Article for Charles Seet to read in 2022

Courting Trouble

To understand 1 Corinthians 6 it is necessary to understand some basic characteristics of the judicial process in a Roman colony. It appears that by the mid-first century a.d. trial by jury was reserved mainly for criminal proceedings, and even then there might be exceptions.¹ Trials would be handled by some sort of judge, perhaps one of the colony’s duoviri, but it is possible that an aedile like Erastus might handle a case that arose out of some conflict or problem in the macellum (the meat market) or the marketplace.² The earliest and most famous of Roman courts was the “extortion” court, “the need for which became acute as Roman governors … discovered the possibilities of enriching themselves at the expense of the provincials.… Many of the great cases of the late republic and early empire were heard before this court.”³

There was a three-stage judicial process for civil cases. First, the plaintiff would appear before one of the city’s magistrates requesting a suit. If the magistrate agreed that there were grounds for a suit the defendant would be summoned by the plaintiff to court. The factual details of the case would be discussed and debated and a formula (statement of the factual details that both parties agreed on) arrived at. The trial would be based on what was in the formula. Second, the magistrate would then asssign a judge, agreeable to both parties, to the case and pass along to him the formula. Finally, the case would be heard by the judge and the sentence passed, but it was the plaintiff’s responsibility to see that the judgment was carried out by the defendant. This process could drag on for some time and could be aborted at various points, for example if the defendant refused to come to court in the first place and the magistrate was not inclined to use force. Going to court could be a very expensive proposition. Tacitus tells us that a lawyer in a.d. 47 could command a fee of as much as 10,000 sesterces (Ann. 11.5–7). The annual salary for a duovir’s clerk in a Roman colony in Spain was only 1200 sesterces.⁴

A number of forces in Roman society affected the adminstration of justice.⁵ Social status and rank vis-à-vis one’s opponent were major determining factors. While “the situation of the weaker plaintiff improved with the end of the Republic and the coming of the Empire,” the system remained heavily weighted in favor of people of higher status.⁶ From at least the time of Augustus certain people—fathers, patrons, magistrates, and men of standing—were basically immune from prosecution for fraud by some kinds of other people—children, freedmen, private citizens, and men of low rank. Only if a lower status person had a powerful patron was there a likelihood that he or she could bring a successful suit against someone higher up the social ladder.⁷

Another factor in civil cases was the lawyer. If he was a good rhetorician, highly skilled in forensic rhetoric, one had a chance, even if social standing stacked the odds otherwise. In courts the art of persuasion became much more than a mere exercise in public oratory. People packed many trials to hear the great orators of the day.

Nevertheless, the Roman judicial system was pervaded by “improper influences” and this “made equality before the law unattainable” or virtually so.⁸ Citizens were less likely to be arrested, beaten, and imprisoned than foreigners. “The principal criterion of legal privilege in the eyes of the Romans was dignitas or honor derived from power, style of life, and wealth.”⁹ To the wealthy, well-born, and well-connected went the chief rewards of the legal system, along with many of the other benefits available in society. There was a strongly aristocratic bias to the whole culture. Justice during the empire was far from blind and was often looking over its shoulder.

The importance of this for 1 Corinthians 6 is that at the very least one or both of the Christians going to court were probably well-to-do and hoping to exploit the judicial system to their advantage.¹⁰ As in ch. 5 we find further hints here that Paul’s chief troubles in Corinth were caused by well-to-do members of the ekklēsia.

Chapter 6 has been traditionally divided into two parts, the first on a case in a pagan court involving differences between two Christians (vv. 1–11) and the second on another case of sexual immorality (after the one in ch. 5), in this instance a man going to prostitutes (vv. 12–20). It is often doubted that the case in 6:1–11 is directly connected to the incest case addressed in ch. 5, since it has to do with fraud (v. 7) and thus is likely a property matter. But since marriage often was a property matter, there may be a close connection.

There are close links between 6:12–20 and what follows in ch. 7. Paul is trying to establish both a Christian view of the importance of the human body in the order of redemption and the practical implications of an eschatological worldview for present sexual conduct. He continues to address his audience’s view of human sexuality and their aberrant theology of salvation in ch. 7.¹¹

Both cases discussed in ch. 6 deal with a serious breach of community and an ensuing bad witness to the world. Paul argues that by taking disputes to a pagan court and by fulfilling one’s sexual drives outside the body of Christ one is violating Christian community and Christian witness. He uses several sarcastic rhetorical questions, not detailed arguments, to express himself here. Especially sarcastic is the question whether there is not one sophos (wise person) among the Corinthian Christians who could judge the matter (v. 5), in view of their claims about being wise. All these rhetorical questions are meant to shame the Corinthians into seeing their real moral condition and to deflate their unwarranted pride. This letter would be read before the whole congregation and would be a humiliating public shaming.

The point in v. 1 could be that Gentile courts are inherently unrighteous. Dio Chrysostom, commenting on Roman Corinth about a.d. 100, says that there were “lawyers innumerable perverting justice” there, and refers to young men declaiming forensic pieces in the courtyard next to the Temple of Poseidon during the Isthmian games, hoping to drum up business (8.9).¹² K. Wengst has stressed that in view of the experiences listed in his tribulation catalogs (1 Cor. 4:9ff.; 2 Cor. 11:23ff.), Paul had little reason to trust Roman justice and that this passage should be read in that light.¹³

But Paul’s sweeping dismissal of the practice of law does not amount to an attack on the law as such, and his statement that it would be better to suffer wrong (v. 7) “presupposes the recognition of law.” “Going to law here is itself regarded as doing injustice and robbing one’s adversary. That injustice and robbery thus appear in the garb of law … makes it clear why Paul can describe the judges as unjust.”¹⁴ Paul believes that Christians, like Jews before them, should settle all disputes among themselves on their own. He does not deal here with the case of a Christian and a non-Christian entangled in legal matters.

In both this and the next case, Paul provides the wider Christian perspective by bringing in eschatological matters. In the first case, he brings in the fact that on judgment day believers will judge the outside world and even angels (vv. 2f.); in the second case, he refers to the future resurrection, which shows the value that God has placed on human bodies (v. 14). The Corinthians’ problems arose not just from bad ethics or bad social values but from bad theology, which affected all worldly affairs and matters including sexual and legal matters. They had an inadequate if not non-existent future eschatology, or at least future eschatology was not shaping their values and decision making. Paul’s point in vv. 2f. is that if they are going to go on and judge the world, then surely they can handle an ordinary mundane matter now on their own.

Some have identified “the despised” (or “the least esteemed”) in v. 4 as Christians,¹⁵ in which case Paul is showing his contempt for the litigators, or possibly he wants to invert the secular pyramid by putting the least esteemed of the congregation on top as judges. But if the word in question really means “despised,” then this view seems unlikely. It is more likely that the ekklēsia in this verse is the secular assembly, not the Christian congregation.¹⁶ Men oun (“no, rather,” “therefore”) in the first clause must be given its due weight, so that v. 4 answers to v. 3.¹⁷ In v. 4, then, Paul asks rhetorically whether resorting to a pagan court does not amount to appointing outsiders ill-suited to the task to judge among Christians.

Paul is clear in v. 7 that going to pagan court already amounts to moral failure. He asks the plaintiff, in words probably drawing on the Jesus tradition, would it not be better to be defrauded? In v. 8 he addresses the one who did the defrauding and reminds him that people who behave in this manner will not inherit God’s dominion when it finally comes.^[1]

 

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¹ Jesus’ case might have been such an exception since Pilate, not the Sanhedrin, was in the end the one who decided it.

² Cf. J. K. Chow, Patronage and Power: A Study of Social Networks in Corinth (Sheffield: JSOT, 1992), p. 80.

³ G. A. Kennedy, The Art of Rhetoric in the Roman World 300 b.c. to a.d. 300 (Princeton: Princeton University, 1972), pp. 11f.

Ann Annales

⁴ Cf. Chow, Patronage and Power, p. 76.

⁵ See P. Garnsey, Social Status and Legal Privilege in the Roman Empire (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), pp. 183ff.

⁶ Ibid., p. 192, cf. p. 217: “The possibility of suits brought by men of comparatively humble origin and position against men of rank cannot be ruled out; but they are unlikely to have been a frequent occurrence.”

⁷ It is better to speak of social status or level and not social class, since the modern notion of class does not really suit the situation in the Roman Empire. There was nothing quite equivalent to our middle class. The three basic distinctions were between citizen and foreigner, honestiores and humiliores, and freeborn and slave. Depending on which distinction was being used, one could be higher or lower. For example, a freeborn person could be poor, whereas a freedman or freedwoman could be rich, and this was of great importance in a city in which one bought one’s way into society, public office, and sometimes even justice. Furthermore, some honestiores did not have citizenship while some humiliores did. See A. Clarke, Secular and Christian Leadership in Corinth (dissertation, Cambridge, 1991), pp. 26ff.

⁸ Garnsey, Social Status, p. 207.

⁹ Ibid., p. 279.

¹⁰ Cicero (Pro Caecina 73) complains that three things hinder justice from being done in the provinces east of Rome: gratia, potentia, and pecunia, that is, “excessive favor,” power or great resources, and money, that is, bribery.

¹¹ Many Corinthian Christians apparently thought that salvation did not involve the body.

¹² If one also considers the analogy with Jesus’ parable in Luke 18, it is believable that Paul may have been referring to judges in Corinth. Unlike B. W. Winter, “Civil Litigation in Secular Corinth and the Church,” NTS 37 (1991), pp. 559–72, I doubt that Paul’s reference is to juries, since small civil claims did not usually call for a jury. The plural “the unrighteous ones” does not require a reference to a jury, since Paul is generalizing here.

¹³ K. Wengst, Pax Romana and the Peace of Jesus Christ (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987), pp. 76f.

¹⁴ Ibid. This assessment does not conflict with what Paul says in Romans 13 since there he speaks of the divinely ordained and intended function of government, not of some particular practice of it, and he is not referring to Christians making use of the judicial system but of actions initiated by the authorities.

¹⁵ Winter, “Civil Litigation,” p. 570.

¹⁶ It is possible that en tȩ̄ ekklēsia̧ means “of the assembly” so that Paul’s complaint is about making pagans judges of the Christian ekklēsia. In any case, if Paul could call secular judges “unrighteous” (v. 1), he could equally well call them “despised.”

¹⁷ J. B. Lightfoot, Notes on the Epistles of Saint Paul (Winona Lake: Alpha, reprint), p. 213.

^[1] Witherington, Ben, III. 1995. Conflict and Community in Corinth: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary on 1 and 2 Corinthians. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.