1 Dr. Dave Mathewson: NT Lit. Lecture #16, 3/2/11 © 2011, Dave Mathewson and Ted Hildebrandt 1 Corinthians All right, let’s go ahead and get started. Last class period, actually, last week we started looking at the Paul's letters, one of the more significant corpuses in the New Testament or sections comprising the letters of the apostle Paul, a figure that we’re introduced to in the book of Acts. We began looking—last class period at the book of First Corinthians, this is one of the books that we’ll slow down and look at a couple of sample texts in a little bit more detail—actually, three or four chapters or sections of First Corinthians to examine what the issue or problem was that Paul's addressing, and how he addressed that, and how our ability to uncover what may have been the problem or issue at stake, how that can make a difference in the way we actually interpret the text. And in a couple instances, it may actually result in an understanding that is very different than what it looks like at first, a reading that you may be used to. But let’s open with prayer, and then we’ll look more specifically at certain sections of First Corinthians. Father, we realize we face a daunting and humbling task and that is attempting to understand and analyze and wrestle with what is nothing less than Your very words, in Your very speech and communication to us. So Father, I pray that we will be willing to wrestle with the text and ask the difficult questions about the text and about ourselves, and that, Lord, we would take the greatest pains and do whatever's necessary to understand them as clearly and accurately as possible. In Jesus’ name we pray, Amen. All right, we ended by looking at the First Corinthians from the standpoint of First Corinthians being only one part of an ongoing communication between Paul and the Corinthians. You can read in Acts chapter 18 more detail about the background to Corinthians, and Paul’s first visit to Corinth, where he spent roughly a year and a half2 establishing a church there, and then due to certain factors and certain issues arising in the church, Paul finds it necessary to address those problems and issues in writing a series of letters. We said technically our First Corinthians is really Second Corinthians. First Corinthians refers to a letter that Paul had apparently written previously, that we don't have any longer; we have no access to it. So First Corinthians is technically our Second Corinthians. What we call Second Corinthians is technically Fourth Corinthians, because Second Corinthians mentions—we’ll look at Second Corinthians later—but Second Corinthian's mentions a “severe letter” that some persons actually feel has been combined with another letter into Second Corinthians; we’ll talk about that later. But in assuming that the “severe letter” mentioned in Second Corinthians is a separate letter, we know of at least four letters that Paul wrote to the Corinthians—that we know of. And again, only two of them exist or are extant in what we call First and Second Corinthians. So what that means is it's going to be even a little more difficult to try to reconstruct what was going on, because there is also so much interaction already between Paul and his readers. He simply is going to assume, obviously, that they know what's going on, and he will respond to them. But again, we have to do the hard work of attempting, based on First Corinthians and based on what we can know historically, to try to reconstruct what were the issues that Paul was addressing in the church at Corinth. There are actually two ways to divide the book, or to think about the book of First Corinthians; there are two ways to consider its plan, how it's put together. One of them is: you could divide the book into the manner in which Paul received the information about the Corinthian church; in other words, after Paul had left Corinth after spending a year and a half there and establishing the church, how did Paul find out about the different problems that arose? Well, the first six chapters seem to address problems that came to Paul via word-of-mouth report. So he heard by report from someone telling him that certain problems had arisen. In the first six chapters, he deals in order and kind of takes each problem in turn that he has been made aware of, and deals with it, whereas in chapters 7 through 16, Paul seems to respond to written reports. So for example, chapter 7, in verse 1,3 Paul says: “now concerning the matters about which you wrote”—so whether it was a letter or whatever—perhaps then, the Corinthians also wrote Paul a letter, but now Paul seems to respond to a series of issues that he is been made aware of through a letter. Another way to divide the latter is to divide according to the way that Jews during this time would have frequently characterized Gentiles, and that is according to two major sins. You find this in the Old Testament, you find this in Jewish literature also and you find this elsewhere in the New Testament that it was a common Jewish understanding that Gentiles were basically characterized or guilty of two sins: sexual immorality and idolatry. Again, it appears all through the Jewish literature, and so chapters 5 to 7 could all be seen as addressing a series of issues related to the problem of sexual immorality, again putting those under the category of a common sin that Gentiles, according to Jews, were guilty of. Then chapters 8 through 14, address the issue of idolatry—another characteristic sin of Gentiles, according to many Jews. So then chapter 15, at the climax of that, deals with the hope of the resurrection. So those are two ways to understand how First Corinthians was put together. When you read First Corinthians, it becomes very important or very clear that Paul just seems to take a number of issues and a number of problems, and deals with them, and they’re often introduced by this phrase “now concerning”: now concerning meat offered to idols, now concerning spiritual gifts, now concerning this, now concerning the matters about which you wrote. So Paul seems to deal with a series of issues. But again, they could be categorized according to one of these two schemes, so that's one way of organizing and understanding what's going on in First Corinthians. I find this one very compelling, because interestingly, Paul is going to address many of the Corinthian