Corpus-Paul

["Mark D. Nanos" <nanosmd AT home.com>]

on 6/20/01 10:47 PM, John Dickson at dicksonj AT bigpond.net.au wrote:
 
> As for your more basic question (what makes anyone think there were a number
> of groups consisting of about 40 Christians in Corinth in Paul's own 
> time?): I
> too look forward to the various responses.

Many of the figures are based on very little available evidence. This
extends beyond the question of how large were the groups, to how many, and
even to how many believers in Christ there were during Paul's time, or
anytime prior to the fourth century and later. The ranges offered vary
considerably, reflecting the wide range of presuppositions.

One of the rules of thumb follows from respect for the political constraints
as mentioned in other posts, especially to the degree that any of these
groups might have been other than Jewish (I have trouble imagining this for
Paul's period; although they may be "strange," they nevertheless are
considered by themselves and others to be Jewish). Another arises from the
socio-economic constraints such as seem to be the case for Jewish and other
voluntary groups in the Greek and Roman world. These groups seem for the
most part to meet in peoples homes, tenement rooms, workshops, or other such
multi-use spaces adapted for meetings. We at least have no evidence of the
kinds of structures with which we are familiar for religious groups, such as
churches, synagogues, mosques, etc. until the third century and later.
Rather, we find homes around which these later structures were constructed.

Thus we are left to guess at the size of the groups. I have not worked on
Corinthians enough to venture a guess.

I have proposed that there were perhaps tens and hundreds of Jewish group
meetings in Rome, a few of which consisted of Christ-believers, when Paul
wrote Romans (cf. "The Jewish Context of the Gentile Audience Addressed in
Paul's Letter to the Romans," CBQ 61:2 (1999) 285-88). I note there in
particular the arguments of P. Lampe, Die stradtrömischen Christen in den
ersten beiden jahrhunderten, Mohr Siebeck, 1989, R. Jewett, Tenement
Churches and Communal Meals in the Early Church" in BR 38 (1993) 23-43; L.
M. White, Building God's House in the Roman World, Johns Hopkins, 1990,
60-101. 

My guess is that the letter to the Galatians went to several very small
groups functioning as subgroups of the Jewish communities of villages and
towns of central Anatolia. There is little to base numbers upon; we have
only the rhetoric of the letter. But the way that Paul addresses these
several groups as though one shared exigence, as well as the nature of the
case with which he is concerned, suggests small (sub)groups with similar
boundary issues, at least issues that would arise in very early group
formation. Since we don't know where in Galatia they were, there is nothing
to base a group size upon. If Antioch, then a large home or public space
might accommodate 40 people for a meeting, but we still do not know if any
members of these groups had such homes, or if they did, how many met in
them. But if a town or village, how large a home can we suppose, and thus,
how large a (regular) meeting?

Whatever is proposed should arise from the rhetoric of each letter, and it
will have to remain extremely tentative until some kind of material evidence
becomes available. In other words, it would be best not to base any other
arguments upon the decisions made about group size, but only to tentatively
suggest group size based on other arguments.

Regards,
Mark

-- 
Mark D. Nanos, Ph.D.
313 NE Landings Dr.
Lee's Summit, MO 64064
USA
nanosmd AT home.com