Corinth

Old Corinth held one of the earliest stone temples in Greece, seven of whose columns still stand, cut from a single block each and usually assigned to Apollo. Above the city rises the Acrocorinth, and on its summit stood a sanctuary of Aphrodite. Strabo reports that the goddess owned a thousand sacred prostitutes, a line that has coloured every popular account of the city since; modern scholarship has largely dismantled the claim, which rests on a small number of literary sources with an interest in Corinthian excess and finds no support in the archaeology.

The sanctuary of Demeter and Kore on the north slope of the Acrocorinth is better attested and more revealing, with dining rooms cut in terraces where small groups ate in the goddesses' presence, and votive deposits of miniature vessels and figurines. A sanctuary of Asklepios in the lower city produced a well known collection of terracotta body parts, arms, legs, breasts, eyes, left by people asking for or acknowledging a cure.

Nearby stood the sanctuary of Poseidon at Isthmia, host to the Isthmian Games, one of the four crown festivals of the Greek world. Rome destroyed Corinth in 146 BCE and refounded it as a colony a century later, settled largely with freedmen, so the city Paul knew was Roman in law and administration, Greek in cult, and full of people who had arrived recently from somewhere else.

Paul's Corinthian correspondence is the closest thing the New Testament has to a case file on a single congregation. It shows a community split into parties naming Paul, Apollos and Cephas; arguing over a lawsuit brought by one member against another before a civil court; divided over whether meat sold in the market after sacrifice could be eaten; and holding a common meal at which the wealthy ate and drank before the poorer members arrived, which Paul says makes the meal no longer the Lord's supper at all. It also records early instructions on the supper and on resurrection appearances that Paul says he received and passed on, which makes them older than the letter carrying them.

The community's enthusiasm for speaking in tongues and prophecy is met not with prohibition but with an argument for order and for intelligibility, and the chapter on love sits in the middle of that argument rather than standing alone as the wedding reading it has become. A second letter defends Paul's authority against rival apostles who evidently impressed the Corinthians more than he did.

An inscription from Delphi naming the proconsul Gallio, whom Acts places on the bench when Paul was brought before him, anchors the whole episode to the early 50s CE and is one of the firmest dates in Paul's life. Roughly forty years later a letter from the church at Rome, known as First Clement, was sent to Corinth to address a fresh quarrel in which the congregation had deposed its elders. It was still arguing.