Over
the past few weeks I have been reading Richard Hays’s short commentary on 1
Corinthians[i]
as a supplement to some work I have been doing on Anthony Thiselton’s
magisterial — and massive —commentary on the letter.[ii] It may come as a surprise to some, but I have
considered Hays to be America’s most significant New Testament scholar ever since
I first encountered his work twenty years ago while working on my doctoral
dissertation on Paul’s letter to the Galatians.[iii] Hays’s work is not only characterized by
penetrating insight, but by a facility with the English language that befits a
man who earned his BA at Yale in English literature.
The
other day I came across a prime example of this combination in his discussion
of a peculiar statement of Paul’s at the end of 1 Corinthians 8:1-3, which read
as follows:
Now concerning food offered to idols: we know that “all possess knowledge.” This “knowledge” puffs up, but love builds up. If anyone imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know. But if anyone loves God, he is known by God.[iv]
In
1 Corinthians 8 Paul introduces a matter for discussion brought to his
attention in a letter from the Corinthians themselves. The issue concerned ta eidōlothuta, rendered “food
sacrificed to idols” by both the NIV and NRSV.
Better is the REB’s “meat consecrated to heathen deities.” But best, I believe — in accuracy if not in
felicity of expression — is Thiselton’s “meat associated with offerings to
pagan deities.”[v] Such a rendering allows for the term’s use in
all of the various social contexts discussed by the apostle in chapters
8-10. Primary among these contexts, in
view of the discussion in 8:7-13 and 10:1-22, was the eating of meat
consecrated to an idol in one of the many dining rooms attached to the temple
of the god(dess). Apparently, the “strong”
at Corinth were insisting on their “right” (exousia,
8:9) to eat “idol meat,” even to the extent of participating as guests at
explicitly cultic meals at the temple. And they were doing so on theological
grounds!
As surprising as this might seem to us
for whom Paul’s Corinthian correspondence has been recognized as authoritative
for more than 1900 years, the “strong” at Corinth reasoned that they had such a
right to dine because of their “knowledge” (gnōsis) that the “idols” to whom the sacrifices
were offered had no genuine metaphysical reality in view of their shared confession
that “there is no God but one” (8:4).
Not only that, but it appears likely that they took pride in their
having arrived at this possession (egnōkenai,
perfect tense [v. 2]) of such
knowledge, and hence utilized such pagan feasts to public exhibitions of their
freedom and supposed spiritual maturity.
Paul exposes the bankrupt pride
produced by such so-called “knowledge” as mere self-important inflation (physioō), akin to that of the frog who
burst in his attempt to inflate himself in Aesop’s The Frog and the Ox. Indeed,
the apostle subverts their worldview in two ways. First, he affirms the priority of love over the
knowledge in which they took pride because only the latter results in true “edification”
(oikodomeō) — the genuine enlargement
of others (8:1b, 7-12). Secondly, he redefines true knowledge so as
to expose the inadequacy of their perception (8:2-6). It is in this context that Hays writes
profoundly:
In sharp contrast to this “soteriology of knowledge” …, Paul insists that what really matters is love, which builds up the community (8:1b). Paradoxically, those who boast in their own exalted knowledge demonstrate precisely by that boasting that they do not yet “know as [they] ought to know (v. 2, NIV). Implied here is that the one who knows rightly will love the brothers and sisters in the community. Paul, however, goes on to make a different point: “anyone who loves God is known by him” (v. 3). We would expect Paul to say, “anyone who loves God knows God truly,” but the reversal of subject and object in the last clause of the verse expresses a truth close to the heart of Paul’s theology: The initiative in salvation comes from God, not from us. It is God who loves first, God who elects us and delivers us from the power of sin and death. Therefore what counts is not so much our knowledge of God as God’s knowledge of us. That is the syntax of salvation. The dominance of this syntax in Paul’s thought is shown in Galatians 4:9, when he commits an error of theological grammar and stops to correct himself in midsentence: “Now, however, that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God. …” Anyone who understands that the logic of the gospel depends on God’s initiative will not become puffed up by the possession of knowledge.[vi]
True
knowledge, according to Paul, is not mere creedal confession —though of course
it contains such knowledge, as Paul’s
own citation of a Christologically redefined Shema in verses 4-6
indicates. True knowledge, for the Christian,
is fundamentally bound up with his or her relationship
with the God of Christian confession (in these verses, a God explicitly
described in binitarian terms [cf. 10:9!]).
Moreover, this true knowledge is incapable of being “arrived at” in this
life. It is only in the consummated
eschaton that we will, as Paul later says, “know even as we are known” (13:12). Most importantly, however, this is a
knowledge prompted by God’s sovereign initiative (cf. Romans 8:29) in choosing
us and bringing us into relationship with him.
As Hays notes, those of us who recognize this fundamental truth of
soteriological syntax can never inflate ourselves with pride for the “knowledge”
to which we imagine we have attained.
And if indeed we live in relationship with the sovereign God we confess
as “one,” our loyalty to this God will supersede in importance any
self-centered rationalizations of dalliances with idolatry based on poorly
thought-through understandings of the ramifications of his ontological
uniqueness.
[i] Richard
B. Hays, First Corinthians
(Interpretation; Louisville: John Knox, 1997).
[ii]
Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle
to the Corinthians (NIGTC; Grand Rapids/Cambridge: Eerdmans; Carlisle:
Paternoster, 2000).
[iii]
See, e.g., Richard B. Hays, The Faith of
Jesus Christ: The Narrative Substructure of Galatians 3:1-4:11 (2nd
ed.; Grand Rapids/Cambridge: Eerdmans; Dearborn, Mich.: Dove, 2002); idem, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul
(New Haven/London: Yale, 1989).
[iv]
There is a major textual problem in verse 3, with three significant variant
readings in the manuscripts:
·
“But if anyone loves God (ton theon), he or
she is known by him (hyp’ autou): P15, A, B, D, F,
G, 81, 1759, Byz, it, vg,
syr, cop
·
“But if anyone loves God (ton theon), he or
she is known: א, 33
·
“But if anyone loves, he or she has experienced “true
knowing”: P46, Clement
Despite the overwhelming manuscript support for the
longer reading, the work of Günther
Zuntz (The Text of the Epistles: A
Disquisition upon the Corpus Paulinum [Schweich Lectures; London: Oxford,
1953] 31-32) has convinced a growing number of scholars of the originality of
the shorter reading (e.g., Fee; Yeo; Cheung; Thiselton) and, hence, an
understanding of the verb egnōstai
as middle rather than passive. Fee, for
instance, thinks that the way the shorter reading provides a short, concise
response to the misunderstanding of the “strong party” at Corinth demonstrates
the originality of the shorter reading.
But that could precisely be the point, couldn’t it? Indeed, Bruce Metzger argues for the
originality of the longer text by positing the shorter text as an assimilation
to verse 2 (A Textual Commentary on the
Greek New Testament [London/New York: United Bible Societies, 1975]
556). For me, the overwhelming
manuscript support and the coherence of the longer text with such parallel and
near parallel Pauline texts as Galatians 4:9 and 1 Corinthians 13:12 make it
marginally the more likely reading.
[v]
Thiselton, 620.
[vi]
Hays, First Corinthians, 138.
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