Paul and the Gators

This morning my inclination was to stick my nose into something about which I know almost nothing. The Alabama-LSU rematch in the BCS Bowl is just right. But it seems a stretch to put my beloved Gators (6-6) in a bowl at all this year, much less in the Gator Bowl against Ohio State (6-6) where Urban Meyer late of The Swamp has just assumed the mantle of Head Coach and already is raiding his old staff at Gainesville. 

Go Gators. How many fingers and toes must one cross? What’s that queasy feeling in my stomach? Think about something else, please.  

At our Bible study last Tuesday we had a look at Second Corinthians. To some folks, myself included, the composition and apparent history of it may be more fascinating than the canonical text, which can be difficult, puzzling -- thus leading to an exploration as to why, unlike most of Paul’s letters, the text seems so confusing. And exploration proves rewarding. Perhaps more than any other document in the New Testament, 2 Corinthians has helped scholars piece together bits of the life of a New Testament figure; such that because of 2 Corinthians, we may know more about Paul than anyone else in the New Testament.

To begin with, we know that 1 Corinthians wasn’t Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians (1 Cor 5:9). And many competent scholars believe that 2 Corinthians itself is not one letter but as many as five shorter letters that an editor cobbled together sometime during the second century for whatever reason. The historical sequence of events may have been something like this.

Paul visited Corinth and founded a church there. Subsequently he wrote a letter to them, which we do not have. Later he heard that they needed guidance, and wrote them the letter that we call 1st Corinthians. 

Still later, he found out that outsiders had come in, who were disparaging Paul as not a true apostle, and bringing their own version of the gospel. Paul refers to them as super-apostles, and someone in our Bible study group wondered if they may have been not the so-called “Judaizers” whom Paul meets and combats elsewhere, but maybe products of the Day of Pentecost, perhaps arriving with glossalalia and other Spirit-filled gifts that Paul had not taught. This should ring a bell: even today it’s a characteristic among some Christians to think that if you don’t believe and do and have the same “spiritual gifts” that they do, you’re not a true Christian; we saw some of that unneighborly nonsense in our own Episcopal Church a generation ago with the so-called renewal movement.   

Anyway, Paul then wrote the Corinthians a letter defending his authority as an apostle appointed by God. Some scholars name it as “Letter One” of five in 2 Corinthians. 

Paul then visited Corinth again to try and straighten things out. But he was treated shabbily, humiliated and disgraced, and left Corinth angry and brokenhearted.

Collecting his thoughts and not giving up on them, he wrote the Corinthians another letter, called the “Sorrowful Letter” or the “fool’s speech.” This would then be “Letter Two” in 2 Corinthians. 

Apparently the Sorrowful Letter won the Corinthians over and they came back under Paul’s authority.

So then, hearing that he had won them back, Paul wrote the Corinthians a letter of reconciliation, which might be called “Letter Three.”

Those three would be the main letters of 2 Corinthians.

Letters Four and Five are appeals to the Corinthians to contribute to fundraisers.

And finally is a section that some scholars say has nothing whatsoever to do with anything else in the letters, and in fact seems not to have been from Paul at all, but lifted from material that also has been found in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Members of our class left with a copy of Second Corinthians sorted into the not unlikely five letters. We have two class sessions left. For tomorrow the group decided to study the Creeds. The final session, next week, isn’t decided yet.

All this makes a lot more sense to me than pitting the Gators against the Buckeyes.

TW+