by N. T. Wright
“That was just ignorance,” he says, in the tone of voice the Athenians themselves might use to dismiss the muddled thinking of less sophisticated peoples, referring to the idols of gold, silver, or stone, made by skillful human beings, that were ubiquitous in Athens itself as well as everywhere else. Paul is echoing, of course, the normal critique of idolatry, again as found in the Psalms or Isaiah and closer to Paul’s day in a book like the Wisdom of Solomon; it echoes too what he had said at Lystra. Some of his philosophically inclined hearers would have agreed. “If you set aside this ignorance,” he continues, “you will discover not only that idols are a shabby and misleading representation of the true God, but also that this God doesn’t live in temples made by human hands.” So much, then, for the majestic Parthenon, there in plain sight across the valley. “Our wonderful temple,” the Athenians realize he is saying, “is a category mistake!” “So too,” insists Paul, “is the kind of worship offered at temples. People are trying to feed the divinity, when all along he is the one who gives everything to us” (again, just as Paul had said at Lystra). “If I was hungry,” Israel’s God had said in the Psalms, “do you really suppose that I would tell you about it?”8
So who is the true God, what is he like, and what relation does he have to the world? Here Paul steers a thoroughly Jewish course, acknowledging the half-truths of the ruling philosophies, but seeing them all within the larger whole he is advocating. The One God is the creator of all. As Moses had said (Paul does not refer to him, but this idea is deeply rooted in Israel’s scriptures), this One God made all peoples and allotted them their times and places. Above all, he wanted them to know him—ignorance was never his plan. He wanted them, after all, to be image-bearing humans, not unreflective puppets. The Stoics, though, are wrong: the true God is the creator of all, not the divine depth within everybody and everything. He is set apart from the world, but he is not (this time against the Epicureans) detached from the world. “He is actually not far from each one of us, for in him we live and move and exist.”9 One poet, the third-century BC Stoic Aratus, whose work Phaenomena was the most widely read poem in Paul’s world after Homer himself, put it like this: “For we are his offspring.” Quoting this is as close as Paul comes to something that, taken out of context, might easily be mistaken for Stoicism. What follows makes it clear that this would be a serious error.
First, the Stoics had never suggested that human-made idols were a bad idea. If, as they believed, there was divinity in everything, then it would follow that (though of course popular ideas would need to be critiqued) there was no harm in having an idol as a focus of worship. Paul waves this aside: more ignorance, he says.
Second, although, as I noted, some Stoics like Epictetus could speak warmly of a personal relationship with “the divine,” Paul’s Jewish and now Jesus-focused vision of a personal relationship with the world’s Creator moves beyond that into a different sphere. God intended for people to search for him! Perhaps even reach out for him and find him! This is not simply a matter of humans getting in touch with their inner divine self. Nor is it about a self-propelled and potentially arrogant “quest for God” in which humans take the initiative and God remains passive. God gives everything to everyone; what he is looking for is not initiative, whether theological or epistemological, but response. Nothing like that is found in Stoicism. Still less in Epicureanism.
Third, the Stoics’ view of history was cyclic. Their vast whirligigs of time, with periodic conflagrations and restarts, were the inevitable result of pantheism; if to pan, “the all,” is all that there is, then it must be what it is forever, going around in a great circle and repeating itself endlessly and exactly. No, says Paul, history is linear. The “ignorance” admitted by the inscription “To an Unknown God” is a temporary phenomenon. The Creator has allowed it for a while and is now prepared to draw a veil over it. History—time itself!—is moving forward toward a goal very different from either the Stoic “conflagration” or the Epicurean idea of everything simply dissolving into its component atoms. The goal is now a day of ultimate, world-righting justice.
All this of course provides a further irony. Again we find ourselves wondering whether an onlooker would have winced and thought, “Is Paul going too far? Is he now going to tease the judges with the news that their oh-so-superior court is at best a secondary forum? Is that the best way to win friends and influence people in Athens?” But Paul is in full stride. God has established a day “on which he intends to call the world to account with full and proper justice by a man whom he has appointed.”10 Full and proper justice. I slightly overtranslate here, but it makes the point I think Paul was making, which is that this will be true justice, not the second-rate variety provided by the highest court in Athens! As he says in 1 Corinthians, he regards it as a matter of minimal concern to be judged by any human court, since what matters is God’s ultimate judgment, which will be based on the secrets and intentions of the heart.11
Here, then, comes Paul’s thoroughly Jewish and messianic view of God’s future. Like some other Jewish writers of the time and in tune with a good deal of other early Christian evidence, Paul is echoing Psalm 2. The nations of the earth can rage, plot, and strut their stuff, vaunting themselves against the true God; but God will laugh at them and announce that he has established his true king, his “son,” who will call the nations to account. “Now therefore,” says the psalm, “be wise; be warned, O rulers of the earth.”12 Again we sense Paul’s subtext. Athens, with its symbol of the owl, prided itself as the home of wisdom. No, Paul implies, true wisdom would consist in recognizing that the One Creator God has now unveiled his purpose for the world before all the nations. That purpose is focused on the Jesus who was crucified and raised and marked out thereby as God’s son, the one through whom God would fulfill his ancient promises and put the whole world at last to rights.
Paul has thus worked his way around at last to explaining “Jesus and Anastasis”: it is Jesus and resurrection! These are new ideas, of course, and “foreign” in the sense of coming from the Jewish world, not being homegrown in Athens, and indeed flying in the face of the old slogan from Aeschylus. But at a deeper level, Paul is implying that this is not foreign at all; it is, rather, the reality to which so many signposts had been pointing. Paul is not suggesting for a moment that one could start from those signposts and work one’s way up to Jesus and the resurrection. But he is certainly suggesting that the puzzles and inconsistencies—the ignorances, in fact—within the world of Athenian and other pagan cultures functioned like signposts pointing into the dark, and that when the true God revealed his ultimate purposes for the world in Jesus’s resurrection, one would then be able to see that this might be where the signposts had been pointing all along. Yes, this is new. The final punch line explicitly contradicts what Apollo himself had said at the foundation of this very court. But it makes sense.
People have sometimes sneered at Paul for a failed bit of philosophical theology. Hardly anyone was converted—though one member of the court, Dionysius, came to faith along with a woman named Damaris and others. But that wasn’t the point. What mattered is that Paul went out from their presence.13 He got off. If this was a trial, he was acquitted. Jesus and Anastasis might be new, strange, and even ridiculous to these senior Athenians. But Paul had convinced them that the heart of his message was something to which their own traditions, read admittedly from a certain angle, might all along have been pointing.
His polemic against temples and idols must have seemed unrealistic. One might as well stand in the middle of Wall Street and declare that the entire banking system is a category mistake. But he had a coherent point of view that justified his claim that he was not merely “introducing foreign divinities.” When some of the court said, “We will give you another hearing about this,” this didn’t imply a second legal hearing. It seems that some at least thought that what Paul was saying had more to it than met the eye. They would welcome another chance to ponder it all. But Paul, p
erhaps wisely, was not going to stay long in Athens. He saw no point in pandering to the local desire for novelty. He may also have realized that to get off with a speech quite different from what the court might have anticipated could only be a temporary expedient. He moved on once more, still traveling alone. From the lofty heights of Athenian culture to the bustling, thrusting world of Corinth.
Athens to Corinth
9
Corinth I
THANKS TO PAUL, we know more about life in Corinth than we do about life in any other first-century city in Greece. Poets like Martial and Juvenal give us a (no doubt jaundiced) vision of Rome in the first two centuries. Josephus, in a very different register, lets us look on as mid-century Jerusalem descends into chaos. But Paul, as a by-product of his urgent pastoral and theological concerns, shows us Corinth as a lively and lascivious city, with its class distinctions and its law courts; its temples, markets, and brothels; its dinner parties, weddings, and festivals. We watch, in a way we cannot do with any of Paul’s other churches, as a community comes to terms with what it meant to be Messiah people in a world full of challenges and questions. And—in keeping with our purpose in this book in particular—we watch as Paul himself faces new challenges, new opportunities, and not least new heartache. Corinth was famous in any case, but Paul gives it an assured place in any account of ancient city life.
Corinth occupied an enviable civic position. Greece divides geographically in two; its most famous cities were Athens in the northern part and Sparta in the southern. The narrow neck of land that joins the two, carrying traffic and trade between them to this day, is the Isthmus of Corinth, and the city itself sits right there, on the southwest corner of the isthmus and the southeast corner of the western gulf. Attempts were made in antiquity to dig a canal across the four miles of the isthmus to enable ships to avoid the long trip around the Peloponnese by passing directly from the Adriatic to the Aegean (or vice versa) through the Gulf of Corinth on the west side and the Saronic Gulf on the east. Nero himself took a pickax and tried to start such a project in AD 67 (using Jewish prisoners from the early years of the Roman-Jewish war), but like all the other ancient attempts his was unsuccessful. Alternative arrangements were made using a stone carriageway to drag ships overland, though that was laborious and costly. The present canal was finally dug and opened for sea traffic in the late nineteenth century. Even then, and to this day, the canal is too shallow, narrow, and susceptible to rockfalls to accomplish what was really wanted. Most larger ships cannot use it. What you are likely to see there now are smaller tourist boats.
Even without a canal, however, Corinth was bound to thrive. It has several freshwater springs that made the site attractive for dwellings and commerce. In addition to being located right by the main shipping and land routes, it commands a coastal plain that was proverbial in antiquity for its fertility. Corinth was also proverbial for its morals, or rather the lack thereof. It was a classic port city—though actually the ports proper were Lechaeum, two miles to the west, and Cenchreae, six miles to the east—where every type of human behavior might flourish unchecked. (A large temple to Aphrodite, on the summit of the Corinthian acropolis, made its own statement, even though the climb to the top was and is far more demanding than the trek up the much smaller Athenian acropolis.) After a century in which the city lay in ruins, having been sacked by the Romans in 146 BC, it was refounded in 44 BC as a Roman colony by Julius Caesar not long before his assassination. (He was another who tried to have a canal dug. Indeed, people spoke of a curse on the project; Caesar, Nero, and Caligula all died violently after trying to get the scheme going.) Corinth was the capital of the province of Achaea, administered by a proconsul.
Like other colonies, if anything more so, Corinth was excessively proud of its Romanitas, its “Romanness.” The new temple for the imperial cult is still prominent in the Corinthian Forum, deliberately raised just a little higher than the other local temples, of which, of course, there were many, including those to Aphrodite, Poseidon (god of earthquakes as well as of the sea), Apollo, and the healing god Asclepius. The symbolism of raising the imperial shrine higher than the others was, and is, obvious. Even though by the standards of the day Corinth was a large city, to our eyes everything seems close together. When you walk around the city center today, you are reminded again how easy it was for everyone to know everyone else’s business. Except for the very rich, life happened in public. And Paul was not rich.
The original members of the colony were Roman freedmen, ex-slaves on the way up the social scale. They were joined by Roman businessmen with their eye on the profits to be made in such an ideal trading and transport post. Like every other city in the ancient world, Corinth had a huge social imbalance, with few rich, many poor, and at least half the population in any case enslaved. Still, it was a city full of possibility, including the chance of social mobility—in either direction—and hence there was a high probability that people would pay close attention to markers of social standing.
Paul has few such markers. As he trudges into town—we normally assume he traveled on foot, and it would have taken perhaps three or four days from Athens—he does not cut a fine figure. It is now early 51. It is a matter of weeks, perhaps at most a couple of months, since he was badly beaten in Philippi; but since then he has had to leave three cities in a hurry, he is anxious about the Thessalonians after the riots and the threats against Jason, and he may well be short of funds. Having sent Timothy back to Thessalonica, he is alone. “I came to you in weakness,” he would later write to the Corinthian church, “in great fear and trembling.”1 But at this point he makes some new friends who will be among his most important supporters in the days to come.
Aquila and Priscilla (in Paul’s letters he abbreviates her name as Prisca) were a Jewish couple who came from Pontus, on the Black Sea shore of ancient Turkey. They had, however, been living in Rome until Claudius banished the Jews for rioting. It is hard to pin down exactly what had gone on, or indeed when. The Roman historian Suetonius says that the riots had been instigated by “Chrestus,” which could reflect a garbled account of trouble in the Jewish community in Rome when the gospel of Messiah Jesus (“Christus,” with the middle vowel pronounced long) arrived in town. Suetonius gives no date for the incident, but the convergence of other evidence makes it likely that it happened around AD 49, and that Aquila and Priscilla arrived in Corinth—adding to the many Roman businesspeople already there—not long before Paul did himself. Like him, they were tentmakers. They seem not only to have struck up an instant friendship, but to have become sufficiently close for Paul to lodge in their house, share in their business, and also travel with them to Ephesus. By the time Paul wrote Romans, they were back in Rome again. The way Luke tells the story of their first meeting and going into business together makes the moment seem full of hope and fresh possibility.
As usual, Paul starts his apostolic work (as opposed to his tentmaking work) in the synagogue. We must assume that he rehearses yet again the familiar narrative: Abraham, Exodus, David, exile, hope. The focus is likewise the same: scripture speaks of a Messiah who dies and rises again, and this Messiah is Jesus. It is to his Corinthian listeners, in the first of the two letters, that he later writes to remind them of the very simple terms of his initial gospel announcement:
The Messiah died for our sins in accordance with the Bible; he was buried; he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Bible; he was seen . . .2
He summarizes this even more sharply: “When I came to you . . . ,” he says, “I decided to know nothing in my dealings with you except Jesus the Messiah, especially his crucifixion.”3 That, however, would take a great deal of explaining, and Sabbath by Sabbath Paul gives it all he’s got, arguing and expounding, winning over a good many of the Jews in the synagogue and also several of the God-fearing Greeks. This is how Timothy and Silas find him when they finally catch up with him, Timothy having made the double journey from Thessalonica to Athens and back and now on to
Corinth itself.
When Paul later described his initial preaching in Corinth, he reflected on his wider experience of announcing the gospel:
Jews look for signs, you see, and Greeks search for wisdom; but we announce the crucified Messiah, a scandal to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, Jews and Greeks alike, the Messiah—God’s power and God’s wisdom. God’s folly is wiser than humans, you see, and God’s weakness is stronger than humans.4
In other words, every time Paul came into a new town or city and opened his mouth, he knew perfectly well that what he was saying would make no sense. As with Jesus himself, the kind of “signs” that were on offer were not the sort of thing that the Jewish world was wanting or expecting. A crucified Messiah was a contradiction in terms.
As for the non-Jewish world—well, the suggestion that a Jew might be the new “Lord” over all other Lords was bad enough, but a crucified man? Everybody knew that was the most shameful and horrible death imaginable. How could such a person then be hailed as Kyrios? And if the answer was (as it would be for Paul) that God had raised this man from the dead, that would merely convince his hearers that he was indeed out of his mind. (A Roman governor would accuse him of that later on, but Paul must have been quite used to people saying it.) Everybody knew resurrection didn’t happen. A nice dream, perhaps—though many would have said they’d prefer to leave the body behind for good, thank you very much. Anyway, there’s no point living in fantasy land.
Paul seems to have accepted this role—saying things that made people think he was mad or blaspheming, but that then appeared to carry a life-changing power of their own. He must have known that some, on the edge of the crowd as it were, might even see him as a magician, someone saying incomprehensible things, with a magic name thrown into the mix, as a result of which—poof!—something dramatic would happen. Someone would be healed. Some well-known local character would be transformed and become a new person. Paul clearly had to resist the temptation to suppose that this power was somehow in his possession or under his control. He was simply a steward, dispensing God’s power and wisdom in the most unlikely fashion. But it tells us a lot about Paul that, in the first Corinthian letter at least, he can speak of this paradoxical vocation in a deliberately sharp-edged and teasing way. The passage is, of course, rhetorically crafted—in order to say that clever rhetoric isn’t where it’s at. Paul must have enjoyed that, not least because he would know that several of the Corinthians would see what he was doing and enjoy it too. But the fact remains that Paul had, to this point, made a career out of telling people things he knew they would find either mad or blasphemous or both. He had grown used to it. This was what he did.
