THE APOSTLE PAUL'S CORINTH BY IAN PAUL & STEPHEN TRAVIS AN ON LOCATION GUIDE

What would you look for in your ideal location if you were going to found a city? Well first of all you might look for somewhere to defend and the immense mountain behind me forms the Acrocorinth, the upper part of the city. Secondly you'd need water and the site of Corinth here has two big springs, the Pyrenees spring over here and on the other side the Glauca spring. Thirdly you'd be looking for food and the beautiful fertile valley stretches away to the coast and in fact the name Corinth comes from currants that were made from grapes grown there. But if a city was really going to flourish you need to have it of strategic importance and the location of Corinth here controls trade routes north and south over the Isthmus but also of the two ports, the Lechaon port in the west and Kencrae on the east. In fact the road here is called the Lechaon Way and this heads from the centre from the Forum right down directly to the coast and to the port. That made Corinth in Paul's day an immensely bustling cosmopolitan and strategic city to be in. I'm standing here at the top of the Lechaon Way and the steps lead up into the Forum, the Roman marketplace and the steps say thus far and no farther, you bring your horse and your cart here, you unload them and everything else goes up by hand. But this road tells us a bit about why Corinth was so important. If you wanted to sail round from Rome to the east then you had to either sail all the way around the Peloponnese and risk the storms there or you came across to the Corinthian Isthmus. So you unload your boat at Lechaon in the west, your goods are transported and your boat hauled across the Isthmus and you re-embark at Kencrae in the east. That shows that Corinth would have been a very cosmopolitan place with sailors, with traders, with all the people associated with all that kind of business. It also meant it was a natural place to stop as you were travelling from Rome and so it was that when the Jews were expelled from Rome by Claudius, many of them ended up here in Corinth. Now when Paul came his trade was a tent maker and the city was teeming with all these refugees. So before Paul served his people by preaching the gospel, he served his people by making tents for them. We've come up the stairs now from the Lechaon Way into the Forum, the Roman marketplace. The Romans, when they re-founded the city a hundred years after destroying it, actually turned the city back to front. The original marketplace was on the north side of the Temple of Apollo. This was a running track and the Romans re-established this as the market on the south side. Here would be the centre of the life of the city. People would come here to shop, to meet, to discuss, to make decisions. We see on each side colonnaded areas for shops and for meeting areas. We see civic buildings. Just over at the back we see the Bouleuterion, the council chamber where decisions were made. This was the place where people would come to talk about everything they could and we use the phrase today, we talk about a discussion forum where people can meet and can exchange ideas. This area behind me doesn't look very impressive. In fact not many people come and visit here, but in Paul's day this would have been a very impressive building. You can perhaps judge just by looking at the size of the stones here. They're an awful lot bigger than many of the stones in the buildings around. This in the first century would have been the Julian Basilica. It was a civic building, but it was full of statues of the Emperor's family. It may well have been here, rather than over at the Boehme, that Gallio heard Paul's case. And in fact as we know from Acts, Gallio simply heard the dispute and said to Paul and to those who were accusing him, this is a religious matter, it's got nothing to do with me, you go and sort it out yourself. Quite near the centre of the forum is this base or plinth on which a statue would have been, and we can actually see an inscription around it here. We can just make out Augusto Augustales. The Augustales were the people who were the guardians of the imperial cult in the city, and in fact we might think of that as simply a religious thing, but this also is tied into the city's loyalty to the Emperor. So anyone who is threatening patterns of worship was also threatening the political and the economic status of Corinth as a Roman colony. Judging from the size of the plinth, the statue must have been two or three metres high, and if made of bronze would have been very impressive indeed. Here in the centre of the forum we find another colonnade of shops or stoa, and here there's evidence there were jewellers and bankers. In the middle of it there's this platform that protrudes. This is called the Boehme. It was the platform where public announcements were made, where magistrates sat to make decisions, and many think this is the place that Paul stood before Galio in 51. Galio is an important figure in dating the chronology of Paul's life. We know from inscriptional evidence exactly when Galio was pro-consul, and so we can be fairly sure of when it was that Paul stood before Galio. It may not have been in front of this boehme, it may in fact have been at the other end of the forum in the Julian Basilica, but it gives us a on Paul's life and his ministry and his time in Corinth. I'm now sitting in the South Stoa. That's on the far side of the forum from the Temple of Apollo. As you can see from the reconstruction of the pillars here, this would have been a very important part of the city. The columns would have supported a roof. This would have provided a shaded area protecting people from the heat of the day. This is a place where people could relax, and where they could meet and associate together. Excavations have unearthed this series of wells along the Stoa, and so that's led to speculation that perhaps the shops here were actually taverns, or maybe exclusive clubs. If you gave access to the water supply from the Pyrenees Spring in a city like Corinth, it was vital that that was protected. The last thing you wanted was for your water supply to be polluted. On the north side of the forum, tucked underneath the Temple of Apollo, we find the North Stoa, a series of shops and a colonnaded arch. On the right hand end of this, one of the shops still has its arch intact. This might have been the kind of place that Paul found Priscilla and Aquila and joined them in tent making. Very often people would live upstairs, although we haven't found any first century evidence of a two-story shop yet. There were plenty of gods you could choose to worship here in Corinth, but there was one more thing which was an object of worship. Money, and the prestige that money could buy. Just behind me here, next to the Fountain of Poseidon, is a monument erected by a particular Babbius Phileinus, and the inscription on it is very revealing. Gnaeus Babbius Phileinus, ideal and pontifex, had this monument erected at his own expense, and he approved it in his official capacity as duovir. Babbius is a former slave. The name Phileinus means darling. It's a name which slave owners would have given to a slave, and what's also very revealing is that in his name he makes no reference to his family background. Here is a freed slave who has made good. He's made money and he's used it to buy influence and power within the city, and he's not afraid to let people know who he is. Corinth was a place where you could make a name for yourself, sometimes quite literally, and it's this spirit of individualism and competitiveness that Paul is tackling at the beginning of his letter to the church in Corinth. Those who say, I'm for Paul, I'm for Peter. Paul says to them, actually it's who we are as part of the body of Christ that is much more important than our own name or the names of those around us. Alongside all the big temples here in Corinth, there were smaller temples and monuments as well. Next to the monument erected by Babbius here, there was a spring dedicated to Poseidon, or Neptune as he's known in Latin, and in fact Babbius erected a statue here dedicated to Neptune. Around here there were also temples to Apollo and to Tyche, the goddess of fortune, to Venus or Aphrodite. It's no wonder that Paul writes to the Christians in Corinth, even if there are many so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth, yet for us, he says, drawing on the Shema, the Jewish confession of faith, there is but one God, the Father from whom all things came and for whom we live. There is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live. Here at the west end of the Forum is another reminder of Roman imperial power. The building behind me, imaginatively known as Temple E, was probably dedicated to Octavia, Augustus's sister. It wouldn't have looked like this with these short pillars. It would actually have had six enormously high pillars built on this huge base and would have been impressive within the whole city. In fact, being built on the highest point of the central part of the city, it would have matched the Temple of Apollo over to the north. The significance of this is twofold. In the first place, we have Apollo and the gods to the north and we have the imperial family here to the west. It's very clear that it's the imperial family and imperial power which is doing the work of the gods for the people of Corinth. In the second place, this arrangement is very similar to the arrangement in Rome. As a Roman colony, this whole physical layout would have reminded people here of the mother city. In these two ways, it's very clear who's in charge here. One of the most interesting things in the museum at Corinth is this selection of grave markers. Not much is said about them here. They date from the 5th, 6th and 7th centuries but a couple of things are really interesting about them. The first is that all of them have a little cross in front of them which shows us that the Christian community here was very well established. These are people who are Christians and who are dying in the hope of Christ. But the other thing that's fascinating is it describes all the different jobs they do. So we have a goat herder, we have a charioteer, we have a stucco renderer, we have someone who fished with fish traps, in other words an eel fisherman. Alongside that, we've also got descriptions of various church officials, deacons, deaconesses and administrators of the church here in Corinth. This is one of my favourite spots in Corinth because this is a carving illustrating this chap here is a koubernetes, he's a steersman. He's the one who directs where the boat is going, he's not the one who provides the motive power as it were. Paul mentions this koubernesis, this steering or this leadership in Romans 12.8 in his list of gifts. Earlier translations of Romans 12.8 called this the gift of administration. I think it's probably a spiritual gift not many people wanted. But in fact, going back to the origin of the metaphor, this is more rightly translated as leadership and Paul is urging those with this gift of leadership to lead, to govern, to steer diligently. One of the questions that rumbles on about the church in Corinth, Paul's relationship with the church and the Corinthian correspondence is what were the social classes involved in those early Christian congregations? We know quite a lot about the Roman Empire as a whole, we know about the number of rich, number of poor, the relationship between them, but the question is did the message that Paul brought to Corinth appeal equally to the different social classes? In the 1930s this inscription I'm standing by was unearthed and it's very intriguing because of the name that it contains. It says this, Erastus for his ideal ship laid this pavement at his own expense. And the question that has intrigued scholars ever since is, is this Erastus mentioned here the same as the Erastus who is mentioned in the New Testament? Luke mentions him in Acts 19 as a person that Paul has sent with Timothy to Macedonia. Paul himself names him in Romans 16 as the person in charge of the city works and he mentions him again in 2 Timothy in his last letter where he talks about the fact that Erastus has stayed in Corinth. There's lots of debates about the slab itself, what date it comes from, whether the different names used for Erastus can fit together, but we certainly know from other parts of the New Testament and from other evidence that there were certainly wealthy and influential people in the early Christian movement as well as the poor and the dispossessed to whom it appealed.