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Summary

Recommended

Book Description:
"After Paul Left Corinth gathers for the first time all the relevant extant material from literary, nonliterary, and archaeological sources on what life was like in the first-century Roman colony of Corinth. Using this evidence, Bruce Winter not only opens a fascinating vista on day-to-day living in the Graeco-Roman world but, more importantly, helps us understand what happened to the Christian community after Paul left Corinth. As Winter shows, the origin of many of the problems Paul dealt with in 1 Corinthians can be traced to culturally determined responses to aspects of life in Corinth."

We recommend a lot of books that tell us all about contexts; this one zeroes in on the letters to Corinth, and solves a great many passages that critics have bewildered and fuddled over, turning them over to their own ends. How is this for a surprise? The "present distress" in 1 Cor. 7:26 is not eschatological, but is a famine; 1 Cor. 11 is in part toward men wearing veils, and it is a cultural issue; Paul and Apollos were helpless victims of rivalries established by their own church, against their will, imitating local sophists! There are plenty of surprises here, and although the focus is narrowed on to just the Corinthian letters (and mainly the first one), you will learn a lot by picking this one up. At the very least it is exemplary of the sort of contextual study that we all need to do, but don't -- especially critics!