Welcome to the Pauline Family's "Year of the Bible"! We've been reading the Bible clear through this year. We are finishing the New Testament, so read along with me. But first, let us pray:
Father,
When the fullness of time had come, you sent your Word in the One who said, “Whoever sees me, sees the Father.” No revelation can surpass this until Jesus comes again. By your gift, the Church continues to receive unfathomable riches from the inheritance handed on from the Apostles and guaranteed by the Holy Spirit.
Let the Spirit who inspired the writing of today's pages "guide me in the truth and teach me" to follow Jesus ever more closely, until he calls me to follow him to the Kingdom where he lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, forever and ever. Amen.
Today's chapters are Romans 16 and 1 Corinthians 1-2.
The final chapter of Romans is basically one long good-bye as Paul closes the letter with personal greetings to all the people he knows in that community, first among them his marvelous collaborators, Prisca and Aquila. The reference to "the church that meets in their house" tells us that immense Rome had more than one Eucharistic community (what we call a parish).
Toward the very end of Paul's salutations (verses 21-23), other people in the room pipe in: Timothy, whom we met in Acts 16, but also "Tertius," the scribe who had been taking dictation from Paul all this time, and (to the delight of historians), Erastus "the city treasurer," or aedile. Excavations in Corinth have turned up two mid-first century inscriptions marking public works attributed to "Erastus the Aedile." They may be the only archaeological traces on earth of a public official who participated (granted, in a small way) in the writing of the Bible!
The Epistle to the Romans was delivered by the "deacon Phoebe" (Paul did not use the feminine form "deaconess"), who set sail from Corinth. It is fitting, then, that the very next book we open is Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians!
My dad, frequently a lector at Mass, once commented, "Paul sure did write a lot to those Corinthians. It seems like every Sunday we have another letter to them." Actually, there are only 38 Sundays/Solemnities and 34 weekdays with readings from 1 and 2 Corinthians, but what Paul wrote really makes an impression!
Paul had founded the Corinthian community, living in that rather notorious port city for a year and a half. He knew the people, the culture, the tendencies and temptations. So when he was across the Aegean Sea at Ephesus and got a message from one of the leading Christian families about trouble in the church, he had a pretty good grasp of the situation. Used to political allegiances and the sponsorship of influential "patrons," the Corinthians had begun to transfer this social pattern to the Church community. They were dividing into factions: the Peter ("Cephas"/rock) people; the Apollos people (see Acts 18:24-28); the Paul party; even some "Christ" people.
Look at how Paul insists on the fundamental unity of the Church, which he will later describe for them in detail as the "body of Christ" (something we already saw in Romans). Paul also aims at the Corinthians' inflated sense of pride, reminding them that for the most part, the local Church was not composed of Corinth's best and brightest. Instead, just as Christ is Paul's only "boast," so is he the only glory of the Corinthians.
There is much to delight in when reading Paul's totally frank outpouring in his letters (both of them) to a Church he deeply loved.
Finish reading Romans here and start 1 Corinthians here.
N.T. Wright's Paul: A Biography is the book I would recommend to someone who wanted to read one (only one) book that combined the life and letters of St Paul. Written by a noted Scripture, this is a flowing narrative that is scripturally enlightening and historically sound. Wright gives the reader a way of following Paul through the Acts of the Apostles and the writing of his letters, making Paul the person that much more approachable, and the letters themselves more readable as a result of having a social and historical context.
While we read Paul's letters to the Corinthians, you might also enjoy A Week in the Life of Corinth. This historical novel is set in first-century Corinth and outfitted with historical footnotes and archaeological sidebars. Ben Witherington III is a Scripture scholar in the Evangelical tradition, so there are some points in which his description of the worship in the Corinthian community mirrors that tradition rather than the Jewish roots of the liturgy we know so well, but his description of the social life and values of ancient Corinth may be extremely helpful in understanding things Paul takes for granted in his letters.
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