Transcript

1 & 2 Corinthians: The Story of a Divided Church - Centre Place

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Transcript:

The Tradition of Scribes and Textual Alterations

(00:04) Our topic this evening are the New Testament books of 1 Corinthians and 2 Corinthians and what they tell us about the early Christian community in that cosmopolitan Greco-Roman city. In the very last page of the Bible, we get this warning. I warn everyone who hears the words of prophecy of this book.

(00:35) If anyone adds to them, God will add to that person the plagues described in this book. If anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away that person's share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book. So, it's a big caution. Do not tamper with this text. And this caution may seem just a little bit odd to us in the modern era of copyright and printing when we more or less receive books the way that the author or at least through via their publisher intended.

(01:13) But because every copy of every text had to be written out by hand in antiquity, the calculus actually tipped significantly in favor of making corrections or changes as you're making each new copy. So, scribes or authors as they are working on a new text, they often reworked old texts by expanding them and making them their own.

(01:40) So, for example, there's a essentially universal scholarly consensus that the authors of the Gospel of Matthew and the authors of the Gospel the author of the Gospel of Luke had a a version of Mark anyway right in front of them and they were continuously taking that as a source, changing, correcting, improving Mark's grammar and so forth as they then expanded to write a original gospel of their own with that as a major source.

(02:14) We've similarly seen how the very obvious joints or seams in the Gospel of John, the way we now have it, demonstrate that it's a work that has multiple authors. So, it comes to an ending at the end of chapter 20, I think it is, and then in chapter 21 it starts over and has a second ending that's modeled on the first.

(02:36) Likewise, while 2 Peter, the second Epistle of Peter, is included in the text of the New Testament canon and it claims to be written by the Apostle Peter, it clearly can't be because the text is actually a reworking and expansion of the Epistle of Jude, which is also included in the New Testament. So, someone pretending to be Peter took the Epistle of Jude out, took all of the sentences, added to, reworked it, changed it, and added new material in order to create their own letter, which they pretended had been written by the

(03:12) Apostle Peter. So, why would this pseudo Peter think that he could get away with it? Didn't he think people would just compare his letter to Jude's letter and determine that he was plagiarizing it? And so, the answer, of course, is that it's likely the author of 2 Peter never imagined that either his letter or the letter attributed to Jude that he was reworking would ever end up together in a single canon.

(03:41) He probably thought that not too many people had this letter of Jude and it would probably end up disappearing and not circulate as he created a new new letter that he hoped would be better and more more um more popular, but never never imagined that they would both make it into a single Bible together. And so that warning at the end of the Bible not to add or take away words from this book, it doesn't refer to the Bible.

(04:09) That's not what this book is. It's referring the book in that passage that you're not to take away from is the book that it's written in, the Book of Revelation, the Apocalypse of John of Patmos. And the author of that book, like I guess I all of the other authors of the books that ultimately did make their way into the Bible, none of them imagined that their writings would be collected into a New Testament.

The Development of the New Testament Canon

(04:32) They were writing stand-alone books in every case. So, eventually though, a canon did get created and once the church had uh imperial patronage, which could afford um creating an entire codex of of of all of the books collected together, um you know, that's when we started actually having Bibles that are published essentially in one in one binding.

(04:59) Um and so we ended up having in the New Testament canon four Gospels, one Book of Acts, 21 Letters, and one Apocalypse. But early Christians, of course, wrote many many more Gospels, many more Books of Acts, many more Letters and Apocalypses than what made it into the canon. So, this graph here shows if we take all of the different number of words and uh graph it as a kind of a pie chart, you can see that um not not ha- not quite half, but a plurality anyway of the New Testament's pages uh are made up of Gospels. So, there's

(05:40) only four Gospels, but they're a lot longer therefore than the Letters. There's 21 Letters, but they're much shorter. And Letters make up the second largest component um because the Book of Acts and and the Apocalypse there's only one of each of those in the New Testament. If we, you know, take that grouping and then divide it into the component constituent books, the Gospels are of course Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

(06:08) And then Acts is next in the order in the New Testament anyway. And of course we note that the Acts of the Apostles and the Gospel of Luke both had the same author. By tradition we call that author Luke. And traditionally the Gospel of John, the Book of Revelation, and the three letters attributed to John are all traditionally anyway by the same guy, but they're by different people who were named John.

(06:36) Especially for sure the Apocalypse is not written by the same guy because it has a um such a different kind of Greek. And indeed we've already talked about how the Gospel of John itself had multiple authors, none of whom um probably were John. But anyway, we can see in this chart then uh how many of the the letters part are written by Paul.

The Ministry and Theology of Paul

(07:01) And so along then with the author of Luke and Acts, Paul is the other major uh author by volume anyway uh in the New Testament. So Paul or Saul as his um birth name it would be was initially important as a church planter. So he's one of the most successful church planters in early Christianity. And he's also important because he argued that the converts to Christianity who did not have a Judean background, who were not Jewish, they didn't need to convert first to become Jewish and start uh adhering to Mosaic law, keeping kosher, being circumcised,

(07:42) and sort forth, that sort of thing. Um he actually argued very strongly over time that they should not do any of those things. They should not be obeying um Mosaic law. They should not be quoting Leviticus in order to um find commandments like don't have tattoos and don't eat shellfish or any of the other uh parts of the Mosaic law.

(08:03) That's not what Christians do, according to Paul. So, as Paul's views though conflicted with the teachings of rival church leaders, or many church leaders who definitely believed um uh Gentile or non-Jewish converts to Christianity did have to start um following the Christian understanding anyway, the early Christian understanding of uh what it meant to keep kosher.

(08:30) The it was in flux, but uh Jesus and all of the early disciples had all come from a Jewish background, and so they were all um adhering to some of the components of Mosaic law, keeping the Sabbath, and so forth. Paul began to write letters to justify his position, which then made him even more important later as he emerged as the very first Christian writer whose writings survived, and eventually the first generation of Christian apostles, like Peter and John and James and again also Paul, they all passed away, and so having the texts

Timeline of Early Christian Writings

(09:09) survive um gave Paul another layer of importance uh when texts started to become important. So, if we look at a kind of a timeline of early Christianity across the whole first century, um you know, this includes at the very beginning the ministries of John the Baptist and Jesus, who are both cut short through um the executions.

(09:38) John the Baptist beheaded by Herod Antipas, Jesus crucified by the uh Roman governor, Pontius Pilate. Uh then a much longer ministry and leadership of the early Christian community in Jerusalem by the brother of Jesus, James, who is one of the um uh proponents of continuing to adhere to Mosaic law. And that his being lived simultaneously with Paul's ministry that includes in the '50s Paul's authentic writings.

(10:15) And this is when we start to have some of the other potential writings. So, hypothetical sources like the Q sayings gospel, the source for the sayings gospel of Thomas, the signs gospel, which is one of the proposed hypothetical sources for the gospel of John. Those would be at the earliest layer after Paul's writings, authentic writings.

The Authentic and Pseudonymous Letters of Paul

(10:38) And then the earliest narrative gospel, Mark, and then the other canonical gospels, Matthew, Luke, and John. And then Paul letters that are written in Paul's name, um which actually continue on for centuries. There continue to be more and uh and more um writings that are attributed to Paul. So, if we want to look at the letters of Paul that are considered authentic in their New Testament order, uh these are not um the same as their chronological order.

(11:12) So, in the New Testament, these are Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon. Um and so, that's a consensus, I think, that nearly all biblical scholars think that these are authentic. Many other uh scholars will argue that some of the other ones may be authentic, and most will argue that uh that includes 2 Thessalonians, Colossians, and sometimes Ephesians.

(11:39) Whereas uh very few argue that Titus and 1 and 2 Timothy are authentic, although some would like to have them be. The problem with those is that they just contain so many anachronisms. They have to be written so late. So uh the biblical order of these letters, like I said, is not chronological. Romans is the last of the authentic letters uh of Paul, maybe written around the year 57.

(12:01) Uh and yet it's first because, in part, it is uh one of the longest letters and one of the most um uh Paul is writing a much more coherent description of his understanding of the gospel to the Romans because it's a church that he did not uh found. And he instead is trying to lay out his message to them in order to um in order to, as he's going to come as a vis- to visit them, he would like them to He would like them to sponsor him on a future mission he plans to Spain.

(12:36) And so he would like them to sort of see what what his goods are, you know, his bona fides by uh giving him this really important, impressive letter. So if we look at all of the books attributed to Paul, and there's actually more than this, um the earliest letters probably first his first letter to the Thessalonian church, the church in in the Roman province of uh Macedonia.

(13:00) Then his letter to the Galatians, which is in the central uh Anatolia. There's a lost Corinthian letter, and then 1 Corinthians, then maybe his letter to the Philippians, his letter to Philemon maybe, or maybe 2 Corinthians right around in that same kind of time frame anyway. And then Romans.

(13:22) And then we have um letters that are written in his name. So if he wrote them, it would be 2 Thessalonians would probably have been written right after the first one, so it would be very early. Uh if you wrote the Colossians, it might be a little after Romans and same thing Ephesians. Uh but then more likely those are written kind of later in the first century along with Titus and First and Second Timothy, which could have been written anytime all the way up until the middle of the second century.

(13:49) And then we have uh lots of other letters that continued to be written in Paul's name as Paul gains importance again, including uh the Acts of Paul and Thecla. This is that adventure um novel where um Paul's missionary companion uh instead of being one of these young men like Titus and Timothy and all those guys, Barnabas, is instead a woman, Thecla, who um baptizes herself as she is being thrown uh to man-eating or women-eating seals in the Roman arena, and uh has all kinds of other incredible uh adventures. And

(14:28) part of the reason why it didn't make it into the canon despite its popularity and the popularity of Saint Thecla, um the apostle, is that uh it's not really credible that any of that happened. There's a Third Corinthians letter uh written probably at the end of the second century. There's two Apocalypses of Paul, one of which we have preserved only in Coptic, that's maybe the earlier one. There's a letter to the Laodiceans.

(14:54) Um there's a letters at the end of this where a whole series of letters that Paul supposedly exchanges with the Stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger, who is a real contemporary of Paul's, but was an incredibly important person and would have taken absolutely no notice of Paul and certainly did not write a whole big correspondence with him.

(15:16) Although by the time we get to the fourth century, people would like to have for him to have done. So, among all of those, mostly most of the early letters did make it in. Um primarily because um uh although it's sometimes argued that people in antiquity didn't mind so much when other people were writing in someone's name, when you're being like a pseudo Paul, uh or pseudo Peter.

(15:41) It's actually they did mind and when they when they could have they just didn't have the tools to uh discover it as well as we do. And so, when they didn't believe the veracity of a text, like for example the letter to the Laodiceans or Paul and Thecla, Third Corinthians, they would leave it out.

(15:59) In the case of some of the other things like the lost letter to the Corinthians that comes before First Corinthians, it's simply lost. If if that had been preserved it probably would have been part of the New Testament. So, we have two early sources for the life of Paul as we've seen, so his own writings and the book of Acts. Acts is fun in that it paints a narrative for Paul's missionary work, including descriptions of three missionary journeys.

(16:26) Um so, trying to put Paul's career into a systematic order or a story form, but descriptions in Acts often contradict Paul's own accounts and it's completely possible that much of the narrative is the invention of the author of Acts. Uh and so, I'm always reading Acts with a lot uh you know, more than a couple grains of salt, but it's one of the one of the places where we can look for additional sources, you know, again written generations after Paul is writing.

(16:58) Um according to Paul's own writings, after his conversion Paul became sort of a freelance apostle operating without authorization from what he calls the acknowledged leaders or pillars of the church, James the brother of Jesus, Peter who had been the leader of the 12, and the Apostle John. And so, they're still operating, but rather than meet with them, Paul just immediately says, "Well, I'm an apostle now that I've had this vision of Christ.

(17:26) I've been called to this mission." And so he says he spent several years um planting you know, spreading spreading the gospel, planting congregations in what he calls Arabia, which is probably not necessarily even maybe sometimes within the Nabataean kingdom, which is a um a client kingdom of the Roman Empire just outside the frontier, but also he might be using that to describe places like the Decapolis, you know, the sort of this He's from a Judea itself is a fringe area of of the Roman Empire, and he's sort of on the other side of the

(17:59) of the Dead Sea and the and uh the Sea of Galilee and so forth. So having then met up with uh James and Peter anyway, he moved his activity from there to more northern Syria, the great metropolis of Antioch, the capital of the Roman East, and also his own home province, Cilicia, which is where he was born and originally from.

(18:24) Um but he records also in his letter to the Galatians that he had a confrontation with Peter in Antioch over this question of should um Christian converts who had previously been Gentiles, do they need to obey Mosaic law and keep kosher? And if they're not keeping kosher, can Jewish Christians be able to share table with them? And so that becomes a a point of contention.

(18:50) And so it does look like from Paul's writings, he's a little circumspect, but it does look like he kind of told Peter out off told Peter off for that, but nevertheless lost control of the Christian community in Antioch and had to decamp as Peter can maybe took over there. And so then he kind of moved you know, north and east planting churches across Anatolia, what we now think of as Turkey.

(19:19) So, in Galatia and so forth, and then crossing the Aegean into um Macedonia and Achaia, what we think of now is kind of Greece proper, where he plants churches in Philippi, Thessalonica, and Corinth, among other places. So, 1 Thessalonians, as we said, is probably Paul's earliest surviving letter, and it's written to a church he planted in Macedonia, the Roman province of Macedonia, the metropolis of Thessalonica.

(19:51) Um and so, what we can tell from the internal evidence of that, where Paul hardly even quotes Jewish scripture, that most of his converts are probably um non-Jewish. They had previously um worshipped the old gods of of ancient Greece. We now think of, you know, polytheists or pagans, as we now call them, and don't have any Judean background, but nevertheless, um become attracted to Paul's teaching, his gospel, and uh become a Christian community there.

(20:24) So, this letter is fairly happy, and there's not really a lot of indications of factional strife, as we get in a lot of Paul's other letters. And Paul tells this Thessalonian community that he sees them as a model for how Christian churches should operate throughout the Greco-Roman world, so they should be a model for all of the churches that he's planting in Achaia and elsewhere.

(20:48) Paul's next letter is writing back to a church that he had planted in Galatia, and this is one that has a lot more angry tone. At one point, he, you know, yells at the people he's trying to be a pastor for to essentially, and saying, "You foolish Galatians, who's bewitched you?" and that kind of thing.

(21:07) So, it's not a um not a way that he won a lot of hearts back. So, in Paul's absence, since he's moved on and planted churches elsewhere, rival apostles have convinced the Galatians that they actually do need to begin adhering to Mosaic law. So, they need to follow some dietary constraints. They need to start um uh keeping, you know, observing the Sabbath, which is Saturday, not Sunday.

(21:33) Uh the Christian uh day of the Lord, and they need to, if they're male, uh they need to have the sign of the covenant, which is circumcision. And so, Paul calls these rivals the circumcision faction. And um as he is trying to refute their argument and denounce their teaching, um he also begins telling his backstory.

(21:58) And so, we often, when I'm doing a biographical thing about Paul, we often quote Galatians a lot, because this is where he talks about his conversion. version. He talks about all the interactions that he's had with James, the brother of Jesus, the leader of the church, and along with um his uh uh compatriots, uh Peter and John.

(22:19) So, although Paul avoids making a completely open break with these rivals, I think his own explanations of this backstory, the descriptions he has meeting with the other apostles, how he describes this in Galatians, makes it clear that behind the circumcision faction are the acknowledged leaders of the church.

(22:42) That is to say, James, the brother of Jesus, who's leading the church in Jerusalem, and the apostles Peter, who um Paul name calls with the uh Aramaic name Cephas, and then the apostle John. So, when we're getting now to the next letters, Corinthians, 1 Corinthians and 2 Corinthians, Paul has a much more conciliatory tone anyway in 1st Corinthians anyway.

(23:07) Uh gets pretty um it gets more more rankled again by the end of 2nd Corinthians. Um and although some of that same factionalism has begun to creep into the church of Corinth as we'll see, at 1st Corinthians anyway, Paul is prepared to be very magnanimous arguing that other apostles should not be viewed as rival leaders.

(23:32) He wants everybody to understand that they're just distinct co-workers and they're all on the same side, which is God's side and so forth. Um as we go through the rest of his letters just a few years later, his uh the last of these as I mentioned is his letter to the Christian community in Rome. And this is a community that he did not plant, so this allows Paul or gives Paul the opportunity to have the longest and most systematic treatment of his understanding of the gospel, his theological ideas as he puts them all together. He tells the Christians in

(24:05) Rome that he plans to come and visit them on his way to start planting new churches in Spain, returning um to Jerusalem on the way along with a large collection that he's uh taken up from all the churches that he's planted, a big donation which he intends to give to the Jerusalem church, uh a group of people who have given away all their property in order to um become mendicants uh in order to live as a blessed community of the voluntary poor.

(24:39) Um he's going to help support them with the collection he's raised and he's hoping that will allow him to reconcile once again with the leader, James the brother of Jesus. And um and one of the reasons he's doing this is he seems once again to he says that at some one point to the Romans um there's nothing left for me that I can do here in the east.

(25:03) So, it seems like it's one more example of just like in Arabia where he had to sort of move on and ended up in Antioch and he ended up having to move on over this issue. He seems to have lost control of his Galatian church and and as we'll see with the Corinthians he also over the course of it starts losing control of that too rivals.

(25:27) He seems to have said, "Well, I don't want to cause a schism. I have this idea. I have an authentic calling. I want to promote that. I'm not going to do that though at the cost of having an open break with uh you know, with James and John and and Peter and so forth. So, if they want to if if everybody agrees with them now, I'm going to go ahead and and move west and start planting um uh planting new congregations at the end of the earth in Spain and he hopes that the Romans will will fund him to do that.

(25:58) We don't have any further writings from Paul describing what happens. So, Acts records a tradition that Paul does make it to Jerusalem and is reconciled with James, but then is arrested for entering the precinct of the Jerusalem Temple uh Herod's Temple that's restricted so that only Jews who are following the law can go there and of course Paul has you know, not been an observant Jew in all the time that he has started to um exercise you know, his new freedom in Christianity and so forth.

(26:33) And so according to um Acts anyway, that trial is follow I'm sorry, that arrest is followed up by trials in the capital of Judea, Caesarea Maritima, the the Caesarea city on the coast um before ultimately relocating to Rome for another another trial. And Acts ends though before um saying whatever happens to Paul.

The Historical Context of Corinth

(26:58) Uh later tradition says that he's executed uh outside the walls of the city of Rome where the uh Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls is to this day. So, with that kind of background of all of the letters, let's dive into the Corinthian correspondence and sort of the context of the Greco-Roman metropolis of Corinth, very important uh city in the Eastern Empire.

Paul's Ministry in Corinth According to Acts

(27:26) So, Corinth is located at the Isthmus that connects the Peloponnese, the peninsula, uh sort of the heart of um the mainland Greece to the European mainland where Athens is on Attica. Corinth was one of the leading cities of ancient Greece um in antiquity in the classical times before even the Hellenistic era, uh but it was ultimately conquered by the Romans who destroyed the city in the year 146 BC.

(27:59) Um after a long time, it was refounded by Julius Caesar as a strategic location, and so he made it be a Roman colony. Roman colonies have special rights into the Roman Empire, and they also are often founded in order to settle um veterans from the Roman legions. And so, that means you would have in addition to um local Greek population, you would also have people who'd been recruited into the legions or other um Roman merchants, people from the west who might be have a Latin background also there.

(28:34) And as the as it was refounded, this becomes the capital of the Roman province of Achaea, of kind of Greece proper. By the time the Apostle Paul moves to the city a century after Caesar refounded it, so he moves it the year 50. Corinth had become a very diverse metropolis with mixed populations. Of course, there are the Greeks there, but Romans from the west is what I was talking about, and there was also a Judean community, and it had its own synagogue, of which there's remains.

(29:02) So, Acts um records actually a tradition that Paul um began his evangelizing, he began his process of convert, you know, gathering new Christian converts and creating a congregation in Corinth by um preaching at or arguing at the synagogue. So, in Acts chapter 18, we read, "Paul left Athens and went to Corinth.

(29:28) There he found a Jew named Aquila from Pontus. Pontus is a province in northern Asia Minor, Anatolia. So, he found someone from Pontus who had recently come from Italy with his wife, Priscilla, because the emperor Claudius had ordered all of the Jews to leave Rome. So, Paul went to see them, and because he was of the same profession, of the same trade, he stayed with them, and they worked together.

(29:55) By trade, they were tentmakers. So, Paul found people he knew, and uh stayed with them in Corinth, and they also exercised their livelihood there in order to support themselves. Every Sabbath, Paul would argue in the synagogue in Corinth, and he would try to convince Jews and Greeks. So, as you might imagine, coming to the synagogue and, you know, continuously arguing didn't necessarily make Paul Paul popular with the local Jews.

(30:25) Paul's tactic we see is to repeatedly testify to the Jews that uh the Messiah is Jesus, something that um later causes um Jews in Judea and uh to make kind of a proclamation that they're not allowed to do that anymore cuz Christian missionaries kept on uh Christian apostles kept on doing that. It was very annoying to them. So we read in beginning of verse 6, when the Jews opposed him and reviled Paul, in protest he shook the dust from his clothes and he said to them, you know, your blood be on your own heads.

(31:00) I am innocent. From now on I will go to the Gentiles. So in other words, I'm no longer going to work towards your salvation. I'm going to renouncing my own people and I'm now going to be an apostle to people of non-Judean origin. Um Paul doesn't ever say anything like that in his letters. He does understand himself to have a special calling to be an apostle to the Gentiles.

(31:26) Although um he already Well, anyway, he I think when he already had it he's already announcing that he had that much earlier than this, but it's placed in Acts here anyway as an event that happens in Corinth. So then Paul left the synagogue and he went to the house of a man named Titius Justus, a worshiper of God.

(31:48) And so Justus's house was next door to the synagogue. So this Titius Justus fellow is an example of this non-Jewish population that is known in the New Testament and elsewhere other contemporary sources as God worshipers or God fearers. So Titius Justus it says a worshiper of God God worshiper. So although folks like in this community the God fearers came from a non-Jewish background, they attended synagogues, they became interested in Jewish worship and in the Hebrew Bible as it had been translated into Greek, so the Septuagint Bible,

(32:27) and they developed a belief that the God of Israel is God. So they they had come to this you know, uh ancient Greece has already been on this um theological reform because of the philosophers that are seeing um all of the many gods maybe in some cases as being emanations from one true God, and so they are prepared to sort of see, oh, well, these are folks who are are very aware of that and who are worshipping the one God.

(33:00) And so this is something that becomes very interesting to a whole community, the God-fearers. However, because there are so many requirements of living Mosaic law, uh not the least of which for men is uh submitting to circumcision, but then all of the dietary restrictions and and also not being able to share meals with uh non-Jews means that uh God-fearers often then fell short of actual conversion to Judaism.

(33:30) They, you know, show up at the synagogue, they're a part of the community maybe, but they're not um they're not full members, they're not converts. So, Paul's message that you could embrace God's new covenant without adhering to Mosaic law, that was a very welcome news indeed among the God-fearer population. And these seem to have become the nucleus for many of Paul's new congregations.

(33:57) They're a prepared people as they're called. And so while most of the people who actually are Jews in these communities, they're not convinced by Paul's arguments that Jesus is the Messiah, um you know, this whole God-fearing community starts to get move over, and some of the the Jews are also converted. And so in Acts there's an example of this, a guy named Crispus, the official of the Corinth synagogue, became a believer in the Lord together with all of his household.

(34:27) By the Lord they means they believe that Christ is Lord. Together with all of his household, and many of the Corinthians who heard Paul became believers and were baptized. Paul's poaching of committed Jews and God-fearers caused a reaction from the remaining Jewish population in Corinth. And so we read in Acts that after Paul had been in the city for a year and a half uh at a time when someone named Gallio was proconsul of Achaia, the Jews made a united attack on Paul and brought him before the tribunal.

(35:01) They said, "This man is persuading people to worship God in ways that are contrary to the law." And as you could imagine, um this would be a weird thing for a Roman governor to, you know, in in a in a Greek city to be, you know, why are you what what does that have anything to do with me, right? So well, that's not how we're we we don't care how people are supposed to worship your God in terms of your law, that's not one of our things.

(35:29) And so as Paul was about to speak Gallio said to the Jews, you know, "If this were a matter of crime or serious villainy, you know, I would be in justified in accepting the complaint of you Jews, but since it's a matter of questions about words and names and your own law, you know, see to it yourselves. I don't wish to be a judge in these matters.

(35:48) " And so he dismissed them from the tribunal. And then everybody in the tribunal seized Sosthenes, the official of the synagogue, and they beat him in front of the tribunal, but Gallio paid no attention to any of these things. So if people if the local Jewish leaders are not popular and there's kind of a little anti- uh Jewish um mob event here, then the Romans are like, "Yeah, I mean that's not my that's not my problem either.

(36:13) " So anyway, you can kind of see the situation culturally. So by coincidence in the salutation of 1 Corinthians, Paul indicates that there's kind of a second secondary author, maybe his secretary of his letter, his brother, Sosthenes. And there's been a bunch of different people. Every time somebody has the same name in the Bible, people would like it to be the same person, and so tradition often combines them.

(36:39) So, every Mary and unnamed woman is becomes the same, you know, Mary Magdalene in except for Mary, the mother of Jesus, you know, but anyway. All the other Marys become one Mary, um uh the the unnamed um woman that anoints Jesus' feet in the Gospel of Luke, who is said to um uh potential, you know, be a a sinful woman.

(37:04) It doesn't say prostitute, but this is where the idea that Mary Magdalene becomes a prostitute by combining these two completely unrelated women. Um in the same way, people there's these guys are named Sosthenes, and so people would maybe say, "Well, in some part of the story that didn't get told here, this guy who was originally a Jewish official of the synagogue named Sosthenes who gets beat up here, um must've then converted and and wrote a letter back to the Corinthians with with Paul, but anyway, that's very seems unlikely to be the same person.

The Figure of Gallio and Historical Chronology

(37:34) And um and Sosthenes is a very common name in in Greece, apparently. So, it's probably not the same. Um so, this Roman proconsul of Achaia, Gallio, in the Book of Acts provides a relatively rare example of where we can actually connect characters in the Book of Acts with a figure that is known and datable from sources outside the Bible.

(37:58) And so, this guy, Gallio, was born as Lucius Annaeus Novatus. And so, he was the son of the Roman rhetorician, Seneca the Elder, so a very famous guy in his own right. And then, he's also the older brother of the philosopher Seneca the Younger, so Seneca the Elder, one of the Seneca the Elder's sons, uh Gallio and Seneca the Younger.

(38:25) Gallio's younger brother, Seneca the Younger, gained fame as a Stoic philosopher. He's also the author of He's a playwright, so he's a tragedy tragedian. He's wrote plays like the Medea. And then he was also sort of famous because he was the tutor of the Emperor Nero. And you probably know the Emperor Nero kind of famously didn't turn out very well, so he's also sort of meant as a kind of a cautionary tale of how even the best philosophers aren't always successful.

(38:57) But, you know, we also we also have very biased sources about Nero, so it's hard to know exactly um, what was going on there, but in any event, uh, he was the, um, tutor of Nero, but was ultimately forced to commit suicide for alleged complicity in a conspiracy to assassinate Nero. And it's not clear whether he had was part of that or not.

(39:18) Uh, nevertheless, he approached his, uh, death with stoicism as a good Stoic philosopher should, and that's one of the things that caused him all kinds of renown through the Middle Ages, um, Christians, you know, routinely sort of put, s- uh, Seneca next to Plato and Aristotle, so he would have been thought of as being like one of the one of the three great philosophers.

(39:40) A fourth-century Christian, like I say, wrote a series of letters that are supposedly correspondence between Seneca the Younger, the philosopher, uh, and Paul. And it's certainly by the time of the fourth century, like I say, wishful filament that that such a thing would have happened. Uh, Seneca though is hanging out with the emperor and stuff, and Paul is is uh, pretty small potatoes in in that in that scale.

(40:05) Um, adult adoption was a really common tradition in senatorial families. It was taken very very seriously. And, uh, Uh, Lucius was adopted from the Annaeus Novatus the Seneca family into another great aristocratic family, the Gallio family. And so, he ended up taking the name Lucius Junius Gallio Annaianus. And so, when you have that in Latin, when you have a final you normally have three names as a noble in Latin.

(40:38) It's like, you know, Gaius Julius Caesar, right? Uh, when you then adopt somebody and you and you take that you take a they'll take a fourth name and that fourth name will have a suffix -anus on the end of it. And so, if you remember, you know, like when you think of the Emperor Augustus he's born when he's born in a young man we call him Octavius.

(41:02) So, his name is Gaius Octavius. Then, when Caesar posthumously adopts him in his will he then has the name Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus and that's why we call him often we often call him Octavian instead of Octavius because his name changes when he's adopted and then of course he ultimately um, adopts the name Augustus.

(41:24) But that's why he has that name. Same thing you can tell um, when we have a person like the Emperor Hadrian, Hadrianus. It means that he's part of that succession of emperors where where they are adopting them in, right? So, he comes out of somebody who would have been called Hadrius and then he's adopted becomes Hadrianus.

(41:40) And so, you hear that whenever you have the name like that, Julianus, you know, Julian means a adopted name as opposed to Julius. So, anyway, Gallio was made consul for the year 51 and 52 under the Emperor Claudius. So, it's at the very height of the senatorial aristocracy. And he then served as proconsul of Achaea in 52.

(42:05) So, we can actually um, date this character. And you know, if he was in a tribunal with Paul, it would have been taking place in 52. We actually actually also have an inscription um where the emperor writing in Greek talks about uh Gallio. You can see that written in Greek. My friend and my proconsul. And so, you know, we have extra-biblical information for this guy.

(42:32) So, nevertheless, that doesn't necessarily um tell us that the story in Acts has historicity. So, the proconsul is a verifiable historical figure. He can be dated, like I said, to the right time, 52. But, it doesn't necessarily mean that this kind of lawsuit brought by Sosthenes, the um local synagogue official against Paul in Acts is historical.

(42:59) For one thing, um it's a you know, it's it's not a kind of complaint that um the Romans would necessarily hear, which is why in the Acts story it doesn't doesn't go anywhere. Um there are a bunch of scholars who argue that um the author of Luke and Acts is a very highly literate person and maybe the reason why they include this detail that Gallio is the proconsul is because that's something that they know about because they have read Seneca.

The Corinthian Correspondence: Lost and Severe Letters

(43:33) So, they've read writings of either um Gallio's father or his brother that talk about um Gallio's time as a proconsul in Corinth. And that's a detail that they know, and so that's why they include this character in their story in Acts. And so, I'll make another lecture at some point on Acts because there's also a theory that um lots of the other historical information that's in Luke and Acts is uh potentially comes from the idea that this author had access to Josephus.

(44:04) And that's a very interesting possibility. Um even though they don't always get the details from Josephus exactly right, so it's complicated. So, regardless of the historicity, um, let's look now at the letters to the Corinthians. So, in addition to the books that made it into the Bible, the books we call First and Second Corinthians, as we mentioned, Paul in First Corinthians mentions a prior letter, so we have a lost Corinthian letter that must have come sometime before First Corinthians.

(44:35) And I mentioned also that there is this Third Corinthians, which is not written by Paul. Um, it's likely written in the second half of the second century or later than that. Um, and let's look a little bit at Third Corinthians. It's initially It was initially viewed as canon in the Syrian Orthodox Church, the Armenian Orthodox Church.

(44:55) The Third Epistle to Corinthians, however, is no longer in anybody's Bible. Um, the letter diverges from Paul's regular themes, and um, probably has a lot bunch of There's some anachronisms in it that make it seem to be dated in the second century with the an author who is trying to have to write in Paul's name and with his authority in order to combat um, not not like Paul was worrying about Paul was worrying about questions like, um, do we should we be be following Mosaic law and that kind of thing? Now, um, the more second century worries are

(45:34) things like Docetism and Gnosticism, so these are, um, alternate understandings of Christianity that become labeled as heresies, but Docetists are ones who say that Jesus only seemed to be a human. And Gnostics have, um, a very different, uh, cosmology and theology indeed. And so, both of them could be countered, um, by Third Corinthians with a um, a pretty fleshy uh description of Jesus' birth through his mother Mary.

(46:08) And so, we read in 3rd Corinthians, "God, the almighty, who is righteous and would not repudiate his own creation, um So, that's kind of you can imagine maybe um potentially uh you know, problem here with it's it's a shorthand, but you know, Gnostics have um two different understandings of God. There's the spirit God and the and the God that's creating um the the fleshy world, which is bad God.

(46:37) Anyway, sent the Holy Spirit to Mary, the Galilean, who believed with all her heart, and she received the Holy Spirit into her womb, that Jesus might enter the world in order that the evil one might be conquered by the same flesh by which he held sway. So, in other words, he's conquered by actual flesh, not not just seeming flesh like Docetics Docetics might think.

(47:00) And be convinced that he was not God. So, the devil is not God. For by his own body, Jesus saved all flesh and brought it to eternal life through faith, that he might present a temple of righteousness in his own body, through whom we are redeemed. So, they're very much trying to say there's a fleshy savior here, not not something who only seemed to be that way.

(47:28) And so, like I said, that's probably meant to counter Docetism and maybe Gnosticism. But, this kind of imagery is not something that Paul ever uses. So, for example, Paul never mentions Mary in any of his writings or even any of the writings attributed to Paul in the New Testament.

(47:47) And so, it's not clear that he actually is even aware of the tradition that um you know, Jesus' mother is named Mary or cared about it anyway, either. So, in what we now call First Corinthians, as I say, Paul um in chapter 5 verse 9, explicitly mentions his previous letter, and so that indicates this existence of an earlier letter from him to the Christians in Corinth that's now lost.

(48:13) But in addition to that, in what we now call Second Corinthians, in chapter 2 and chapter 7, Paul mentions another earlier letter, which we scholars call the severe letter. And um that letter doesn't match First Corinthians. So, he's not referring to First Corinthians when he's talking about this other letter, and he's not talking about that original letter.

(48:39) So, he seems to be talking about a letter that's written between First and Second Corinthians. In chapter 2 of Second Corinthians, Paul talks about a past visit he made to Corinth, and he talks about this letter, which is not a positive letter. Um sometimes Paul is in a good mood, and sometimes, like when he's writing to the Galatians, he's in a bad mood.

(49:03) So, this was one when he was in a bad mood. He says, uh "I made up my mind not to make another visit that causes you grief." So, he went to this last His last visit to them caused them grief. And if I caught Because if I cause you grief, who is there to make me glad but the one who am I have grieved? And I wrote as I did so that when I came, I might not suffer grief from those who should have made me rejoice, for I am confident about all of you that my joy would be the joy of all of you.

(49:37) For I wrote you out of much distress and anguish of heart and with many tears, not to cause you grief, but to let you know the abundant love that I have for you. But if anyone has caused grief, he has caused it not to me, but to some extent, not to exaggerate it, he's caused it to all of you.

(50:01) And this punishment by the majority is enough for such a person. So, there's somebody else who uh it was the problem here, not me, and he's causing grief. But instead of, you know, he's already been punished enough, so instead you should forgive him and console him so that he might not be overwhelmed by even worse grief. So, I urge you to reaffirm your love for him.

(50:22) I wrote you for this reason, to test you and to know whether you're obedient in everything. Anyone whom you forgive, I also forgive. In fact, what I have forgiven, if I forgive in anything, has been for your sake in the presence of Christ. So, Paul is completely circumspect there.

(50:42) We don't We can't really know what the conflict was about that led Paul to write this severe letter, who it was aimed at, who is this guy who he's now forgiven, I guess. But based on Galatians, of course, we know that Paul can fire off angry, biting letters when he wants to. Paul mentions the same person, the conflict, his severe letter again in chapter 7 of 2 Corinthians, where he says, "For although I grieved you with my letter, I don't regret it.

(51:09) So, I'm I don't regret writing it writing it. Although I did regret it, for I see that the letter caused you grief, though only briefly. Now I rejoice, not because you were grieved, but because your grief led to repentance. For you fell to godly grief, so that you would not be harmed in any way by us. For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation and brings no regret, but worldly grief produces death.

(51:36) So, it's good that you, you know, got all upset that I wrote you this mean letter, but at least that caused you to repent, and so now that it ended up being a good thing. So, for what earnestness this godly grief has produced in you what eagerness to clear yourselves, what indignation, what alarm, what longing, what zeal, what punishment.

(51:54) At every point you've proved yourself guiltless in the matter. So, although I wrote you, it was not on account of the one who did the wrong, nor on account of the one who suffered the wrong, but I did it in order that your zeal for us might be made known to you before God. And in this we have found consolation.

(52:14) So, he didn't say anything what happened in this whole thing, but uh it was a big fight and uh and thank heavens it's over now and it all worked out apparently. Paul hopes things are working out when he's writing that. So, because nothing in the text that we have, you know, either first or second Corinthians matches the details of this severe letter that Paul is talking about, most scholars agree that he's talking about an additional lost uh letter.

(52:42) So, this severe letter that Paul and so therefore Paul probably wrote at least four letters to the Corinthians, two of which, the lost original letter and the severe letter, have not survived among the letters that we call anyway, first and second Corinthians that become uh canon. You know, whenever I whenever I mention second Corinthians, I can't help but this think of the two Corinthians.

(53:07) So, I don't know if you remember back in 2016 uh when Donald Trump was fairly new on the scene, he was attempting to establish his bona fides as a Christian by um giving a big speech at Liberty University. It's a big evangelical university. And as he's got a speech that um it's written by somebody else for him that quotes the Bible, he started quoting from two Corinthians, you know, which shows his actual knowledge of the Bible, how much he's ever read it, but it was so two Corinthians.

Factionalism and the "Super Apostles"

(53:34) Anyway, in addition to the text of second Corinthians as we have it, um there's an abrupt change in tone beginning with chapter 10. So, while Paul is attempting to recover his relationships with the Corinthians in chapters 1 through 9, following that severe letter, Paul's tone changes significantly in chapters 10 through 13, indicating that he is in a kind of a new conflict or a new period of uncertainty with the Corinthians that's different from that kind of way he was writing in what we just read. So, that those

(54:10) excerpts we just read about the severe letter where he's saying, "Well, you know, we were fighting for a while, but it all worked out in the end." That kind of thing. That comes from this first section. And like it we saw, it has kind of a generally conciliatory tone as Paul feels he's received a good message back from the Corinthians and that everything kind of worked out.

(54:32) Um and so, in the meantime, his companion Titus has gone back and been an intermediary, he's come back and given that kind of good news to Paul. However, suddenly and for no particular discernible reason in the text, there's a very different tone in chapters 10 through 13. As for example, we read in in this little excerpt from chapter 12.

(54:55) He says, "I have been a fool. You forced me to it. Indeed, you should not have uh sorry, you should have been the ones commending me, for I am not at all inferior to these super apostles, even though I am nothing. The signs of an apostle were were performed among you with utmost patience, signs and wonders and mighty works.

(55:17) Have you been worse off than other churches, except that I myself did not burden you? Oh, forgive me this wrong for not burdening you. Here I am, I'm ready to come to you this third time." He's going to have another visit. "But and I will not be a burden because I do not want what is yours, but you for children ought not to save up for their parents, but parents for their children. So, you're my children.

(55:42) I I founded this church. You shouldn't save up for me. I'm not going to burden you, but I'm I'm going to actually come and and essentially give you gifts. So, I will most gladly spend and be spent for you. If I love you more, am I to be loved less? Be that as it may, I did not burden you. But crafty person that I am, did I take you in by deceit? Did I take advantage of you through any of those that I've sent you? I urged Titus to go and I sent the brother with him.

(56:17) Titus didn't take advantage of you, did he? Did we not conduct ourselves with the same spirit? So, he seems to have got another communication somewhere in between these parts of the letter that he's responded to where um people have accused him of taking advantage of of them and so forth. So, like I said, in that earlier part of 2 Corinthians, chapters 1 through 9, Paul seems to have believed, based on messages from Titus, that matters have improved and they have reconciled since his unsuccessful second visit to Corinth and his severe letter. But now,

(56:49) in chapters 10 through 13, Paul thinks that a proposed third visit might go very poorly because of how the mood has soured on him for him in Corinth. Um so, we also have this mention of super apostles in this section. So, Paul feels he's lost the loyalty of some of the people in Corinth or maybe most of the Christians in Corinth.

(57:12) As always, he's really circumspect about who these rivals are, but twice in this section, he sarcastically refers to them as super apostles. And he implies to them that they are living on the charity or alms of the Corinthians, in contrast to Paul. So, um as we know from both the uh the different accounts in the Gospels of Jesus sending forth apostles, he tells them to go without purse or script, to um to uh you know, sell all their property uh to give it to the poor and come and follow me.

(57:52) So, we understand that the apostles generally are mendicants who are living on um the charity of uh Christian believers. And so, it would be pretty very quite normal for apostles, these super apostles as Paul calls them, to be doing that. Uh and Paul is contrasting what he did with them. So, he says uh to his letter in his letter here to the Corinthians that he'd actually never taken any alms from them because he had funds already from the Macedonian church.

(58:22) So, he says, "When I was with you in Corinth and I was in need, I didn't burden anybody in the Corinthian church because my needs were supplied by the brothers who came from Macedonia. So, those um wonderful model Thessalonians that Paul had written to in that letter, um they were funding him. So, I refrained and I'll continue to refrain from burdening you, the Corinthian church, in any way.

(58:47) " So, one of the other characteristics of the super apostles may be that they have come to Corinth with letters of recommendation. In other words, they have a kind of credentials that prove that they're apostles. And so, that's maybe why Paul's calling them super apostles. Um we don't have him say that in the chapters 10 through 13, but earlier in the in the earlier part of 2 Corinthians, he talks about um people, apostles, who need such credentials.

(59:20) So, um he says that he doesn't need them, but he argues uh because he's the guy who founded the Corinthian congregation. So, he shouldn't need them. He says, "Surely we do not need, as some do, letters of recommendation to you or from you, do we?" In other words, who's going to write me a recommendation? Maybe maybe you, the Corinthian church, should say, "Oh yeah, Paul founded our church.

(59:42) That's maybe maybe we're the letter." I don't Do I need that letter from you? He says, "You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, known and read by all. And you show that you are a letter of Christ prepared by us, not written with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone, but on tablets that are human hearts.

(1:00:05) " And so, this goes once again into Paul's dichotomy, between, you know, true life in Christ in the spirit, as opposed to um you know, like a an organization that has a human a human hierarchy and so forth. And it corresponds with Paul's explanation of his calling um in his letter to the Galatians during his fight with leaders of the circumcision faction, where Paul emphasized in his backstory that he's called directly by Christ through revelation and did not immediately talk to any other apostles, but just immediately started preaching

(1:00:39) the gospel the way you're supposed to do it in his idea. So, we don't know, you know, where super apostles are getting letters of recommendation. Where are they getting these credentials? But, once again, it sort of seems like James and Peter and John are a reasonable guess. So, um they may in as they're having these ongoing arguments um with Paul and his sort of autonomous church, which is not in schism, but is operating without any kind of supervision, they may well be saying, "Well, one of the ways we can um sort

(1:01:13) this is by um writing out, you know, I James, the brother of Jesus, the leader of the church in Jerusalem, I recommend to you uh the Apostle Apollos, who is a um a a true apostle who's been called and and so forth. And so, he those might be what these recommendations are. Although, that's speculation, we don't know.

(1:01:37) So, one of the associations we can see though with Peter also in Corinth is at a much earlier um stage in the factionalism um that's indicated at the beginning of the first uh the what we call first Corinthians. And so, at that point, Paul is still really minimizing differences between himself and other leaders, but he nevertheless indicates that one faction, well, one faction kind of looks to him as the authoritative apostle, at least one other faction is looking to Peter as an authoritative apostle and thinking that that that they are rivals.

(1:02:15) So, he says, "I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, here in Corinth by the name of our Lord Jesus Jesus Christ, that all of you be in agreement, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be knit together in the same mind and the same purpose. For it's been made clear to me by Chloe's people so, somebody from Corinth has come and uh and told him that there are problems there are quarrels among you, my brothers and sisters.

(1:02:45) What I mean is that each of you says, "I belong to Paul." Or, "I belong to Apollos." Or, "I belong to Cephas." Or, "I belong to Christ." Has Christ been divided? Was Paul crucified for you, or were you baptized in the name of Paul? Of course, not. It's for all part of Christ and Christ's body. So, as he develops this theme of unity in Christ in first Corinthians, Paul argues that he and Apollos and Peter should not be looked on as competing apostolic leaders, rather, they are all co-workers in Christ that have each been given

(1:03:21) different roles. So, in chapter 3 of that letter he writes, "What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you came to believe as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos water watered, but God gave the growth. So, there's I planted the community in Corinth. I then left. This other apostle, Apollos, came.

(1:03:49) He watered the community, you know, as it was growing, but the growth is actually coming from God. So, neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who gives growth is what counts. The one who plants and the one who waters, they have one purpose, and each will receive wages according to their labor.

(1:04:12) For we are God's co-workers working together. You are God's field, God's building. So, like I say, in this early stage of this leadership factional conflict in Corinth, Paul, who founded that church, um believes his relationship with the church is strong enough that he can simply argue for unity. There's nothing in in anywhere in Paul's writings that indicate that he's wanting to make an open break with these other leaders.

(1:04:37) He's wanting to have some kind of uh unity with them even as they're disagreeing with some core things that he finds are critically important. So, when we look at that then, we can when we when we bring it all together, we can see that Paul probably wrote at least five letters to the Corinthians, which record this very complex relationship he has with the church there.

(1:05:03) So, these ranged from a relatively close and strong relationship in the uh early years after he founded it and then moved on. So, that lost letter and then the whole of 1 Corinthians, which we might call letter A and letter B. Then this became very strained when he wrote letter C, the severe letter, he later um sort of uh wasn't did regret not regret.

(1:05:32) So, he didn't regret writing or as he kind of regretted it, but anyway, he um but it's lost. And then uh he's hopeful that there's going to have been a reconciliation in letter D, which is the first nine chapters of 2 Corinthians. And then finally, um he uh has this kind of he's kind of as a place where he's possibly resigned to um having maybe lost control or lost um lost his relationship with this church in letter E, chapters 10 through 13 of 2 Corinthians, where he's uh sort of upset and sarcastic about the rivals and so forth.

Practical Questions: Food Offered to Idols

(1:06:10) So, in addition to illustrating struggles Paul has had as he tried to provide light leadership via letters and occasional visits to this church that he founded, his Corinthian correspondence focuses Paul's thinking on practical questions. So, as we've said, while his letter to the Romans allows him to organize his theology, his big thoughts on the gospel, his letters to Corinth uh and especially the first letter of the Corinthians or what we call 1 Corinthians, um involve giving a lot of answers to practical questions about life as a Christian in a

(1:06:48) new congregation. And so, one of these is um this practical question that the Corinthians have written to him and forwarded to him. So, in 1 Corinthians, he's sort of going off a kind of a laundry list of responding to something things that they have asked about. And uh this concerns food that has been part of a ritual sacrifice to one of the old gods.

(1:07:16) So, important gods in terms of their cults in Corinth included Apollo and Aphrodite and Poseidon and uh Asclepius and so on. And so, um most of the meat that would be eaten or sold and eaten in a city like Corinth will have actually been part you know, have been sacrificed to a shrine or a temple, ritually slaughtered before then being sold in the market.

(1:07:42) We sometimes have the wrong impression that um animal sacrifice is always like a holocaust sacrifice where you burn up the entire animal. That's only a very rare. And this is where we get the word holocaust when it when it's uh being everything is destroyed. Um but almost all of the actual um ritual sacrifices to the old ancient gods or if and also in the Jerusalem temple are not uh they don't burn out the whole thing up.

(1:08:11) They just burn essentially the waste parts of the of the animal and the rest is able to be uh eaten. So, is it forbidden for Christians to eat this um sacramental or sacrificial food? So, on the one hand, Paul states that for Christians, of course, statues of Greek gods, they're just idols. Poseidon, Aphrodite, Apollo, these other gods don't exist in the Christian understanding of the cosmos and theology.

(1:08:40) So, really anything sacrificed to them is also doesn't really matter. It's not any different before and after. Hence, Paul says, "As to the eating of food offered to idols, we know that no idol in the world really exists and that there is no god but one. Indeed, even though there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth, and as in fact there are many gods, so-called gods and lords, yet for us there is only one God the Father, from whom all things and for whom we exist, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom

(1:09:18) are all things and through whom we exist. In that sense, therefore, it shouldn't matter to knowledgeable Christians anyway, uh and Paul indicates that he probably hasn't really been worried about such details if he's just on his own, but he continues, it's not for everyone, however, who has this knowledge, since some have become so accustomed to idols until now that they still think of the food they eat as offered to an idol, and then their conscious being weak is defiled.

(1:09:52) So, in other words, we don't want someone who's new to believing in God through Christ, somebody who was previously a devotee of Apollo, for example, to lapse because he's participating still in some way in a ritual that he once thought was really important and divine. So, that that's going to be, you know, it's not wouldn't be important, but now uh something that's not important has become important.

(1:10:18) So, he says, Paul says, be take care that this liberty of yours, the fact that you know the old gods don't exist, does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak. For if others see you, you who possess knowledge eating in the temple of an idol, might they not, since their conscious is weak, be encouraged to the point of eating food sacrificed to idols? So, by your knowledge the weak brother or sister for whom Christ died is destroyed.

(1:10:49) But when you thus sin against brothers and sisters and wound their conscience when it is weak, then you are sinning against Christ. Therefore, if food is a cause of their falling, I I Paul will never eat meat again, so that I might not cause then any one of them to fall. So, so he's articulating essentially here that the the regular kind of rules, these little kind of scriptural rules that you might have that you have a this kind of list or something, that's not what is important.

(1:11:18) There is a deeper principle that we should always be discerning here. So, the new covenant in Christ is not a simple list of thou shalt nots. Paul is trying to explain here to the Corinthians. It's not like uh a list that has thou shalt not eat sacrificial meat. Rather, Christians should be discerning ways to live by higher principles that are grounded in love, Paul says.

Principles of Liberty and Love

(1:11:45) So, he says, "All things are permitted, but not all things are beneficial. All things are permitted, but not all things build up. So, so it's not that I'm saying you can't do this, eating the sacrificial meat, but just because that just because it's permitted, that doesn't mean that it has having a good effect.

(1:12:06) So, do not seek your advantage, but the advantage of the other." That's the motivation for Christians. "Eat whatever is sold in the meat market without raising any question on the ground of conscience." So, you know, if if these if this has come from a a sacrificial thing, that's not something to worry about. Don't don't don't do that.

(1:12:26) "For the earth is in its fullness are the Lord's." So, that's fine. It it that wipes away whatever has been done it for Apollo and Athena. "However, if an unbeliever invites you to a meal and you're disposed to go, eat whatever set before you without raising any question on the grounds of conscience. If they are um you know, they let's say they're a pagan and they have a bunch of meat and and and they feed it to you, then that's fine. Don't worry about it.

(1:12:51) But then if one of them says to you, 'Oh, this has been offered as a sacrifice." It's kind of a gotcha. Well, he says, "Well, then don't eat it out of consideration for the one who informed you and for the sake of conscience." And I mean the other's conscience, not yours. So, the question is not something that you necessarily need to make a big deal out of it unless somebody else is making a big deal out of it or unless it's causing um someone to uh lapse or fall into uh a tradition that you know better than. And so, it's uh again, this

(1:13:24) discerning, not a bunch of thou shalt nots and rules, but discerning broader principles that are based on caring for someone else, based on motivation uh for other and for love. Paul grounds, like I say, this answer in love, which he says should always be the motivation for Christians. So, concerning food sacrificed to idols, "We know that all of us possess knowledge, but knowledge puffs up.

(1:13:51) But love builds up. So, it's not don't It's not as much for you to be right. Anyone who claims to know something does not yet have the necessary knowledge, but anyone who uh who loves God is known by him." So, as God is love for Christians, loving is knowing God and being motivated by love is at the heart, like I say, of Christian discipleship as Paul memorably tells us in 1 Corinthians.

The Encomium on Love: 1 Corinthians 13

(1:14:22) And so, at the heart of um this letter is uh a major quote that Paul has and a major um uh reflection he has on the idea of love. And so, this has become something that as one of the biggest quotable quotes. Um certainly it has become famous because of weddings. So, in the movie Wedding Crashers, Owen Wilson, Vince Vaughn, they play characters who attend weddings in order to hit on women.

(1:14:50) They crash the wedding. They don't know anybody there, but they pretend to. And then, having attended so many weddings, they see certain patterns. And so, as a one of the bridesmaids comes up to um read a passage of scripture, uh Owen Wilson says, "$20 on Corinthians." And Vince Vaughn should not have taken that bet cuz it's always Corinthians.

(1:15:13) So, anyway, this very frequently quoted at um at weddings, and we can see why. It's a beautiful passage, and it's a passage on love, and uh and so on. So, it's sometimes called Paul's encomium on love. An encomium is a formal enthusiastic expression of high praise to honor maybe a person or an object or a concept in this case.

(1:15:37) Primarily because of this frequent use in weddings, the Paul's encomium on love, chapter 13 of 1st Corinthians, has become one of his best-known quotations. So, he begins it by saying, "If I speak in the tongues of humans and of angels, but I don't have love, then I'm just a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. It's just noise.

(1:15:59) If I don't have love, if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains, but I don't have love, I'm nothing." So, instead of reading it in the context of new optimistic romantic love that we normally are thinking about when sitting at a wedding, let's listen to the rest of it, remembering love is one of the ways Christians understand God, define God or the divine, and so on.

(1:16:32) And so, we're thinking about um love here as God or as the ultimate. If I give away all my possessions, like Jesus said to do, "Come follow me. And if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but I do not gain I'm sorry, but I do not have love, I gain nothing. Love is patient, love is kind, love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.

(1:17:00) It does not insist on its own way, it's not irritable, it keeps no record of wrongs, it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hope all hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. So again, we often read this in um the context since it's the weddings in the context of romantic love and some people say, well, sometimes love does end in that kind those senses, although maybe depends on how you think of it.

(1:17:31) But in any event, one of the um if we're also now thinking of this though in the divine sense that's uh that Paul is meaning that also gives it a different context and lens. As for prophecies, they will come to an end. As for tongues, they will cease. As for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part and we prophesy only in part.

(1:17:54) But when com- the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now, we see only a reflection as in a mirror, but then we will see face-to-face face-to-face.

(1:18:18) Now I know only in part, then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love remain these three, and the greatest of these is love. So as sages have pointed out for millennia, uh the self-focused motivations, including, for example, the pursuit, desire of wealth, of fame, of power.

Gender Norms and Head Coverings

(1:18:43) Those are ultimately insatiable. So, famous people still compare their reputation with somebody ever more famous and have jealousy as a result of that. Wealthy still always have all kinds of things that they turn out that they lack. You always need bigger house, another yacht, or anything else like that.

(1:19:03) And even, um, you know, the most powerful autocrats in the world face very practical limitations on their power. You know, sometimes, if they don't have a total control over things like Victor Orban, they get voted out, you know, which happened. Ironically, um, as opposed to these insatiable pursuits, motivation with love works the other way around.

(1:19:24) So, when when someone turns from selfish motivations and act instead out of love of others, they can end up finding their own good. When somebody is loving, they frequently find that they are loved in turn, and so forth. Nevertheless, if Paul often wisely explains, um, the life of a Christian disciple is about discerning principal ways to live motivated by love of others, rather than laying down rules to be followed mindlessly, thou shalt not, and so forth.

(1:19:57) He's an inconsistent fellow sometimes, and he also finds himself committed to enforcing some of these mindless rules. And this is true in 1 Corinthians and other places, as, for example, he's asked whether women should wear head head coverings in church. You know, elsewhere, we have, um, high-minded ideals that I think are are represent kind of true Christianity in Paul.

(1:20:22) For example, his statement, there's no longer male nor female, for all are one in Christ Jesus. Um, and some of the women who have become Christians in Corinth, they seem to have taken that to heart and they take that to mean maybe well, these traditional markers of gender in our very sexist society that we should maybe not have to do that anymore.

(1:20:47) So, um I'm not maybe going to wear always characteristic female stuff or or male stuff as a result of you know, is maybe what's been happening. Um you know, of course fashion and gender norms are very arbitrary. They're very temporal. Um fashion is notori- I guess notoriously um ephemeral. And just to just say in terms of these, you know, like defending these kinds of gender norms, if Paul had actually been asked by the Corinthians, can men wear pants? Can they wear trousers to church? You know, based on the way he answers his head

(1:21:25) coverings thing, he almost certainly would have said, no, you absolutely not. Men can't wear pants to church because that was absolutely um against uh all of the cultural norms of Greco-Roman society. So, in the culture, trousers were considered the ultimate sign of foreign otherness and barbarism. For example, Hippocrates, the famous Greek physician for whom the Hippocratic Oath is named, um he said of Scythians, like we have in this picture here, uh that all of the Scythian men are the most impotent of uh of all the races

(1:22:02) because the Scythians wear trousers and that's uh and trousers are a sign of effeminacy and it also causes impotence in men according to Hippocrates. So, although the Christian community is new, there's already been a tradition that's developed apparently that men pray with their heads uncovered, unlike Jewish men who have their heads covered.

(1:22:26) So, in other words, men Christians don't wear hats and shirts in church. Meanwhile, there's a tradition that had already developed in the first couple decades here well where women are wearing some kind of head covering and it's not clear what it is from the context, so maybe a head scarf, a veil of some kind over their hair essentially.

(1:22:45) Later in modern Christian Christianity in the 1950s, it's your Easter bonnet, right? So hats in church, so men can't when back when men wore hats, you know, you'd have to take that off in church and met women kept wearing hats. So anyway, it's because it got written into the scriptures here. Anyway, in defense of um what is just an arbitrary custom, Paul musters a number of arguments.

(1:23:10) So for example, he appeals to shame. He says any man who prays or prophesies with something on his head, he shames his head. But any woman who prays or prophesies with her head unveils shames her head. It's the same thing as having her head shaved, which would just be the a sign of total shame in um um Greek and Roman culture.

(1:23:34) Um This happens in Game of Thrones where they they uh the the sept cut off uh uh the queen's head in order to have her walk of shame, right? They cut off all her hair. Um anyway, Paul then also appeals to tradition. He says, "I'm I I commend you because you remember me in everything and maintain the traditions just as I handed them on to you.

(1:24:01) " So this is a tradition that we're doing and I told you to do it, so keep doing it. He also appeals to what he thinks is natural. He says, "Does not nature itself teach you that if a man wears his hair long, it's dishonoring to him, but if a woman has long hair, it is her glory for her hair is given to her for a covering." So um again, this is just describing, you know, kind of like Roman ideas of the day where Roman men cut their hair short and women grew their hair long and so forth, but it hadn't always been that way and certainly uh, changes even in earlier

(1:24:36) times in Greece. So, an almost exact contemporary of Paul's, the Stoic philosopher Musonius Rufus, notes that there's nothing that's more natural about wearing your hair long or cutting your hair short. Uh, he says, quoting, um, attributing this to Zeno, an earlier Stoic philosopher, uh, it's quite as natural to cut the hair as it is to let it grow long in order to not be burdened by too much of it or hampered for any activity.

(1:25:07) So, if this is not this appeal to nature that Paul is making, we can see is pretty spurious. Paul also appeals to contemporary ideals of hierarchy, which are really embedded in Greek philosophy at the time. So, especially Aristotle teaches everything's a a hierarchy going all the way up to the heavens. And unfortunately, Paul takes that existing worldview and kind of Christianizes it.

(1:25:34) And so, he says, uh, I want you to understand that Christ is the head of every man and the man is the head of every woman and God is the head of Christ. So, he establishes essentially a a hierarchy here, a celestial hierarchy that unfortunately, um, has been used to, um, across the centuries for subordinating women in some kind, you know, Christianity generally, but some por- portions of Christianity today.

(1:26:00) Obviously not all, some of people have gone back to other things that Paul has said, like for example, there's no longer male or female as all are one in Christ Jesus. So, um, in this sense, Paul ends up being inconsistent. Nevertheless, after he makes this entire argument in defense of the tradition of men taking hats off and women putting something over their hair, Paul himself concedes at the end and says, "Just judge judge for yourself what what you think is right on this.

The New Covenant vs. The Letter of the Law

(1:26:30) " Um finally, as in other letters where Paul explains that Christians aren't to obey Mosaic law, he makes the same point in 2 Corinthians chapter 3. So, uh but he does so even in a much more stark way by um um using some pretty stark imagery about um about the Pentateuch, that is to say, he calls what he always calls Moses because he considers um the Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy to have been written by Moses, which people traditionally thought that.

(1:27:10) So, he says Paul says, "Now, if the ministry of death chiseled on letters in letters on stone tablets, the 10 Commandments, if that came in glory, so that the people of Israel could not gaze on Moses' face because of the glory of his face, a glory now set aside, how much more will the ministry of the spirit come in glory?" So, that's a tough sentence to unpack, but essentially there's this idea that um as Moses is coming down from uh Horeb or Sinai, he has to have his head in it's hard to read exactly, but it as it's translated into um

(1:27:51) uh in the Septuagint here, has his head veiled, so the people aren't able to look upon him because he's seen God, and and the glory is reflected into it through his face, and it would um you know, it's not something that everybody else can see without and live. And so, um nevertheless, having had having had that come in glory, a a a old covenant that has now been set aside he said what she calls the ministry of death so in other words it's a ministry of death that's been set aside so if there is that much glory in a ministry of

(1:28:25) condemnation as he now calls it how much more does the ministry of justification the new covenant abound in glory indeed what once had glory has in this respect lost its glory because of the greater glory for if what was set aside came through glory the old covenant had some glory but how much more has the permanent the new covenant that is eternal how much more glory does it have since then he says we have such hope such a hope we act with complete frankness in the new covenant not like Moses who put a veil over his face to keep the

(1:29:05) people of Israel from gazing at the end of the glory that was being set aside but then the people's minds were hardened indeed to this very day when they hear the reading of the old covenant when they read the old testament that veil is still there it's not unveiled since in Christ it's set aside in the new covenant indeed to this very day whenever Moses is read whenever the old testament is read a veil lies over their minds but when one turns to the Lord when one learns to Christ the veil is removed now the Lord is the spirit

(1:29:47) and where the spirit of the Lord is there is freedom and actually that's the that's the two Corinthians quote that that Trump made anyway now the Lord is the spirit and where the spirit of the Lord there is freedom and all of us with unveiled faces seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.

(1:30:15) For this comes from the Lord, the spirit. So, so definitely again, um a sense uh that Paul has that the old covenant is being set aside. The old covenant was about uh being something chiseled in stone that uh that the old covenant is something that has been replaced or fulfilled with a new covenant in the spirit that uh ends uh a veil that separates us from uh from the divine.

(1:30:44) But Paul then extends this understanding of Moses, the Pentateuch, the Old Testament, to explain how Christians in the new covenant should understand and approach all of scripture. So, he says, "Such is the confidence that we have through Christ towards God. Not that we're qualified of ourselves to claim anything as coming from us.

(1:31:06) Our qualification is from God who has made us qualified to be ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter, but of the spirit. For the letter kills, but the spirit gives life." And so, you know, Paul makes it very plain that interpreting scripture according to its letter, that is to say, literal interpretation, that kills.

(1:31:32) Therefore, Christian understanding of scripture should be the one that is lived meaningfully with the aid of the spirit of discernment. And so, I think that he um shows that really well when he is answering the question about should Christians eat um you know, meat that's been sacrificed to a god, and he um kind of flubs it when he's trying to justify a a thou shalt not prescription against um you know, men having to take their hats off in church and women having to put hats on or whatever the particular fashion thing needed to be.

(1:32:07) And so that is uh my explanation exploration of the books of first and second Corinthians. I'm going to get some water as Landro uh finds your comments, questions. All right. I want to thank um Ted uh Gimberling for your support, for your contribution. We really appreciate it. Also, thank you to Gabriel Knight and to Fred Church. Appreciate it, all of you.

(1:32:35) Ted Gimberling says um and I guess Shush I Was Never Here also says this. >> Yeah, two people. >> Oh, two people are asking a question about this. >> I Was Never Here. >> Shh, I Was Never Here and Ted Gimberling. Um they want to know about uh the dating of Galatians and 1 Thessalonians. So um So the uh I put those in based on um you know, so So we don't know for sure the these exact dates.

(1:33:07) I put in circas in front of every one of those, I think. So I usually always, you know, have that little hedge mark of writing C, you know, and then I then I write the number. And uh the whys and wherefores I say circa or around is because um it's uh not always uh everybody doesn't always agree.

(1:33:26) I think that I was um Let me Let me walk over here for just a second. I'll get I have um uh you know, the New Interpreter's Bible commentary, which has got a very, you know, some long essays on this, and I think I used their dates for the for the text, but there are alternate dates that different scholars propose, and so So um some people date Galatians that are early as being earlier um uh than that.

(1:33:55) And but it's but anyway, that it it's complex complex of why you would make that argument. So, it involves um this fight that Paul is having and um as he's describing in that this meeting that he has in Jerusalem, a meeting that gets uh reinterpreted by tradition in Acts as the Jerusalem Council.

(1:34:18) And so, you know, when when did each of these kind of things happen? And so, it's possible, you know, that that that's an you know, an earlier text, but I'm following this commentary and they are actually um they're actually this is actually based on a whole uh analysis of of scholars more generally. So, so so, in that sense um that's where I got it, but I think that in that kind of cases almost all of those dates are a little bit hypothetical.

(1:34:45) One of the one of the reasons why um a lot of this gets anchored to that kind of time in the early 50s is because of that Gallio being proconsul of Corinth in 52. And the and Paul doesn't talk about that, only Acts talks about that. And so again, depending on how much historicity and how much weight we give to Acts is one of the reasons why that sort of gets dated to that time frame.

(1:35:09) Um and so, in that's kind of the only one of the only anchor points we have for the whole kind of chronology of this. And so, it's it's it's the um the relative order is is maybe a little bit more important than when exactly the date of any one of those things. Um Jai Gurudev, thank you so much for your support.

(1:35:28) Um Ricky Placias says, "Is the theme of Corinthians the same or similar to Thessalonians?" It's I think it's actually I mean, there there are themes that Paul has that are sort of universal to all of his letters. Um but even as we'll we'll see in the um you know, within the two Corinthian letters, Paul's uh sort of tone and what he's doing changes where in the first case he's um much more pastoral and he's just kind of answering questions and things like that.

(1:36:01) And then he's worrying about in the you know, he's wanting to um have everybody rise above factionalism, but in the later letters, which we as we saw are probably two different letters, there's bigger fights happening and he may and he's a little more concerned with the fights. So, he's not having those kind of fights in 1 Thessalonians and um and again because uh that group, unlike the Corinthians, the Corinthians must have had some Jew people with Jewish background and a lot of God-fearers maybe who are very interested in scripture. So, Paul quotes

(1:36:32) a lot of um Hebrew scripture. In Thessalonians, I think he doesn't quote almost anything um because uh 1 Thessalonians anyway, because I think he that's a that community is almost like entirely people who are people who converted directly from what we call paganism, but from worship of the old Greek gods. Uh Mary Magnuson says, uh "None of the early church fathers mention anything about the birth narrative, specifically absent when arguing about the divinity of Jesus and his status beside the Father, could um

(1:37:09) the birth narratives have been added very late uh to Mark and Matthew and Luke?" Um So, I don't I don't think that they I don't think so, no. Um so, I do think that they're uh um cons- you know, they're consistent with both Matthew and Luke. I mean, I guess the way I guess I guess the argument for Luke would be that um if you're a following the hypothesis that um Luke's gospel actually was uh um Marcion's gospel and that they and that the version that Marcion has of Luke that's described in antiquity where it doesn't include the birth narrative,

(1:37:48) um that that is actually the original text, which some people have made that hypothesis, then that would then the implication of that is that then that one that has been added to and reworked because it was originally a Marcionite gospel. Um I don't really believe that hypothesis, but it's something that people can argue.

(1:38:07) I mean, that's not that's not the way I read Luke, and so I think of it as being pretty consistent across the whole gospel, the birth narrative, and so on. And same thing, um Matthew's birth narrative is written in a ways that are very consistent with how Matthew otherwise uh is framing things, is kind of showing Jesus as a Matthew always is kind of showing Jesus as another Moses, and uh and so Matthew's birth narrative um does a lot of Moses-like things, including the massacre of the innocents, the story that Matthew more or less makes up in order to make um Jesus more

(1:38:42) like Moses. Um uh m- uh Jesus's flight to Egypt, and the and out of Egypt I've called my son, in other words, making another um reference to Jesus being like Moses. So, I think that those um birth narratives that are in Matthew and Luke are consistent with with the evangelists and their editorial uh the way they write things and that kind of a thing.

(1:39:05) Um I think there's also our um some early um uh um fathers that do talk about the birth anyway, at least that uh that Jesus um you know, was born of Mary and things like that. So, for example, Ignatius of Antioch um is an early writer, I think, who talks about that. Um So, so I do think that there it's not that it's unknown.

(1:39:35) Uh it's that uh probably becomes more important because of um you know, in the 1st century, one of the ways that um, you know, kind of post-Pauline Christians, many of them have unders- because they haven't focused on Jesus and because they are focusing on, um, a very spiritual, very high Christology gospel like that Paul talks about, have, um, have started to work out the details and have decided, in some of the cases, to be docetic.

(1:40:01) In other words, the idea that, um, that Christ is not about, uh, uh, any kind of a um, a fully human idea, but instead is it only seems human kind of thing. And so, I think that that's probably where the stories need to need to say, "No, we we're reading the other other thing." Uh, T-Bone says, "Why is Jesus traditionally portrayed with long hair? Is that a Merovingian influence?" No, it's not a Merovingian influence.

(1:40:32) Um, it's earlier than that. So, um, there's no particular uh, there's no particular reason to believe or to imagine that, uh, Jesus looks anything like the way that he's portrayed or even and people say that, well, he he had to have had a beard. Well, we're not sure. The you know, some of these traditions are very much in flux, um, among Judeans, Jewish, uh, Second Temple Jews in the beginning of the 1st century.

(1:41:01) Um, they start to become there starts to become traditions and then everybody certainly would have a beard by the end of the 1st century and the and and start to, uh, have different traditions, but we don't really know what, for example, a Galilean Jew might do, but he probably I think he probably, you know, as a as a peasant, he probably would have had shorter hair, um, in that time period, but I don't actually know what the common thing for for for Judean peasants are.

(1:41:28) He's portrayed that way, um, um, because of, you know, the the portraits that we have are later kind of Roman portraits, and so, um, uh, I think some of the very first portraits that we have are from the the third and then especially the fourth century where we have um kind of funerary art, and uh Jesus is often portrayed as a um as a kind of a a philosopher and a and a young, you know, like uh wonder worker or healer, and so he's sort of like a uh an Apollo or an Asclepius sort of type as they are showing him as a healer, and so that's

(1:42:07) how he's portrayed in in sort of the while he's walking around doing miracles phase, and then he's often portrayed then in those same sometimes on the same exact sarcophagus um when he rises again, the risen Christ, then he has a beard and he's more like, you know, like Zeus or something. And so and so these are imagery that um that comes from existing Roman templates.

(1:42:32) This has nothing to do with what Jesus would have looked like. There's no uh no description of him in the in the text. Uh Shush I was never here says, um I'm curious about what Paul means by a spirit of discernment. So um so I I would you he doesn't Every time Paul is talking about like life in the spirit, he's he has these very long circum phrases where where he um has clauses that are building on each other and all kinds of things, and so you have to kind of read through the whole thing and and understand what the point of it is, but that's why we spent

(1:43:08) so much time um um talking about the one idea the the should you eat meat, you know, that um has been part of a sacrifice, you know, cuz you can see kind of how convoluted all of his thinking was, but the the heart of it, the discernment part was, so yeah, you have knowledge, that's great. You know that um you know that it doesn't mean anything if you eat that stuff except uh you don't you shouldn't be puffed up in your own knowledge.

(1:43:37) What you should be doing is you should be building up others. And so, think of all the other ways that your example might hurt people or undercut things. So, be motivated So, interpret um all of this, you know, these kinds of precepts. He's quoting precepts on and off in between there. As As you're interpreting those, interpret that with um how are you How are you motive being motivated by love as which he puts at the center of all these things in that encomium speech.

(1:44:07) Um how are you being motivated to live out these scriptures not as a bunch of um uh thou shalt nots but as a way to um express building up everyone around you. Uh be motivated by love. Uh David Latorre says, "Do we have any idea what the population of Corinth was at the time?" So, ancient people always overestimate populations.

(1:44:36) Um it's surprising how small you know, we now think of, you know, there's some such a huge population of the earth and but um it's a big city, so maybe it has 50,000 people. Um some people estimate more than that, but I it's like it's sort of like that. Um but it's not it's not like one of the it's not like Rome, which is the which is a megalopolis, one of the ancient mega cities and things like that.

(1:44:57) It's a it's a good-sized ancient city. All right. I think that's it, huh? Okay, no more. So, we'll um go ahead and remember uh watch the movie Dogma with us and we'll react to it together next Tuesday. Um remember you can always subscribe to our newsletter to receive the various slides that we've made and so on.

(1:45:19) We always thank you for all the ways you can support this channel. Includes liking and sharing and uh uh, uh, contributions, too. So, thank you so very much.