Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

corpus-paul - Re: Opponents in 1&2 Corinthians

corpus-paul AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Corpus-Paul

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: "Frank W. Hughes" <fwhughes AT sunbeach.net>
  • To: Corpus-paul <corpus-paul AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: Opponents in 1&2 Corinthians
  • Date: Sun, 27 Jun 1999 18:08:01 -0300

Frank, could you elaborate on your reasons for seeing a single group of
opponents in the Corinthian correspondence?  At what stage in the sequence
did they arrive in Corinth, and when did they leave?  Also, what was the
identity of the opponents, according to your reconstruction?
Thanks for your question which really gets at the heart of the matter.  I recently found two excellent articles in the Anchor Bible Dictionary dealing with 1 and 2 Corinthians respectively.  In both these articles you find a very clear statement of the problem. On the opposition reflected in 1 Corinthians see ABD 1.1141-2 by H. D. Betz and M. M. Mitchell; on the opponents in 2 Corinthians see ABD 1.1152 by Betz.  (N.B.: the pages cited here are not the whole articles but the sections that deal with the opposition.)

We do not have hard evidence about the opposition in the so-called 1 Corinthians.  The most famous proponent of a single opposition reflected in both 1 and 2 Corinthians would be, I think, Walter Schmithals.  The view he espouses in Gnosticism in Corinth was that the opponents were full-blown Gnostics, presupposing the existence of pre-Christian Gnosticism.  As we are all aware, the evidence for pre-Christian Gnosticism is ambiguous at best and slim to none at worst.  I do not think, however, that there has been proof that pre-Christian Gnosticism did not exist.  To make such an argument is to engage in an argumentum e silentio.  The silence (or perhaps the still, small voice) can be interpreted in more than one way.  A mediating position on the relationship of the Corinthian opposition to Gnosticism has been taken by Hans Conzelmann in that he sees a proto-Gnosticism or incipient Gnosticism reflected in 1 Corinthians.

An advantage of either the Schmithals position or the Conzelmann position is that it serves to explain the existence of the opposition reflected in 1 Corinthians 15 as well as the factions reflected in 1 Corinthians 1:10 (etc.) as well as the activities of the "superapostles" of the so-called 2 Corinthians.  I would place my position closest to the Conzelmann position.  We do not know when the opponents came to Corinth or when their influence on the Corinthian church began.  If they were not there already, the position of Bornkamm and Georgi, that the Pauline opponents reflected in 2 Corinthians moved there after 1 Corinthians was written, seems well taken.  On the other hand, it may well be that they were always there and made their early inroads via the factionalism reflected in 1 Cor 1:10 etc.  They may not only have supported this factionalism but in fact caused it.  This would be my reading.  In other words, certain parties in the Corinthian church seem likely to have found the opponents' theology and practice more appealing than other parties did.  I also think that Gerd Theissen is on the right track in looking for socioeconomic differences within the Corinthian congregation as reflected, for example, in the problems surrounding the celebration of the Lord's Supper in Corinth.  Paul's financial independence from the rich Christians in Corinth also helped him avoid the tangles of a patron-client relationship with them.  It interests me that we see traces of the aftermath of Paul's decision not to accept a salary from the Corinthians in both 1 and 2 Corinthians.

The reason we cannot say for sure who the opponents are, and when they came, is that we only have Paul's rhetoric against them.  This is the difficulty of trying to explain who the opponents are from Paul's polemical attacks on them.  The explanation that makes the most sense to me is that the Corinthian correspondence reflects Paul's successive (but unsuccessful) attempts to deal with the problems in the Corinthian church, based on his quite incomplete knowledge of what was going on there, especially in 1 Corinthians or in Jewett's partition theory, letters A and C.  When he wrote letters A and C, he doesn't mention opponents because he presumably didn't think there were any.  The reason that the Corinthian church didn't settle down center around the sad fact that factionalism alone wasn't the problem in Corinth.  He thought it was, and he wrote letters A and C on that basis.  He was wrong.  Apparently the factions whose slogan was "I am of Apollos" and "I am of Cephas" and maybe even "I am of Christ" coalesced into a rather more organized opposition, strongly under the influence of the opponents of Paul.  Letter C (most of 1 Corinthians, not including 1 Cor 9:1-18) reflects Paul's use of deliberative rhetoric to persuade the Corinthians to give up factionalism and adopt policies which would promote unity.  Unfortunately this attempt did not work.

Letter D (2 Cor 2:14-6:13 + 7:2-4) shows us that Paul gave up on deliberative rhetoric until the Corinthian church "shaped up and flew right."  It was a subtle piece of judicial rhetoric.  Later Paul finds out that his subtlety worked against him; he abandoned this in favor of sarcasm and bombast in Letter E (2 Cor 10:1-11:11 + 1 Cor 9:1-18 + 2 Cor 11:12-13:13), continuing to use judicial rhetoric including defense of himself and prosecution of his opponents.

Frank W. Hughes
Codrington College
Barbados



Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page