"Members of Christ": Reevaluating the Significance of Stoic Language and the Unity of Paul's Argument in 1 Corinthians

Modern biblical scholarship on 1 Corinthians has long recognized the presence of language and concepts most closely paralleled by Stoic descriptions of the sage, as in 3:21–23; 4:8; and 6:12–20, and the sage’s perspective on their relationship to other human beings, as in 12:1–11, 12–27.For all the cultural backgrounds adduced in support of the scholarly theory that Paul addressed libertine believers at Corinth in the letter, from Gnosticism, to Hellenistic Judaism, to realized eschatology, and to the Cynic-Stoic hypothesis, one of the most enduring elements of the theory of libertine Corinthians is the assumption that 3:21–23; 4:8; and 6:12–20 in some manner reflect Corinthian claims to possess a perfect form of wisdom that justifies immoral conduct analogous to Stoic claims to perfect wisdom.

Methodologically grounded in fresh comparative research on the native function of the Stoic elements that appear in 1 Corinthians within the Stoic ethical system, my dissertation demonstrates that Stoic descriptions of the sage and the sage’s perspective did not function as self-descriptions of one’s wisdom or to justify immoral behavior, but were used by Stoic teachers to orient their students’ moral aspirations and training towards the goal of benefitting others in line with a normative understanding of the common good.

Based on this research, I propose that the Corinthians to which Paul wrote were not libertine but ascetics, who practiced Christian eschatological forms of sexual abstinence and the consumption of pagan sacrificial meat as means of developing individual self-control, and that Paul draws on Stoic descriptions of the sage and the sage’s perspective in the letter to reorient their ethical practice and aspirations from caring for themselves to caring for the morally “weak” among them.I argue that Paul uses the Stoic community-oriented model of a cosmic body linking its human members to one another through one divine Spirit to reinterpret the recognized Corinthian rituals of the Lord’s Supper and inspired speech-acts as lessons designed to teach the Corinthians a new form of wisdom, a wisdom centered on treating one another as members of the one “body of Christ.”