“Paul’s Use of Hebrew Scriptures in 1 Corinthians”

“Paul’s Use of Hebrew Scriptures in 1 Corinthians”
College essay by Brandon James, 2008 (Disclaimer)

The establishment and endurance of the early Christian church can be largely credited to the apostle Paul from Tarsus, who travelled throughout Rome and beyond establishing churches for both converted Jews and Gentiles. Whenever he caught wind that one of his churches had strayed from his original teachings, Paul composed a letter of praise, instruction, and chastisement. These letters, according to ancient traditions, represented the writer himself who could not give the message personally. Paul could not be at all his churches at once and was often on the move. When the followers at his church in Corinth fell into disorder, Paul wrote 1 Corinthians to correct their behaviors and to chastise them as though he himself were visiting. Paul, a master of rhetorical devices such as metaphor, irony, and rhetorical questions, was well-versed in the Hebrew Bible, having been prior to his conversion to Christianity an extraordinarily devout Jewish Pharisee. The Hebrew Bible, as a basis for the young Christian religion in the first century, was heavily drawn upon by early Christian writers to override the dominant Jewish beliefs and to seek Scriptural support for their own practices. In 1 Corinthians Paul, in his attempt to realign the behaviors of his followers in Corinth with his original teachings, alludes heavily to and depends upon the Hebrew Bible in order to dissemble the Jewish influences on his church and to remind his followers of their Scriptural justification and obligation to Jesus Christ.

Paul’s occasion for writing the letter is made clear at various points. He writes, “I am not writing this to make you ashamed, but to admonish you as my beloved children” (New Revised Standard Version, 1 Cor. 4.14). His primary admonishment, it seems, is, “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (1 Cor. 11.1). The Corinthian followers had begun to act in ways inconsistent with Paul’s original teachings, such as creating factions among themselves (1 Cor. 1.10-15), tolerating sexual immorality (1 Cor. 5), establishing lawsuits against one another (1 Cor. 6), and abusing supposedly spiritual gifts (1 Cor. 12), among other concerns. Paul is not entirely upset with the Corinthians, however, for he does not deviate from his standard letter structure by excluding a thanksgiving (1 Cor. 1.4-9) as he does in his letter to the Galatians. At the end of his letter, in his own script, he writes, “My love be with all of you in Christ Jesus” (1 Cor. 16.24), a convention unique to this letter. Paul loves the Corinthians as his own children, for he “fed [them] with milk, not solid food” (1 Cor. 3.2) as a mother would. He writes, “I commend you because you remember me in everything and maintain the traditions just as I handed them to you” (1 Cor. 11.2). However, the Corinthians are not quite as Paul describes. By commending them already, he assumes that the Corinthians will follow his letter, modify their behaviors, and act accordingly to Paul’s teachings. He shows his confidence in the Corinthians. The basis for Paul’s teachings is, as with all of the early Christian apostles, the Hebrew Scriptures, the Jewish holy books appropriated by the Christians to suit their own purposes. Paul writes a slogan that summarizes this early Christian attitude: “’Nothing beyond what is written’” (1 Cor. 4.6). What is written and useful to Paul and his followers, at that point in history, is the Hebrew Bible, from which Paul heavily draws the justifications for his admonitions described above.

Regarding the divisions in the Corinthian church, Paul asks rhetorically, “For when one says, ‘I belong to Paul,’ and another, ‘I belong to Apollos,’ are you not merely human?” (1 Cor. 3.4). However, a Christian is supposed to be more than human—a Christian is God’s temple. Paul draws from the book of Ezekiel in saying, “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s spirit dwells in you?… For God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple” (1 Cor. 3.16-17). Paul had read, in Ezekiel, “My dwelling place shall be with them; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people” (37.27). Paul is telling his followers that, according to the Hebrew Scriptures, they are one and the same and that divisions make them less Christian. Regarding their supposed wisdom and arrogance, Paul writes, “Do not deceive yourselves. If you think that you are wise in this age, you should become fools so that you may become wise… For it is written, ‘He catches the wise in their craftiness’” (1 Cor. 3.18-19). When Paul writes that “it is written,” he is referring to what is written in the Hebrew Bible, the text that formed the groundwork of the Christian church after the death of Christ Jesus. Regarding the tolerance of sexual immorality among the Corinthians, Paul quotes Deuteronomy in saying, “God will judge those outside. ‘Drive out the wicked person from among you’” (1 Cor. 5.13). It should be noted that Paul does not solely depend upon the Hebrew Bible for his interpretations and justifications of Christian behavior. Regarding virgins, he writes, “I have no command of the Lord, but I give my opinion as one who by the Lord’s mercy is trustworthy” (1 Cor. 7.25). His knowledge of the Hebrew Bible, he supposes, makes him worthy and capable of discerning what God might have said regarding certain practices. Paul depends upon his knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures in admonishing the Corinthian church to behave in the ways he prescribed during the church’s initial formation.

Furthering Paul’s need to use the Hebrew Bible is the fact that the Christians, during this time, desired to distinguish themselves from the surrounding Jewish majority. Their faith, while based upon the same texts used by the Jews, was entirely discordant with Jewish practices and beliefs. Paul not only quotes and references the Hebrew Scriptures throughout his letters, but he also builds upon them, subsuming them and making them the property of his own church. Distinguishing his church from Jewish ones, Paul writes, “For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and a foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1.22-24). His church can contain both a Jewish and a Greek membership, he writes, though his church is entirely distinct from Jewish or Greek beliefs. Making the Scriptures his own, Paul writes, “Hence, as to the eating of food offered to idols, we know that ‘no idol in the world really exists,’ and that ‘there is no God but one’” (1 Cor. 8.4). By conjuring the images of idolatry prevalent throughout Hebrew Scriptures, Paul asserts that there is but one God, Jesus Christ, and that all who fail to worship him, such as the Jews, are idolaters. He writes, “It is not everyone, however, who has this knowledge. Since some have become so accustomed to idols until now… their conscience, being weak, is defiled” (1 Cor. 8.7). Referring to both Jews and people of other non-Christian faiths, Paul accuses them of being defiled and weak, reminding the Corinthians that they are of the superior faith and that they should not incorporate any Jewish teachings. Theirs is the new religion, the new Judaism, built upon an older, inferior version that mistook everything that was written. Acknowledging this connection to the past and a break from it, Paul writes, “I do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, that our ancestors were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea… Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them, and they were struck down in the wilderness” (1 Cor. 10.1-5). That he and the followers in his Christian church, both Jew and Gentile, are ancestors to the ancient Israelites of Moses’ time suggests a dependence upon the past for lessons to be learned. “Now these things occurred as examples for us, so that we might not desire evil as they did” (1 Cor. 8.6), Paul continues. Everything written in the Hebrew Scriptures, according to Paul, is an example for what the new Christians should and should not do. Regarding ancient Jewish immorality and idolatry, Paul tells his Corinthian followers, “We must not put Christ to the test, as some of them did, and were destroyed by serpents” (1 Cor. 8.9 emphasis added). Paul asserts that, even long before the birth and crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, the Jews sinned against the person who would be, centuries later, their savior. Paul uses the example of the ancient Israelites found in Hebrew Scriptures to reinforce his teachings to his Corinthian church members in the hope that they will stay true to his original teachings, reminding them throughout his letter that all beliefs outside of the ones he espouses are putting Christ “to the test, as some of them did.”

In the early Christian church, a textual basis for beliefs and practices was nowhere to be found, so leaders of the young Christian churches found the remedy in the Hebrew Scriptures and used them to serve their own purposes. Paul founded several churches but could not manage them all at the same time. By sending letters, he projected himself to all these places to remind them of the true path of a proper Christian. By utilizing his knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures and building upon it, making the Scriptures his own, Paul gives his followers a concrete system to which they should adhere. His admonishments both remind his followers at the church in Corinth of their obligation to his methods and teachings and persuade them to ignore and reject the outmoded, inferior, and misguided practices and beliefs of the Jews. To Paul and his followers scattered throughout the land, the Hebrew Bible was the textual and historical basis for their faith, a faith that went beyond the Scriptures and required new interpretations, interpretations that Paul, in his scriptural knowledge and rhetorical prowess, was more than happy to provide.

Works Cited

The Harper Collins Study Bible. Harold W. Attridge, gen. ed. New York: Harper Collins, 2006.