In my previous post I tried to show why most critical scholars think that the letter of 2 Corinthians is actually two different letters that have been spliced together.  When I was back in graduate school, I learned – to my surprise – that there were scholars who thought that in fact 2 Corinthians was made up of five different letters, all spliced together.  At first that struck me as a bit crazy, but as I looked at the evidence I began to see that it made a good bit of sense. I’m not completely committed to that idea, but I’m inclined toward it.  My sense is that this is the view of a sizeable minority of critical scholars, but I have no data, only anecdotal evidence, to back that up. In any case, what matters more is what you yourself might think of it.  I won’t be giving the evidence in full, but here is how I lay it out for students to consider in my textbook on the New Testament for undergraduates.  To [...]

In recent posts I've been talking about 1 Corinthians and its understanding of the Christian community in the important city of Corinth.  We know about the community because of Paul's letters written to it.  In the New Testament of course, we have 1 and 2 Corinthians.  (OUTSIDE the New Testament we have 3 Corinthians!  It also claims to be written by Paul, but is a forgery; I'll talk about it in a later blog post).  They are both pretty long letters, and give us a lot of information. That's especially true for a reason most Bible readers don't know, and would have no way of knowing.  Scholars have long argued that 2 Corinthians is not just a single letter.  Almost all critical scholars think it is two letters that have been cut and pasted together; and some scholars (including me) think it is actually five letters combined -- all written at different times for different occasions.  That may really matter, because it means we can trace a bit of the *history* of the community's relationship with [...]

  I have been discussing how Paul established the church in Corinth; this is important information for anyone interested in knowing what kinds of problems arose in the church -- some of them rather amazing, for a group Paul calls "the saints"!  Here is how I discuss Paul's message in my textbook on the New Testament: ****************************** During their stay in Corinth, Paul and his companions appear to have converted a sizable number (dozens?) of pagans to the faith. The book of Acts indicates that they spent a year and a half there. Paul himself makes no clear statement concerning the length of his stay, but there are indications throughout his letter that the Christians in Corinth, or at least some of them, had an unusually sophisticated understanding of the faith.  Indeed, some of the Corinthians had so much knowledge of their faith that they took Paul’s gospel simply as a starting point and developed their views in vastly different directions. What can we say about the message that Paul originally preached to these people? [...]

I have begun to talk about Paul’s church in Corinth and the correspondence he had with it.  For a bit more background I want to explain how he actually started it.  Corinth was apparently a city he had not visited before, yet he went there and managed to convert a large group of people to his Christian message.  How did that happen? Here is how I explain what we know in my textbook The New Testament (Oxford University Press). ************************ After leaving Thessalonica, Paul and his companions, Timothy and Silvanus, arrived in Corinth and began, again, to preach the gospel in an effort to win converts (2 Cor 1:19). Possibly they proceeded as they had in the capital of Macedonia, coming into town, renting out a shop in an insula, setting up a business, and using the workplace as a forum to speak to those who stopped by. In this instance, the book of Acts provides some corroborating evidence.  Luke indicates that Paul did, in fact, work in a kind of leather goods shop in [...]

To explain why the Holy Spirit was so central to the earliest Christian communities we know about, we have to explore what we can know about earliest churches.  The ones we know best about are those associated with Paul, since Paul is our earliest Christian author, and in his letters he refers to church activities.  Nowhere is that more true than in the two-letter correspondence with the Corinthians. 1 and 2 Corinthians gives us a lot to go on when we want to know what this particular Christian community was like – that is, how it did as a distinct and coherent religious group in the midst of its wider society, what activities it engaged in as a group, how it was organized, how it worshiped, and so on.  We know so much about such issues because the community was riddled with problems.  Paul wrote his letters to address the problems, and so by looking carefully at what he wrote, we can understand not only what he thought was going wrong in the church but [...]