The Corinthian Body

by Dale B. Martin

In this intriguing discussion of Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, Dale Martin contends that Paul's various disagreements with the Corinthians were the result of a fundamental conflict over the ideological construction of the human body.

According to Martin, most Corinthian Christians and Paul himself saw the body as an entity that could be permeated by different pollutions. Other members of the Corinthian church, however, viewed the body as hierarchical―as a microcosm of the universe―and were not particularly concerned about body boundaries or pollution. These differing views of the human body (and also of the church as the body of Christ) led to differing opinions on a variety of subjects―including the role of rhetoric and philosophy in a hierarchical society, the eating of meat sacrificed to idols, prostitution, sexual desire and marriage, and the resurrection of the body. Martin explores these conflicts by drawing on ancient medical writings, modern anthropological approaches, and feminist and ideological methods of critical analysis. He shows how Paul's understanding of the body prevailed among the less well-educated inhabitants of the Roman Empire, who occupied relatively low socioeconomic levels. The minority who espoused the ideas of hierarchy, on the other hand, were usually of higher social status and were better educated. And it was along these same class lines, Martin argues, that the Corinthian church itself was divided.

Genres: Theology, Biblical Studies, Religion, Christianity, Philosophy, History

330 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Dale B. Martin specializes in New Testament and Christian Origins, including attention to social and cultural history of the Greco-Roman world. Before joining Yale in 1999, he taught at Rhodes College and Duke University. His books include: Slavery as Salvation: The Metaphor of Slavery in Pauline Christianity; The Corinthian Body; Inventing Superstition: from the Hippocratics to the Christians; Sex and the Single Savior: Gender and Sexuality in Biblical Interpretation; and Pedagogy of the Bible: an Analysis and Proposal. He has edited several books, including (with Patricia Cox Miller), The Cultural Turn in Late Ancient Studies: Gender, Asceticism, and Historiography. He was an associate editor for the revision and expansion of the Encyclopedia of Religion, published in 2005. He has published several articles on topics related to the ancient family, gender and sexuality in the ancient world, and ideology of modern biblical scholarship, including titles such as: "Contradictions of Masculinity: Ascetic Inseminators and Menstruating Men in Greco-Roman Culture." He currently is working on issues in biblical interpretation, social history and religion in the Greco-Roman world, and sexual ethics. He has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany), the Lilly Foundation, the Fulbright Commission (USA-Denmark), and the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (elected 2009).

Reviews

[Scriptor Ignotus · Rating 4 out of 5]

The main thesis of The Corinthian Body is that the disagreements Paul addresses between factions of the Corinthian church were rooted in differing construals of the human body; construals which were informed by—and in turn reinforced—various understandings of the normative social order in its status and gendered dimensions, whether among elite philosophical circles or at the level of popular “folk” belief. Dale Martin argues that the primary division in Corinth was between a minority of “the Strong” who viewed both the personal and social body as a hierarchical system in which the “higher” elements governed the ”lower” ones, and which was threatened more by internal “dysregulation” than by external forces—a view corresponding to that of higher-status members of society—and a majority of “the Weak” who saw the body as a more porous entity, vulnerable to penetration and invasion by hostile foreign entities, be they gods and spirits or simply unwelcome substances: a fearful posture reflecting the precariousness of life among the lower orders.

Adopting the style of a homonoia speech—a popular form of rhetoric in Greco-Roman antiquity which encouraged social harmony by portraying society as a single organism whose members must cooperate (and, when necessary, submit) for the wellbeing of the whole—Paul responds in 1 Corinthians to the respective stances taken by these two groups on a number of topics, including the resurrection of the body, speaking in tongues, the consumption of meat sacrificed to idols, prostitution, marriage, the eucharistic meal, and the veiling of women, as they pertain to the body Paul is concerned with protecting and nourishing: the body of Christ. In each case—with one critical exception—Paul enjoins the Strong to forego their prerogatives to accommodate the Weak in accordance with the value system of the apocalyptic Kingdom of God.

Such is the thesis, which Martin demonstrates more convincingly on some points than on others: but what really makes this book worth reading and absorbing is how evocatively Martin draws on a wide variety of sources—both Jewish and “pagan” religious and philosophical texts, medical treatises, ancient physics and astronomy, the magical papyri, and modern anthropology—to reconstruct the cosmological ambience of classical antiquity, which formed the background of all antique thought and culture, including that of Paul and his interlocutors.

To understand the Corinthian body, one must first dispense with the Cartesian dualisms of mind/matter, physical/mental, natural/supernatural, etc. The ancient Mediterranean mind was steeped in what Marshall Sahlins would call a “culture of immanence.” The cosmos was a multitiered “hierarchy of essence,” ascending in gradients from the densest, heaviest, coldest, wettest, and most inanimate material to the lightest, airiest, most rarefied substances—identified variously (and at times interchangeably) as air, fire, ether, or, for Paul and others, pneuma, usually but misleadingly translated as “spirit”—which formed, to increasing degrees, the very “stuff” of life, motion, and perception. This entire spectrum of elements occupied a single continuum; there was no supernatural realm partitioned from our own, but only one world shared by gods, daemons, men, animals, ghosts, elemental spirits, and the like. One may visualize this cosmos as a series of concentric circles, the innermost being the hardest, densest stuff of earth; the middle layer being a certain admixture of earthly and heavenly materials that comprise the animal bodies occupying the surface of the earth: bodies which are animated by the heavenly elements, but still confined and subject to death due to their more solid constituents; and the outermost—and most all-encompassing—circles being the heavenly spheres, made up of the rarefied, living, immortal stuff of the moon, stars, sun, planets, angels, and gods.

In this scheme, the human being—or the self—was not a discrete, fixed, stable entity, but rather a “confused commingling of substances,” an amalgamation of the elements that pervaded the surrounding environment. The human body was composed of both lower and higher elements—dense matter, soul, spirit—and therefore participated in the nature of each simultaneously, subject to certain quasi-alchemical transformations. One might speak of an indeterminate self, or, perhaps more cautiously, of multiple selves pertaining to each level of the cosmic hierarchy. Certain comparisons might be drawn here with the cosmology behind neidan—the “internal alchemy” of traditional Taoist practice, in which the practitioner cultivates the higher elements of Qi (“breath”) and Shen (“spirit”) to achieve immortality—along with the many other configurations of the "subtle body" described in virtually every major eastern tradition. And just as the body was not discrete “vertically,” it was also not discrete “horizontally”; that is to say, the individual body was not wholly separate from other bodies of its kind, but was incorporated with them into a larger organism due to their shared constitution.

Thus for Paul, every human being, by virtue of being composed of flesh and blood and subject to mortality, is an extension of Adam’s body. Adam, the first man, was not simply an individual who lived and died long ago. Rather, as the earthly progenitor of the human race, he extends through space and time as the race itself, each member of which is made of his selfsame somatic material. There’s a parallel here to the figure of Manu, the first man in Hindu tradition. In ancient Sanskrit, to be a human being is to be manuṣya—“of Manu.” Likewise for Paul, to be a human being is to be “in Adam.” Later, Manu came to be used as a title for a ruler, a patriarch, or the founder of a dynasty, because in much premodern political thought, to be the subject of a dynast was to be incorporated into his sovereign body. One thinks of the frontispiece of Hobbes’s Leviathan, and recalls that Locke’s First Treatise of Government refutes Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha, which argues for absolute monarchy on the grounds that Adam was the first king by patriarchal right—as head of the human body—and that all legitimate monarchs are descended from Adam by way of one of Noah’s three sons (each of whom ruled a continent), thus inheriting his headship over the collective body of their subjects.

The body of Adam is a “psychical body” (sōma psychikon), which, though it has had life breathed into it by God, is composed of earth and therefore captive to death, a return to the inertia characteristic of the lower elements. But in fulfillment of the resurrectional hopes of Jewish apocalyptic, in the closing days of the present age, Jesus of Nazareth, a prophet and martyr who sacrificed his earthly body on a Roman cross, has been raised by God in a heavenly body—a body of pneuma, the immortal substance of angels and stars. What’s more, Christ is merely “the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep,” and just “as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.” Every human being has the opportunity to receive, through baptism and the ascesis of the flesh (sarx), a pneumatic body—a higher and more universal self, if you will—and to be incorporated thereby into the collective pneumatic organism that is—in a very “literal,” material sense—the body of Christ. Paul’s identification of Christ as the “last Adam” is far more than a figure of speech: Christ is the progenitor of a new, spiritualized human race, which will survive the cosmic conflagration that is to consume the present age (according to both the New Testament and the prevailing stoic cosmology of the first century) and inhabit the World to Come, no longer encumbered by the mortal body of flesh and blood.

A war is raging, both throughout the cosmos and within each person, between the heavenly body of Christ and the world that is passing away. While the Strong, with their hierarchical view of the body, aren’t particularly worried about the potential corruption of the former by the latter, Paul urges them to live in solidarity with the Weak to preserve the integrity of Christ’s body from hostile external forces, and in so doing displays a concern about the potential invasion or pollution of the body characteristic of the Weak themselves. While the Strong might have viewed sex between a Christian and a prostitute as an unfortunate indulgence by a “lower” member of the collective body, but one that posed little threat to the higher, governing members and thus to the integrity of the whole, Paul saw such relations as an unthinkable interpenetration between Christ and the cosmos. While the Strong saw little problem with both providing and eating the lion’s share of the Lord’s supper, Paul saw this as the occasion of a dangerous schism within Christ’s body, which left it vulnerable to attack and contamination. While the Strong favored the higher, more esoteric practices of prophecy and speaking in “angelic tongues” (literally speaking the secret language of the angels), Paul sought to tie these charisms to the lower, more exoteric faculty of the nous, enjoining the Strong to interpret the pronouncements they made in the angelic language for the edification of all: “Otherwise, if you give thanks with your spirit, how can anyone in the position of an outsider say ‘Amen’ to your thanksgiving when he does not know what you are saying?” (1 Cor. 14:16) While the Strong saw little danger in eating meat sacrificed to idols, Paul wanted them to forego the practice if it posed a risk of corrupting the Weak, who lacked the gnosis—and therefore the power over contaminating spiritual influences—possessed by the Strong.

In each instance, Paul intenerates the strong-weak hierarchy to some degree. Yet he does not do the same when it comes to gender relations, because like virtually all writers of his time, he envisioned a male-female hierarchy corresponding to the cosmic hierarchy of essence. The modern notion that there are simply two different types of human beings—men and women—did not become cultural “common sense” until the eighteenth century. Most ancients subscribed to a “one sex” model akin to the “one world” model, according to which the male principle corresponded to the higher, spiritual elements—pneuma, purusha, yang—and the female to the lower, earthly ones: sarx, prakrti, yin. Physiologists interpreted a woman’s body as one that simply hadn’t attained the level of heat and dryness to fully develop into a man’s body. Women were seen as unformed men, and were therefore both more vulnerable and more dangerous to the social body. While Paul believed that women received the same spiritual body as men, this body was nonetheless quintessentially male, and the stuff of a woman’s earthly body—with which the spiritual was in conflict—was inherently more porous and vulnerable to hostile agencies, making them both more easily corruptible and a potential corrupting influence upon the rest of Christ’s body. This male/spirit/life – female/earth/death polarity mapped all too easily onto the Eden narrative, which was allegorized by Philo and others as the corruption of the original, male, spiritual element within humanity by its derivative, earthly, female counterpart.

This is the physiological/cosmological background of Paul’s instruction for women to cover their heads while prophesying “because of the angels.” The mythological background is a narrative from Genesis 6 and its elaboration in 1 Enoch, in which the “sons of God,” “angels,” or “watchers” become enflamed with lust for human women and copulate with them, producing the race of giants and imparting forbidden promethean knowledge to humanity.* If the porous bodies of women make them naturally suited to mantic practices, they also make them a potential access point into the Christ body by malevolent forces. Hence Tertullian’s infamous pronouncement that women are “the devil’s gateway.” Women are certainly among the Weak in Paul’s conceptual scheme, but whereas in other cases he sees the Strong as a hazard to the Weak, in the case of gender relations he sees “weak” women as a danger for “strong” men, enjoining them to take precautions for themselves and the community. Though Paul encourages reciprocity between the sexes in some contexts, the ideological matrix in which he lived simply precluded him from being the sexual egalitarian we would want him to be.

I don’t fully accept all of Martin’s interpretations. I’m not sure, for instance, that the Strong/Weak division can be perfectly fitted to divisions in social status. One of the appeals of joining a Christian community for someone of lower status might have been the prospect of being part of a spiritual elite. Some of the Strong may well have been lower-status individuals seeking a social context in which they could occupy a higher status. Nor am I convinced that the people who doubt the resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15 do so because they envision this as the reanimation of a corpse and abhor the idea. Rather, I don’t think any of the Corinthians expected a resurrected body of flesh and blood; what some of them doubted was whether people could be raised from the dead. They expected to be raised while living, as were Enoch and Elijah, and wondered whether being saved from death (which seems to have been the only concept of salvation in early Christianity) was possible for those who had already died. Paul believed that it was not only possible but inevitable, firstly because Christ himself rose from the dead, and secondly because of the corporeal interconnection of all human beings. Nonetheless this is a fascinating read, and one I can recommend for the purpose of blowing up theologically-influenced preconceptions of normative and historical Christian belief.







* Suffice it to say, early Judaism and Christianity had no concept of a pre-historical fall of the angels, and tended to view angels as morally ambiguous actors. This is further evidenced by Paul’s suggestion that the saints will judge angels (1 Cor. 6:3).

[Hunter Quinn · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I completely disagreed with his exegetical moves and assumptions he brought to the text, Dr. Martin forced me to think long and hard while reading. *Really* hard. I had to spend several days thinking through his interpretation of 1 Cor. 15. He writes clearly and has a deep understanding of Greco-Roman culture, shedding light on how the Corinthian church may have thought. As he analyzed Paul's thoughts, Martin made me reexamine my own assumptions. The evangelical scholar or pastor can learn a great deal from Martin's research without adopting Martin's conclusions. He is an excellent sparring partner.

I would not recommend this to someone who has not studied biblical Greek. Most of Martin's arguments depend upon the context and interpretation of Greek vocabulary as found in medical and philosophical texts at the time.

[Sam Nesbitt · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting and thought-provoking analysis of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. It is a landmark in Corinthian scholarship that is frequently referenced in more current literature.

Greco-Roman background is the strongest feature of this work; one will no doubt come away with a deeper understanding of first and second century ideology of cosmos and human body.

I also found Martin’s methodological statements about discerning what cultural background influences could have been working in Paul to be enlightening. Fraught debates about Jewish or Greek backgrounds are often misguided; rather, a more holistic approach that allows for layers of meaning and reference is to be preferred. Although this is not without its dangers (i.e., arbitrariness), it seems to be an inevitability when working with 1 Corinthians, perhaps the most difficult NT book to discern background influences.

Negatively, Marin gets carried away with his Greco-Roman cosmology and makes some overstatements. His analysis of 1 Corinthians 15 and the resurrection, for example, defines pneuma more on upper-class Greco-Roman conceptions of the body rather than Pauline theological conceptions of the Holy Spirit, as enumerated in 1 Corinthians 3, for example.

The above criticism is closely related another: by allowing the Greco-Roman context to dominate the actual text of 1 Corinthians, the letter does not function as a literary whole under Martin’s analysis. The above example with 1 Corinthians 3 and 15 is an apt example.

Lastly, although Martin discusses most of 1 Corinthians, he omits certain sections of the text that would go against his project, such as 1 Corinthians 10:1-22 and 1 Corinthians 11:14-15.

Overall, I enjoyed his writing style and learned a lot of helpful information about the Greco-Roman worldview concerning the human body and political body.

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Engaging, academic, and perceptive analysis of the role of the body in Greco-Roman society, politics, medicine, and culture, specifically how that perception of the body plays in with Paul's arguments in 1 and 2 Corinthians. While this book is not light reading, it was enlightening and, at times, humorous in its descriptions and analysis.

[Jamie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent! So much insight into the broader Greek/Roman mindset and literature, beyond just a focus on biblical texts. My disdain for St Paul remains, lol, but this is the kind of book I find way more fascinating than just “grrrr, Paul.”

[Rachael · Rating 4 out of 5]

#keeppaulweird

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Martin synthesizes classics and Biblical scholarship in the service of an intriguing thesis.

While he explicitly aims his work at both audiences, Martin is likely to be most read in New Testament circles. His attempt to reconstruct the way Paul's audiences would likely have understood the body is persuasive to me, and is also the most original aspect of the book.

Martin's application of that reconstruction will be compelling to the extent that the reader shares Martin's methodological and theological assumptions. For example, Martin takes it for granted that the content of 1 Corinthians is, by our standards, misogynist. Not all readers of the New Testament would be comfortable granting that assumption; those thus discomfited would likely reject much of Martin's argument as well.

I hesitate to recommend the book to anyone who can't or won't suspend (dis)belief for as long as it takes to read the book. It's possible to accept or reject Martin's argument on its own terms, but it's best to give it a full hearing first, if possible.

[Zachary · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this is Dale Martin's best book. It is beautifully written with some stunning turns of phrase and eloquent, lucid, yet succinct prose (and who can forget the evocative and incisive analysis of Christ fucking the cosmos and himself being fucked by sin?). Still, the highest praise I can give this book is that Martin transcends the usual boundaries of the NT discipline, and even that of the broader field of classics (or should i say that the boundaries between these fields are porous?). It is a readable account that can be appropriated and understood by non-experts, yet it is itself an expert analysis with a stunning and innovative reading of 1 Corinthians that critiques traditional ideologies and commentative practices overlooking the important field of "common sense".

There are certainly some issues with the book and the argument(s) at several points, but none of these are enough to detract from a 5 star rating.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very academic exploration of extra biblical text and how they inform the metaphor of the body in times contemporary with Paul. This book speculates on very difficult text in the letters to the Corinthians. Why must women cover their heads when prophesying? Because on women the hair is an extension of the female genitalia and they must protect themselves from sexual interaction with the divine! DUH! While this is an extreme example this book also shows that Paul was communicating care for the poor in his body metaphor. This book isn't for everyone but for those of you who pick it up it is going to change how you read the book of Corinthians.

[Andrew Marr · Rating 4 out of 5]

A study of the anthropology of 1 Corinthians in terms of the historical context and intellectual ambiance re: anthropology in Paul's time. Class issues are prominent. Martin indicates that Paul fairly consistently sides with the lower classes & their viewpoints. Especially towards the end, Martin demonstrates how much Paul is a man of his own time, which suggests that Paul is not helpful for contemporary readers in some areas. A helpful read.

[Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

For a detailed and highly informed approach to this difficult letter of St Paul - this book brings insights more people ought to know when debating the use of Paul's thoughts as semi-universal and intangible