In his letters Paul talks about God, Jesus Christ, and the pneuma in ways that were received by the Corinthians as a chord of gods rather than as one deity. Along the lines of the intertwined categories of genealogy, myth, and history, we easily see the genealogical connection between God as father and Jesus as son throughout the letters.
See also The Origins of the Corinthian Christ Group: Paul’s Chord of Gods (Edinburgh University Press, 2024).
By Stephen P. Ahearne-Kroll
University of Minnesota
January 2025
As much as we might like to think that the compelling nature of the early Christ movement resided in its uniqueness, its similarities to its context might have had just as much, if not more, power to attract its earliest followers, as Jennifer Eyl’s recent work has demonstrated so well (2019, 20-30). Along these same lines, Stanley Stowers comments with regard to the Corinthians:
The key to the question of why the Corinthians gave some recognition to who Paul was, and what he did, as why they had some interest in him, is… [that] the Corinthians possessed fine-grained practical understandings, skill intelligibility, if you will, of most of the practices that Paul advocated…. They therefore already had practical dispositions toward the genres of Paul’s doings and sayings (2011, 128).
The focus on the reception of Paul by the Corinthians is key in Stowers’s comment and key to what I think is most important in understanding the beginnings of the Corinthian Christ group. The focus on the reception of Paul by the Corinthians is key in Stowers’s comment and key to what I think is most important in understanding the beginnings of the Corinthian Christ group. Paul advocated adherence to and honoring of (father) God, the lord Jesus Christ, and the pneuma, which I will argue was received by the Corinthians as akin to their local practice of adherence to and honoring of small groups of gods in and around Corinth. Some might balk at this notion because of Paul’s status as a Jew, and therefore a monotheist. But many scholars have convincingly argued that the concept of monotheism—the belief that Jews thought only one ‘real’ god existed, the god of Israel—should be retired, to paraphrase Paula Fredricksen (2006, 231). In his 2020 book, Two Gods in Heaven, Peter Schäfer says, “Among the most popular clichés not only in Jewish and Christian theology but also in popular religious belief is the assumption that Judaism is the classic religion of monotheism, and if Judaism did not in fact invent monotheism, then it at least ultimately asserted it” (2020, 1).
Ancient Mediterranean Religion
So, what of the religious landscape of the Ancient Mediterranean if not monotheism and polytheism? Robert Parker says something almost in passing that was first noticed in the 19th century: Greeks, he says, “typically prayed not to individual gods but to ‘chords of gods’” (2011, 66). This idea of a chord of gods as the typical local configuration of gods found among Greeks in various places also holds true across the Mediterranean for all sorts of ethnic groups and local populations and is a ubiquitous feature of ancient religion in a variety of types of locations and levels of society—urban and rural, domestic and civic, elite and not so elite. This practice was so widespread and long-standing that it constitutes a true social pattern of practice akin to what Marcel Mauss and Pierre Bourdieu call habitus. Later critics of Bourdieu’s work like Brenda Farnell and Theodore Schatzki refine his notion of practice (habitus) into more precise descriptions of social practice, namely “the nexus of doings and sayings that compose them, as opposed to the individual doings and sayings involved” (Schatzki, 2002, 88; my emphasis). This idea of social practice fits quite well with chord of gods practice.
Chord of gods practice relies on small groups of gods being connected locally through traditional genealogy, mythology (or myth), history, and cultic practice. Genealogy simply means the relationship between a god or divine being and that being’s fellow gods or divine beings at a sanctuary. History/mythology or mythological language can be understood as the type of language that appeals to and [re]interprets historical traditions, grounds them in time immemorial, naturalizes them by imbuing them with particular meanings important to the local population, and/or uses them to justify a particular local religious practice. Cult means any ritual honor that is given to a god or divine figure that maintains and reinforces a reciprocal relationship between the god or divine being and the practitioners.
I will only look at two examples of chord of gods practice, one in Echelidai near Athens and one in Isthmia, near Corinth.
On or near the Kephisos River, at Echelidai a few miles from Athens where the Kephisos empties into the Aegean, there was a minor shrine from which two marble reliefs and an inscribed stele are the only remains. The reliefs describe a scene where a mother presents her son to someone who is likely Kephisos the river god, probably for divine protection. The first part of the inscription reads, “Xenocrateia dedicates and sets up this holy gift to Kephisos and the altar sharing gods” (IG II2 4548, 1-4. Ξενοκράτεια Κηφισο ἱερὸν ἱδρύσατο και ἀνέθηκεν ξυνβώμοις τε θεοῖς διδασκαλίας τόδε δῶρον). These altar-sharing gods are inscribed on the surviving stele: Hestia, Apollo Pythios and Leto, Artemis Lochia, Eileithyia, Achelous, Kallirhoe, Geraistan Nymphs of Birth, and Rhapso (IG II2 4547). It seems that all these gods have a role to play in birthing and raising Xenokrateia’s son, as symbolized by her presentation of him to Kephisos with the other gods surrounding them. Only together will this group ensure the health and vitality of the son. In the words of Robert Parker, “No clearer expression is found anywhere in Greek art or literature of the idea of putting a child under divine protection than this little group” (2005, 430). We find here a group of gods working together, sharing the cultic altar of the sanctuary, to ensure the wellbeing of a mother and her son (Cuchet 2017, 80). And the mother and son properly honor Kephisos and his altar-sharing gods—all with connections to childbirth and child rearing and some genealogically connected to each other—with the proper performance of the necessary rituals and the dedication of plaque and stele. The configuration and worship of this group is particular to this local sanctuary, a configuration that combines pan-Hellenic concerns (like Leto giving birth to the twins Apollo and Artemis, the quintessential “fair birth” in Greek myth) with very local ones (honoring the local river god Kephisos).
My second example is from Isthmia, only 13 km from Corinth and part of the greater Corinthian culture, and the location of the great Poseidon sanctuary, a far more prominent and documented sanctuary than that at Kephisos. By the Roman period, the sanctuary reached its height of importance and complexity. In the second century, Pausanias says: “On the temple (τῷ ναῷ)…stand bronze Tritons. In the fore-temple (ἐν τῷ προνάῳ) are two images of Poseidon, a third of Amphitrite, and Sea, which is also bronze….On the chariot Amphitrite and Poseidon stand and the boy Palaimon is upright on a dolphin….On the base, upon which is the chariot in the middle, Sea is sculpted as holding up the girl Aphrodite, and on either side are those called the Nereides” (2.1.7-8). Later, Pausanias describes the temple of Palaimon, with its statues of Poseidon, Leukothea, and Palaimon himself. (2.2.1). The temple resides within the Poseidon sanctuary.
Oscar Broneer thinks it is likely that “In Roman Imperial times, prior to Pausanias’ visit, the cult statues appear to have consisted of a standing figure of Poseidon and a seated Amphitrite” (1971, 88; see also Sturgeon 2015, 159-92). The presence of Melikertes (later renamed Palaimon) seems to go back to the archaic period in Corinth (Gebhard 2005, 167), but corroborating Pausanias, Corinthian numismatic evidence from first and second centuries shows the boy, his dolphin, and his temple (Gebhard 2005, 168). Although some of these statues were added after Paul’s time, the presence of multiple gods at Poseidon’s sanctuary long before and during Paul’s time is well-established.
Mythologically, the sea and its dangers hold all these gods together. The maritime roles of Poseidon and his wife Amphitrite are well known, but Melikertes (later called Palaimon) and his mother Leukothea were also widely appealed to in Roman Imperial times for protection from the sea (Hawthorne 1958, 92-98). Their basic story is that Hermes takes the infant Dionysus to Ino and Athamas to be reared as a girl. Hera (or Jove in later traditions) becomes angry and drives Ino and Athamas mad, causing both to kill their sons, with Ino (later called Leukothea) plunging Melikertes into a basin of boiling water and then jumping into the sea with him. In many versions, their death by plunging themselves into the sea was followed by deification with a wide range of powers granted to them in the process (Ovid, Metamorphoses 4.542; Gebhard 2005, 169-70), producing his connection with Poseidon and the Nereids.
So, in the sanctuary of Poseidon we have a husband-wife pair (Poseidon-Amphitrites) along with their children (the Tritons) and a mother-son pair (Leukothea and Palaimon) who are also linked with Poseidon, along with some supporting figures (the Nereides). This is a distinct group related in cult, in myth/history, and in genealogy. The prominence of the site locally and panhellenically (site of the Isthmian games) helps reinforce the idea that the pattern of worship of small groups of gods in one sanctuary was part of the normal cultic activity in the Corinthian region, and across the Greek world.
Paul’s Corinth
Although Paul’s Corinthian correspondence does not represent the initial encounter between Paul and the Corinthians, I assume that there was some continuity between what Paul says in the letters and what he initially said to them. In the letters Paul talks about God, Jesus Christ, and the pneuma in ways that I argue would have been received by the Corinthians as a chord of gods rather than as one deity. Along the lines of the intertwined categories of genealogy, myth, and history, we easily see the genealogical connection between God as father and Jesus as son throughout the letters. And we see how this relationship plays out mythologically most extensively in 1 Corinthians 15, where Paul mythologically imagines the end times when Christ hands the kingdom back over to God the Father (15:24) and the final subjugation occurs under God, including the subjugation of “the Son himself” (15:28). The pneuma also plays a key role in the unfolding of the transformation of the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 2 into pneumatikoi culminating in the description of resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15. The intimate genealogical connection between the pneuma, God, and Christ is evident throughout chapter 2 and by the blurring of the distinction between “the Lord” and the pneuma in 2 Cor 3:17-18. Cultically, we can point to the metaphor of the temple to describe the presence of the pneuma in 1 Cor 3:16 and 6:19; ritual baptism mentioned in four different passages of 1 Corinthians (1:13-17, 6:11, 12:13, and 15:29); and the celebration of the Lord’s supper in chapter 11. Nowhere is the presentation of three distinct divine figures clearer than in 1 Cor 12:4-6 and 2 Cor 13:13.
Perhaps the most telling indication that the Corinthians and Paul shared a similar religious worldview described by chord of gods practice is in 1 Cor 8:4-6; 12:1-11; and 2 Cor 6:14-7:1. In all three of these passages, Paul exhorts the Corinthians to flee idolatry and idols, but he does not make the demand that they flee their traditional “polytheistic” religious practice in favor of his “monotheistic” religious practice. Instead, Paul demands allegiance to his divine figures: god, Christ, and the pneuma or some combination of the three. The Corinthians likely would have understood Paul as demanding a difficult but necessary change of allegiance from their traditional chords of gods to his chord of gods. When given the clear chance to distinguish between Corinthian traditional chord of gods practice and Paul’s desired religious practice, the only thing that Paul called for was a change of allegiance to favor his chord of gods. Clearly, the Corinthians had no problems mingling their traditions and their life as Christ followers or else Paul would not have been calling for this shift in allegiance. To me, this could indicate that the similarities in chord of gods religious practice were great enough that the Corinthians chose to integrate Paul’s chord of gods with their own traditional chords of gods rather than choose between the chords.
Reconstructing Corinthian Christ Group Origins
A common way to reconstruct the earliest moments of the Christ movement is to turn to god-fearers—gentile adherents to some of the tenets and practices of Judaism—as the first accidental yet receptive audiences of Paul’s preaching. From there, one would posit that the god-fearers would form the nucleus of Paul’s assemblies and they would then attract more believers from their contacts and social circles until the assembly grew to a critical, stable number to be a definable social group with Christ as its patron deity. Paula Fredricksen has argued this very scenario recently (2017). However, this scenario does not really work with Corinth because none of the inscriptional evidence for god-fearers in reference to Judaism comes from Corinth, let alone from the first century, and the only literary evidence of god-fearers in Corinth is from Acts 18. In other words, there is no extant inscriptional evidence in Corinth for god-fearers and no other evidence before the late 1st or early 2nd century CE (the likely date of the writing of Acts), and nothing is mentioned about them in any of Paul’s writings.
Stanley Stowers has a more plausible solution to Paul’s success in Corinth. He centers his solution on Paul’s ability to enlist educated, higher status Corinthians to learn his “alternative esoteric and exotic paideia [i.e. imparted knowledge that makes one cultured]” (Stowers 2011, 116) and act as his deputies to recruit others. Paul’s paideia is “different from the dominant sophistic or philosophical kinds, yet still recognizable as a form of the same broader game of specialized literate learning” (Stowers 2011, 117). I agree with the need for recognizability, but Stowers is unclear about how non-elite Corinthians might have been convinced to join the group.
“Chord of gods” religious practice offers a helpful supplement to Stowers’s theory. A majority portion of the Corinthians were non-elites who initially found something appealing about Paul’s movement that was not tied to his possible activity with the elite. If the pattern of religious practice was obvious to the Corinthians, then it provided a familiarity and comfortability with at least some of Paul’s proposals about his chord of gods and the subsequent demands he was making of those who would join the movement. This would not be the only reason for them wanting to join the movement; social connection, economic improvement, and desire for security all could have contributed to the process. But familiarity and comfortability with the structure of religious practice would have aided in Paul’s efforts,
Further, the chord of gods religious practice might help explain the spread of Paul’s paideia beyond the elite circles that Stowers posits. Current research on network formation shows that at least two major forces result in social group formation: preferential attachment and homophily. Although this research is thoroughly modern, homophily, especially, has been applied to a huge range of social relations and settings and has proven to be highly explanatory of behavior in these settings. Preferential attachment theory states that alliances form as a result of a “bandwagoning” effect, by attraction to the member that has the most centralized organization and power. “Thinking of alliance formation or institutional network formation as a bandwagoning process is both simple and intuitive” (Moaz 2012, 347; see also Moaz et al. 2007). It is imaginable that after Paul’s initial success with some of the more educated Corinthians (Gaius or Stephanus, e.g., as Stowers argues), a small center of authority formed around Paul that attracted other members to the group, even if the newest members were not completely convinced by Paul’s Christ-centered mythmaking and thoughts about the eschatological dynamics unfolding in real time. Once the node that had formed around Paul grew large enough, others would be attracted through the social force of homophily—“Similarity breeds connection” (McPherson et al. 2001, 415; see also Weare et al. 2009; Moaz 2012, 347-52), a popular ancient concept referred to famously in Plato (Phaedrus 240c) and Aristotle (Nichomean Ethics 8.6). Homophily does not have to be all-encompassing, however; differences were often overridden by connections essential to one’s character. Robert Holschuh Simmons (2018) argues that in an ancient Athenian context, a leader could cultivate friendships with social subordinates by seizing on essential similarities or advantageous qualities of the social subordinate and using these as the basis of a friendship. One strong force that enables feelings of connection between social unequals is physical proximity (propinquity) (see Bergoon et al. 2002, 661-62).
These types of connections plausibly could have formed between the elite group of Corinthians to whom Paul taught his paideia and the less elite Corinthians, in part, because of the homophily of religious practice that was being offered by Paul and his deputies. The proximity of the socially heterogeneous members of the Corinthian group could have recognized the limited homophily of chord of gods religious practice, thus creating the bonds necessary for the group to grow in size as they spent more and more time together. There was no need for every one of the Corinthians to buy into Paul’s exotic paidea for the movement to have grown, if the homophily of religious practice was strong enough.
Obviously, we cannot know with certainty what motivated the Corinthian gentiles to respond favorably to Paul and join the movement. If nothing else, the chord of gods scenario that I argued for in this study gives us a reasonable, historically-based context for the understandability of the group practices that Paul was advocating of its members. Perhaps, thinking in smaller terms along the lines of chords of gods can give a more accurate picture of how religious practice worked in the ancient world—somewhere between “monotheism” and “polytheism”—and how Paul and his adherents in Corinth significantly overlapped in their religious sensibilities. If we can imagine this overlap more concretely, as I have done here, we can imagine reasons for Paul’s success in convincing gentiles to join his movement.
(For the full version of this argument, see Ahearne-Kroll 2024.)
Bibliography
Ahearne-Kroll, Stephen P. 2024. The Origins of the Corinthian Christ Group: Paul’s Chord of Gods. Edinburgh Studies in Religion in Antiquity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Bergoon, Judee K., Joseph A. Bonito, Artemio Ramirez, Jr., Norah E. Dunbar, Karadeen Kam, and Jenna Fischer. 2002. Testing the Interactivity Principle: Effects of Mediation, Propinquity, and Verbal and Nonverbal Modalities in Interpersonal Interaction. Journal of Communication 52: 657-677.
Broneer, Oscar. 1971. Isthmia. Vol. 1: Temple of Poseidon. Princeton: American School of Classical Studies at Athens.
Cuchet, Violaine Sebillotte. 2017. Families et société à Athènes à l’époque Classique: un éclairage par les études de genre. Pages 71-90 in Pallas: Famille et société dans le monde grec, en Italie et à Rome du Ve au IIe siècle avant J.-C. Universitaires du Midi.
Eyl, Jennifer. 2019. Signs, Wonders, and Gifts: Divination in the Letters of Paul. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fredricksen, Paula. 2006. Mandatory Retirement: Ideas in the Study of Christian Origins Whose Time Has Come to Go. Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 35: 231-246.
Fredricksen, Paula. 2017. Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Gebhard, Elizabeth R. 1993. Rites for Melikertes-Palaimon in the Early Roman Corinthia. Pages 165-204 in Urban Religion in Roman Corinth, edited by D. N. Schowalter and S.J. Friesen. Harvard Theological Studies 53. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Hawthorne, John G. 1958. The Myth of Palaemon. TAPA 89: 92–98.
Maoz, Zeev, Lesley G. Terris, Ranan D. Kuperman and Ilan Talmud. 2007. What is the Enemy of My Enemy: Causes and Consequences of Imbalanced International Relations, 1816-2001. Journal of Politics 69: 100-115.
Maoz, Zeev. 2012. Preferential Attachment, Homophily, and the Structure of International Networks, 1816-2003. Conflict Management and Peace Science 29: 341-369.
McPherson, Miller J., Lynn Smith-Lovin, and James M. Cook. 2001. Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks. Annual Review of Sociology 27: 415-444.
Parker, Robert. 2005. Polytheism and Society at Athens. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Parker, Robert. 2011. On Greek Religion. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Schäfer, Peter. 2020. Two Gods in Heaven: Jewish Concepts of God in Antiquity. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Schatzki, Theodore R. 2002. The Site of the Social: A Philosophical Account of the Constitution of Social Life and Change. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press.
Simmons, Robert Holschuh. 2018. ‘Men, Friends’: The Sociological Mechanics of Xenophontic Leaders in Winning Subordinates as Friends. Pages 31-44 in At the Crossroads of Greco-Roman History, Culture, and Religion: Papers in Memory of Carin M. Green. Edited by Sinclair W. Bell and Lora L. Holland. Oxford: Archeopress.
Stowers, Stanley K. 2011. Kinds of Myth, Meals, and Power: Paul and the Corinthians. Pages 105-150 in Redescribing Paul and the Corinthians. Edited by Ron Cameron and Merrill P. Miller. Atlanta: SBL.
Sturgeon, Mary C. 2105. New Sculptures from the Isthmian Palaimonion. Pages 159-192 in Bridge of the Untiring Sea: The Corinthian Isthmus from Prehistory to Late Antiquity. Edited by Elizabeth R. Gebhard and Timothy E. Gregory. Hesperia Supplement 48. Athens: The American School of Classical Studies.
Weare, Christopher, Juliet Musso, and Kyu-Nahm Jun. 2009. Cross-talk: The Role of Homophily and Elite Bias in Civic Associations. Social Forces 88: 147-173.