Read the Bible with Me!

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 1 Corinthians 12-14.

Having given the Corinthians a powerful wake-up call about the divisions within their assembly (divisions that even carry over into their Eucharistic celebrations), Paul offers them a new way of thinking about what it actually means to believe in Jesus and share in the life of his Spirit. He is not "a god" like the "mute idols" that surround them in Corinth: Although Paul doesn't use the word "Trinity," his threefold expression (Spirit-gifts, Lord-service, God-works) lays the foundation for future trinitarian theology. And this living God acts powerfully within each believing soul through unique gifts that are meant to be put into the service of the whole, through appropriate "works."  Because Baptism unites all those believers into one living Body. And that Body is Christ, continuing his life on earth through many members.

Given the Corinthians' propensity to focus on the gifts and not on the works of service, though, Paul knows he will have to go deeper. And so he does. This is the context for the famous Hymn of Charity, which is patient, kind, not jealous, not pompous, not inflated...

With that explanation of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and the centerpiece of the greatest gift of all, Paul can return to the practical matter of how to conduct prayer meetings and faith sharing. His words with regard to women's participation can be really unsettling for modern readers. It might help to recall that Paul's reputation across the ancient world in the first two centuries of Christianity was the great defender and champion of women. We do not know what he was responding to in Corinth, but his invoking "the (Mosaic) law" in the context of Church order hints that the context may have been  liturgical in the strict sense. That he emphasizes that what he writes in 14:33b-34 is "a commandment of the Lord" and not his personal opinion means we should be very wary of attributing this to cultural conditioning or misogyny. (See 1 Cor 7 for an example of how carefully Paul distinguishes between his own opinions and the Lord's commands in the matter of remarriage.)

Start reading here.

For additional background

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.