How Paul Turned a Familiar Metaphor Up Side Down
Cicero used a body metaphor long before Paul wrote his letters to the church in Corinth, and Plutarch employed a similar metaphor later—but Paul’s point was radically different from theirs
In a grove of trees south of the city of Corinth stood the Asklepion, an ancient temple dedicated to the god of healing. Every year, thousands of women and men made pilgrimages to this temple to seek relief for their bodies.
Worshipers who believed they received healing in this place left behind an odd sort of testimony for future pilgrims. They made terra-cotta images of whatever body part had been healed and placed these images in the temple. And so, within the Asklepion, disjointed images of legs, arms, eyes, ears, and other body parts encouraged pilgrims that they too could find healing in this shrine. Still today, in a nearby museum, visitors to Corinth can see the body parts that have been unearthed from the site of the ancient temple.
It is impossible to know for certain, but I wonder if perhaps the apostle Paul was thinking about these isolated body parts when he reminded the Corinthians that “there are many parts, yet one body” (1 Corinthians 12:22).
Regardless of whether Paul had the Asklepion in mind when he wrote, this much is certain: The Corinthian Christians were behaving like a pile of disjointed body parts, refusing to function in harmony with one another. And so, part of Paul's point in 1 Corinthians was to remind them that, because God had made them one body in Jesus Christ, they were able to work together in unity.
What Was Happening in Corinth?
Paul first proclaimed the gospel in Corinth around the year A.D. 50, two decades or so after Jesus rose from the dead. Despite resistance from some local religious leaders, a decision from Roman proconsul Lucius Junius Gallio enabled Paul to preach freely for almost two years (see Acts 18:12-18). By the time Paul left the city, he had planted a church in the key coastal city of Corinth.
In A.D. 54 or 55, a few members from the Corinthian church—“Chloe’s people,” in Paul's parlance (1 Corinthians 1:11)—tracked down the apostle.
Chloe’s people brought some positive news. God had “enriched” the Corinthians with knowledge and revealed his grace among them through manifold “spiritual gifts” (1 Corinthians 1:7).
But not all the news from Corinth was good. The very outpouring of knowledge and spiritual gifts that should have drawn the Corinthian Christians together had resulted instead in rankings and schisms. Some members had turned their focus toward whose spiritual gifts seemed the most dramatic (1 Corinthians 1:11-13).
In Paul's letter to the church, he made it clear that such hierarchies had no place among God's people. To rank believers according to fleeting “manifestations of the Spirit” was to magnify the status of individuals instead of building up the whole community (1 Corinthians 14:4-12). To identify with specific teachers and dramatic gifts was to behave in ways that were “merely human” (1 Corinthians 3:4).
Further complicating the Corinthian situation, the same members who boasted about their knowledge and spiritual experiences may also have enjoyed a higher socio-economic status. They saw themselves as “strong” and superior compared to their “weaker brothers” (1 Corinthians 4:9-10; 8:7–9:2). This disdain for those with less dramatic gifts and fewer resources was being displayed in the church’s worship and in celebrations of the Lord’s Supper (1 Corinthians 11:17-34; 14:1-12).
In his instructions, Paul urged the Corinthians to consider carefully the entire “body”—that is, not only oneself but also each fellow member of the church—whenever they participated in this sacred meal (1 Corinthians 11:29). A few lines later, Paul began to build on this metaphor of the church as a body, pointing out how both the human body and the church were “one with many members” (1 Corinthians 12:12).
Some aspects of this metaphor of the body would have been quite familiar to Paul's first readers.
What Paul did with the metaphor, however, was very different from anything they had ever heard before.
Ancient Homonoia Speeches and Paul’s Body Metaphor
“All the members of the body, though many, are one body,” Paul wrote (1 Corinthians 12:12), and at least a few hearers in Corinth would have immediately assumed that they knew where Paul was headed. This was, after all, an idea that the cultured Corinthians had heard before—though perhaps not from any Christian teacher.
The metaphor of one body with many members working together was a common feature in a form of Greek and Roman political rhetoric known as the “homonoia speech.” The Greek word “homonoia” meant “like-mindedness.”
Homonoia speeches typically called people to stop their conflict for the sake of the greater good of their society. Such speeches sometimes drew analogies between the harmonious function of different body parts and the ways that people should work together.
For example, five centuries before the birth of Jesus, soldiers from the lower classes of Roman society protested the excessive wealth and power of the upper classes. To regain the soldiers' support, the consul told a parable in which the hands, mouth, and teeth of a body refused to provide food to the stomach because the stomach was not doing enough for them. The entire body was quickly “reduced to the last stage of exhaustion”; that’s what the consul predicted for the city of Rome if plebeian soldiers did not support the “stomach” and perform their duties. The soldiers responded to this metaphor by renewing their support for Rome.
In 43 B.C., as the Roman Republic gave way to the rising Empire, the lawyer Cicero described how a society would become weak if any “bodily member” began to believe that it could remain healthy by borrowing strength from other parts of the body.
Writing in the early decades of the growth of Christianity, the Greek historian Plutarch likened the twofold nature of nostrils, ears, eyes, hands, and feet to the way that brothers should relate to one another—and these analogies are only a few of many examples that may be found in ancient literature.
And so, Paul's body metaphor stands within a long and familiar tradition in Greek and Roman rhetoric. As in the story of what happened when hand, mouth, and teeth refused to feed to stomach, Paul personified different parts of the body. As in Plutarch's comparison of brothers, Paul used ears, eyes, hands, and feet to make his point.
But the similarities between Paul and previous writers should not overshadow the crucial twist that sets Paul’s analogy apart.
What Paul Did Differently
Paul, inspired by the Holy Spirit, did not merely mimic an analogy that most people had heard before. In usages of this metaphor outside the New Testament, the speaker's purpose was typically to call less honored members of society to submit to those that enjoyed greater skills or social status.
And so, the purpose of the body metaphor was typically to solidify a social hierarchy.
When the church members whose gifts and status seemed so great heard the opening lines of Paul's metaphor, they probably assumed that the apostle was preparing to take their side. After all, if Paul had followed the familiar approach of other ancient writers, he would have urged weaker members of the church to submit to the members who exhibited more impressive knowledge and gifts.
But that wasn’t the pattern that this Spirit-superintended apostle chose.
Instead, Paul called the congregation to recognize that no member of the church was more vital than another. In fact, “the parts of the body that seem to be weaker” were actually “indispensable” (1 Corinthians 12:22). In other words, even the weakest believers in Christ had a crucial role to play in God's plans for the Corinthian church.
How, then, should the members whose gifts and status seemed higher treat the ones who seemed weaker?
According to Paul, when people clothe sensitive or private body parts, they are not downgrading those “weaker” parts; to the contrary, they are honoring the unique role and function of those bodily members (1 Corinthians 12:23-24). Similarly, the members of the church whose contributions seemed less impressive should not be treated with dishonor or disdain; instead, they should be honored and treated with "the same care" as those whose gifts seemed impressive and obvious (1 Corinthians 12:25).
Paul took a familiar metaphor that had been used to solidify social hierarchies and turned it into a call to elevate those who possessed less to a place of equality with those who possessed more.
Honor in the body of Christ is not based on social status or ecstatic gifts or impressive knowledge. The ordering of the body of Christ is rooted solely in the fact that God himself has “composed the body” (1 Corinthians 12:24), and he has graciously designed this body so that no one possesses all gifts or all knowledge. In the simplest possible terms, God has designed the body so that Christians need one another. The hierarchy of the body of Christ is not one of weaker and stronger members. In the body of Christ, each member submits to the same Lord and rejoices in how the gospel shatters social and cultural boundaries.
Wonderful and insightful!