Introduction
In the field of New Testament studies, the idea of looking at ritual studies as a viable source of questions is a recent endeavor. Given what we know of early Christianity and the innovation inherent in the burgeoning of the new religious movement, it is odd that ritual has been left out of the discussion for so long. This chapter attempts to ask questions about rituals and about the negotiations that occur between groups and individuals in the Corinthian context reflected in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. My purpose here is to demonstrate the utility of the model ritual negotiations offers and utilize it as an interpretive tool for interacting with the text of 1 Corinthians 8–10. In this regard, my goal is simple, but it is an important first step in making clear the utility and importance of ritual studies in interpreting New Testament texts. To accomplish these goals, I will first discuss the state of the secondary literature on 1 Cor 8–10 as it pertains to the groups that are addressed in the text. Second, I delineate a model for ritual negotiation and failure. Third, I look at Paul’s claims to authority within the entire letter in order to set up a context for his claims in 1 Cor 8–10. Lastly, I apply the model and what we know of Paul’s claims to 1 Cor 8–10 in a brief analysis of those chapters in order to highlight the utility of the questions ritual studies raises about the text.
State of the question
Much of the scholarly literature on 1 Corinthians 8–11 understands these chapters as a unit (Ellington 2011; Fotopoulos 2003; Murphy-O’Connor 1978; Still 2002; Willis 1985; Newton 1998; Phua 2005). While they are rhetorically connected, addressing the topic of communal food practices, the chapters are often divorced from the rest of the letter and its context. Others have been preoccupied with theological significance and application, placing Paul in the center as though he is the representative of truth. As Stanley Stowers has noted:
The study of the New Testament has understandably been dominated by the internal perspectives of Christian theology. This means that approaches to Paul’s letters continually reinscribe an incomparable uniqueness and irresistible relevance.
(Stowers 2011, 105)
In this regard, Paul’s positions are often taken for granted as correct or benevolent in some way. Questions evoked by ritual studies complicate that position, as I will demonstrate below.
The scholarly literature also concentrates on the parties reflected in Paul’s discussion: “the weak” (1 Cor 8:11), “the knowledgeable” (1 Cor 8:1), and Paul himself (Phua 2005, 1). Since the purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate how groups interact with one another through ritual negotiations, how scholars perceive the various groups is important. The scholarly literature represents several positions.
The first of these positions understands the parties involved along ethnic lines. Given the larger issues around table fellowship in early Christianity, many scholars see the issues within 1 Corinthians 8–10 as pivoting on issues surrounding Jewish meal practices and the condemnation of participation in Greek and Roman practices. This idea began with Baur’s work and has been nuanced in various ways by later scholars (Baur 1876, 259–67). Manson modified Baur’s theory and claimed that the “Cephas party” brought up the issue of idol meat (Manson 1962, 200; see also Ehrhardt 1964, 277–78; Barrett 1968, 50–56; Cheung 1999; Tomson 1990, 200). However, the passing reference to Cephas (1 Cor 9:5) provides little data, and the interpretations that stem from it, while possible, are a stretch.
Along the line of ethnic groups, Schmithals suggested that we take the knowledgeable as representative of Jewish Gnostics (Schmithals 1971, 225–29). Horsley and Pearson point instead to Jewish wisdom as central to unlocking our understanding of the weak and those who have “gnosis” or knowledge (Horsley 1998, 117; Pearson 1973, 28–33). Later contributors, such as Willis, Witherington, Murphy-O’Connor, Fee, and Gooch, attempted to downplay the role of the Jewish context altogether. They place 1 Corinthians 8–10 exclusively in the context of Greek and Roman meals (Willis 1985; Newton 1998; Witherington 1995; Murphy-O’Connor 1978; Fee 1980; Gooch 1993). Lastly, Phua has made the case that all three parties are, in some way, connected to Judaism in its various forms and theological positions at the time (Phua 2005, 201).
Another solution was eventually proposed that involved seeing “the weak” as the poor and “the knowledgeable” as those who were financially better off. This idea began with the work of Gerd Theissen (1989, 69–72, 102–104). This position has been nuanced and consistent among scholars writing after Theissen. While this is the case, and there has been a sort of consensus on the issue, each scholar has added nuances to the discussion (Meeks 2003, 68–70; Clarke 1993; Martin,1995; Horrell 1996; Lim 2012, 158). Again, it is difficult to assess why social standing is at the heart of the argument à la Theissen given what we know, or do not know, from the text. While the argument is plausible, the gaps being filled here seem rather large and without sufficient content in the letter to back them.
My point here is not to rehash all the major scholars’ arguments but rather to make the point that each concentrate on some combination of ethnicity and social status for determining who the knowledgeable and the weak were and how they would react to eating food offered to idols. A definitive answer as to whether the weak were Jewish or whether they had low social status and whether the knowledgeable were Greek or had high status is not forthcoming. It is likely that there is no either/or answer here. The answer is likely far more complex, one which we cannot sort out from our limited information.
Theories in ritual studies offer a fresh approach to 1 Corinthians 8–10. Given that ritual contexts are spoken of in the text, although indirectly, I will turn to ritual failure and ritual negotiation as a way of opening up a new way of looking at 1 Cor 8–10. More importantly, I will discuss Paul’s role as well as highlight a fourth party implied in the text that has been left out of the triangulation among the “the weak,” “the knowledgeable,” and Paul.
Ritual negotiation
What one realizes when reading scholarship in ritual studies is that many people have misconceptions about rituals and how they function in various contexts. The largest misconception that ritual specialists attempt to correct is that ritual is static and that it means one thing to all the people who are participating in a ritual. This could not be further from the truth. Rather than static, ritual can be, and often is, a locus of change, conflict, and negotiation (Stowers 1996, 71–72). What follows is a brief look into conceptualizations surrounding ritual negotiation and how failure is often at the center of ritual negotiations.
What is up for negotiation in 1 Corinthians 8–10 is decidedly somatic or bodily. It involves an intimate set of relational juxtapositions involving groups of individuals competing for the right to determine the meaning and impact of ritual, how those individuals locate themselves in relationship to otherworldly beings, and how those relationships are determined through somatic media. In this case, the somatic medium is had through ingestion of food. Knowledge, including that of a spiritual nature, is therefore not simply an acquisition of words or visual input but is bodily realized and practiced. This somatic intimacy happens in the actions associated with ritualization of people and objects, in this case food. But it is more than that. In the Corinthian context, while the ingesting of food is at the center of the argument, the ritual context in which said somatic actions take place are far more complex, and the meaning of the ingestion can only be fully understood within those ritualized moments. One can ingest food in various contexts, and many of them have various meanings about bodily activity.
The point here is to avoid the Cartesian idea that the mind has some superiority over the body or that the body is passive or of no consequence. Quite the contrary, embodiment is part of existential experience alongside such things as textuality and representation (Csordas 1993, 136–37). Rituals are contextualized moments or actions where somatic modes become potent in relationship to other embodied persons (Csordas 1993, 138). In 1 Corinthians 8–10, the embodied acts described are those of eating, likely in groups. Eating is not merely some abstraction described in a textual account; eating is also a concrete somatic action that entails tasting, chewing, swallowing, sensations of hunger or fullness, satisfaction, pleasure, smells, and, in the context of ritual meals, conversations and ritual actions and words. The experience of ritual is inherently somatic, and the act of eating and the context in which it happens is what is at issue in the dialogue, arguments, and negotiations among Paul, the knowledgeable, and the weak. Ritual studies’ emphasis on the somatic presses us to ask, how does one’s body and the act of eating relate to claims in 1 Cor 8–10 about ritual efficacy and ritual failure?
At the center of scholarship surrounding ritual negotiation is the observation that ritual is centered in fluid, rather than static, social interactions (Hüsken and Neubert 2012, 2). DeMaris makes this observation about ritual when he states, “for rites, past and present, affect not only the subject of the rite but also a broad web of social relations in which the subject is embedded” (DeMaris 2008, 24). Negotiations in relation to rituals both are symptoms and generative of social conflict and the formation and maintenance of identity. Hüsken and Neubert note that, within the context of ritual negotiation, three processes occur:
First, participation comes to be regarded as central to negotiations around ritual, both as negotiated participation in ritual and as participation in the negotiations about rituals. Second, the disagreements and conflicts that are the basis of processes of negotiation seem to be caused by subversion of ritual prescriptions, ritual roles, and power relations surrounding the ritual performances. Third, the concept of negotiation helps to more thoroughly contextualize both ritual prescriptions and concrete ritual performances.
(Hüsken and Neubert 2012, 7)
Participation is understood to include both taking part in ritual as well as refusing to do so. Also, participation presupposes a person’s power in relation to the group and those who lead or determine ritual efficacy. Therefore, participation not only is relevant in terms of taking part or not but also in terms of one’s place within the context of participating and the power inherent in that place (Hüsken and Neubert 2012, 6).
Ritual negotiations can take place in an organic setting, like the one we find in 1 Corinthians 8–10, where issues arise out of group conflict over various matters, or in a formal discussion about how to enact, change, or validate rituals and their contexts. An example of the latter can be found in Aristotle’s Rhetorica ad Alexandrum, a handbook for public speakers which contains a section on parliamentary oratory. Within the context of parliamentary oratory Aristotle discusses the issue of rituals and their alteration or their continued practice without alteration. I will quote only the section on alteration as a brief example, as the whole text is quite lengthy:
When we are advocating the alteration of the sacrificial rites in the direction of greater splendor, we shall find plausible arguments for changing the ancestral institution in saying (1) that to add to what exists already is not to destroy but to amplify the established order; (2) that in all probability even the gods show more benevolence towards those who pay them more honor; (3) that even our forefathers used not to conduct the sacrifices always on the same lines, but regulated their religious observances both private and public with an eye to the occasions and to the prosperity of their circumstances; (4) that this is the manner in which we administer both our states and our private households in all the rest of our affairs as well; (5) and also specify any benefit or distinction or pleasure that will accrue to the state if these recommendations are carried out, developing the subject in the manner explained in the former cases.
(1423b [Rackham, Loeb Classical Library])
This quote demonstrates a few things about rituals in their ancient contexts. First, it shows that people did think seriously about the nature and function of change in ritual; second, that the implications of rituals were serious business and, in this case, there was a perception that the state was at risk if things were done incorrectly; third, while this is a far more formal declaration of rules about rituals, changes, and the negotiations for those changes, it demonstrates that groups, whether large (the state) or small (the household), had a stake in what sort of changes took place and the possible implication for the collective.
While ritual negotiations can be formal in nature, with a set of rules, they can also be subversive and even violent. Rules can be broken in the service of negotiation to shed light on inter-group and extra-group conflicts. Negotiation, then, becomes a way to challenge idealized standards and to disrupt stabilized hierarchies (Hüsken and Neubert 2012, 6). Hüsken and Neubert provide an example utilizing a same-sex Jewish wedding to note how rituals can be subversive. Here they note the principle of changing identities:
The ceremonial performance can be used to show that the couple is a “normal wed[ded] couple” by enacting traditional parts of wedding ceremonies, or the performance can demonstrate that a same-sex wedding is something special, that it stands apart from heterosexual weddings, simply by transgressing or subverting traditional forms.
(Hüsken and Neubert 2012, 7)
Rituals, writ large, can be used as tools to challenge traditional norms, reinvent and redefine prior conceptions, and reimagine communal identities. Further, within the contexts of communities and the negotiation that inevitably occurs, it is power that is being grappled with in the sense of who, eventually, gets to define and shape ritual itself.
Power within the context of rituals can be fluid. As negotiations occur, power in determining whether or not a ritual is efficacious is at stake. Usually, the ritual officiants or leaders will be those who determine ritual efficacy, but when a community subverts ritual, rebels against it, or demands change, ritual officiants and leaders may lose their ability to be the determining factor in ritual efficacy. As I have argued elsewhere, at the heart of Paul’s arguments in 1 Corinthians is Paul’s need to maintain control of ritual contexts, exercise the power to determine right practice, and, because of this, determine the central identity markers for the larger group. Further, Paul sees himself as the ritual authority par excellence, and to deviate from his instructions is to court disaster for the community writ large (Lamoreaux forthcoming).
Paul and ritual authority
The ritual negotiations modern readers encounter in 1 Corinthians 8–10 involved three primary people or groups: the weak, the knowledgeable, and Paul. However, we only have one side of the conversation and the negotiations we encounter are from Paul’s own perspective. Furthermore, a fourth group is actually part of the discussion and becomes the locus of the conflict. That group is outside of the Corinthian Jesus community and is referred to in the text as those who are probably Greek and Roman citizens participating in normal rituals surrounding meals. All three of the groups within the Corinthian community are making claims about the ritual efficacy of those participating in Greek and Roman meals involving meat sacrificed to idols. As an authoritative claim maker, Paul is arguing throughout the letter that his claim is the official one, and he follows that up with a threat at the very end of the letter. I will provide data from the letter here, but space limitations keep me from being comprehensive (Lamoreaux forthcoming).
Paul’s arguments center on his ability to tap into the spiritual in a way those who disagree with him are unable to do. His purpose in these arguments is set out in 1 Corinthians 1:10:
I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our lord Jesus Christ, so that you might speak as one and have no divisions among you, but you are made whole in the same mind and in the same purpose.
In making a plea for unity, Paul appears to be acting benevolently, with the good of the group in mind. As the letter progresses, however, his insistence on shaping communal identity through ritual and ritual contexts gets heavy handed. (If 2 Corinthians is any indication, such heavy-handedness failed.)
Paul attempts to establish his authority by making claims that he has tapped into some cosmic conduit of truth. He claims that “we speak of these things in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the spirit, interpreting spiritual things to those who are spiritual” (1 Cor 2:12–14). He even claims to have “the mind of Christ” (2:16). Paul contrasts himself with those who are “unspiritual,” setting up an opposition within the Corinthian community. He notes that “those who are unspiritual do not receive the gifts of god’s spirit, for they are foolishness to them, and they are unable to understand them because they are spiritually discerned” (2:14). Later in the letter, Paul will make claims to right ritual practice and the inability of the community to discern these right practices (for example, 11:17–34). Paul is clearly making the claim that only he knows what is right, along with those who obey his directions. In this regard, he is not alone. He points out co-workers within the community that are given authority by him, including Apollos. Paul is the planter, while Apollos the one who waters (3:5–9). Stephanas, whom Paul recommends, is also mentioned in 1 Cor 16:15–16. These individuals are therefore god’s brokers to the Corinthians, who are pictured as a passive field, receptacles of Paul’s knowledge through his allies, rather than innovators in their own right, in control of their own religious and, by extension, ritual contexts (3:5–9) (Malina and Pilch 2006, 74).
Paul also claims to have intimate knowledge of Jesus (9:1–2) and conveniently is able to understand all contexts in which he finds himself (9:19–23). He even claims that he and Apollos are the “stewards of god’s mysteries” (4:1). Therefore, no matter which context Paul finds himself in, whether among Greeks, Jews, or Romans, his claim to ritual superiority and knowledge is all-encompassing. As Hüsken notes, the person arguing for ritual authority within the context of a community must convince that community that her/his access to knowledge is sufficient to back said claims (Hüsken 2007, 361). It is clear from the letter as a whole that the Corinthians have innovated on ritual contexts in Paul’s absence and that Paul, reacting to what he thinks is happening, is responding by making claims to spiritual and ritual authority (Lamoreaux forthcoming). He must not only make the case that his own ritual authority is valid and all-encompassing but that the innovators are in the wrong and do not have the authority to innovate in the least. In 1 Cor 8–10, Paul is attempting to exercise this sort of authority in defining ritual in three groups: the weak, the knowledgeable, and those who still participate in Greek and Roman rituals.
In 3:1–4, Paul discusses the nature of the people in the Corinthian community. Paul notes that he taught them as infants and that they were fed what children eat, milk, and that they are far from ready for “solid food” (3:2). Here we have a foreshadowing of rituals surrounding food in Cor 8–11. Paul warns the Corinthians in relating the story of the ancient Israelites, who wandered in the wilderness, and ate manna (heavenly food), and drank the water from the rock, which Paul equates with Christ (10:1–5). Yet, they still were not mature for they “rose up to play” (10:7), and as a consequence many perished. Paul goes on to talk about spiritual gifts in chapter 12 and states “there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone” (12:6). Paul then ranks classes within the body, beginning with “apostles” (12:28), which is Paul’s self-adopted title (1:1). His authority, therefore, trumps all others by his own definition of who has authority and who can wield it. As Paul “sits” at the table of ritual negotiation, he gives no ground to those who would be discussion partners with him. This attitude on Paul’s part becomes apparent when the end of the letter is reached.
To review Paul’s purposes in writing the whole of 1 Corinthians, Paul makes an appeal for unity. This unity is, of course, defined by Paul himself.
Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you be in agreement and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same purpose.
(1:10)
The arguments throughout the letter attempt to bolster this purpose through Paul’s wielding of authority on a number of matters, many of them addressing ritual contexts: baptism (1 Cor 1:10–17), marriage (7), food offered to idols (8:1–11:1), worship (11:2–16; 14), and eucharist (11:17–34). Paul then concludes the letter with a curse for those who do not agree with his instructions: “Let anyone be accursed who has no love for the Lord. Our Lord, come [Maranatha]!” (16:22). This is what is called a voces mysticae, or words belonging to the language of curse tablets and magical spells (Fotopoulos 2014). With the inclusion of maranatha, a word foreign to Greeks and Romans, Paul inserts into his threat the language of magic and casts a curse on those who do not follow his instructions. As someone who has made claims to ritual authority and having full access to the divine realm, Paul makes the claim that his ritual activity, here a curse, is indeed efficacious. Paul attempts to convince the community that the curse, and all the threats that come with it, will indeed come to pass if they disobey what he has laid out in the letter.
Having noted how scholars analyze 1 Corinthians 8–10 through the lens of ethnic and social status lenses, delineated a model of ritual that allows for certain questions to come to light in terms of ritual and the dynamics of ritual negotiation, and demonstrated how Paul makes authority claims throughout the letter, it is time to turn to 1 Corinthians 8–10. First, however, it should be noted that the bringing up of new questions does not always nullify old questions and their answers. In interpretive work, new paradigms and models, such as those being applied here, can highlight parts of the text, give new answers to old interpretative problems, and even bolster former conclusions rather than negate them. I argue here that ritual studies moves us beyond a simple trust in Paul and allows modern readers to see the text as a part of a dynamic, lived conversation by real people with all the messiness and debate that entails. This supplements, challenges, and shapes existing readings of the text while, hopefully, informing future ones.
Ritual negotiations and 1 Corinthians 8–10
In 1 Corinthians 8–10, Paul is addressing questions the Corinthians posed to him concerning food offered to idols (8:1). As elsewhere, Paul broaches the notion of knowledge or wisdom, a theme that runs throughout the beginning of the letter, as he attempts to claim authoritative control of the Corinthian situation. He notes that “knowledge puffs up” (8:1–2). He also makes the claim that “anyone who claims to know something does not yet have the necessary knowledge” (8:2). If we connect these claims to Paul’s prior claims to knowledge, it seems that Paul contradicts himself. Perhaps here he only means what other people know and not himself. Given that he follows this statement with instructions of his own, he is clearly not referring to himself. Furthermore, Paul makes an appeal that “love” should win over any exercise of “knowledge” in the case of those who eat at idol temples (8:1). However, what Paul asks of those who know is far beyond acquiescing to some sort of theological compromise. For the Corinthians, this is not a purely religious matter in the sense of interacting with an idol (8:7, 9). Rather, it is inevitably social.
Regarding the social, I would like to return to Hüsken and Neubert’s three processes in regard to ritual negotiation and failure: participation, subversion, and contextualization. Paul’s central concern is the perception of the weak in regard to their understanding of ritual efficacy in idol temples. In other words, do the rituals surrounding sacrifice and the officiants over them actually function properly and who gets a say in which rituals succeed and which do not? If we are looking at each of the “voices” involved in the discussion, Paul and the “weak” stand on one side in agreement while the “knowledgeable” and those participating in meals with idol meat outside the Christian community stand on the other. The knowledgeable have decided that the rituals which involve meat sacrificed to idols have failed (8:4–6), while the weak hold that the meat is somehow altered, hence tainted, by the ritual and its specialists (8:7). Further, Paul agrees with the knowledgeable and yet asks them to concede to the weak’s claims to ritual knowledge. However, Paul attempts to lay a different interpretation over the ritual in 10:20–22, claiming that those who know really do not know, since the idols are not gods but rather demons. This isolates the knowledgeable even more because they are not akin to their Greek and Roman counterparts but have done something else with the ritual that sets them apart for Paul. In this case, Paul takes up the position of the weak while setting up the knowledgeable with a rhetorical trap. Participation for the weak amounts to being a traitor to the identity of a Jesus follower. Participation for the knowledgeable does not amount to betraying Jesus, because they proclaim the inefficacy of the rituals involved in the preparation of sacrificial meat.
E. C. Still posits, based on papyri invitations, that some, if not many, invitations to dine with people outside the Jesus community are not connected to idolatry at all. In other words, there was no sacred or sacral ritual associated with a given meal if an invitation did not say so (Still 2002, 336). This possibility would clear Paul of any notion that he tolerated eating meat offered to idols, as 1 Cor 8:10 suggests. Yet, if this is the kind of dining under discussion in chapter 8, it makes no sense for Paul to ask the knowledgeable to abstain. Coutsoumpos follows a similar line of argument based on dinner invitations found among the Oxyrynchus Papyri:
Apollonius requests you to dine at the table of the lord Sarapis on the occasion of the coming of age of his brother in the temple of Theoris.
(P.Oxy. 1755)
Diogenes invites you to dinner for the first birthday of his daughter in the Sarapeum tomorrow which is Pachon (? or 16) from the eighth onward.
(P.Oxy. 2791)
Coutsoumpos makes the claim that, because some invitations were to events like birthdays and the like, it was highly unlikely that meat sacrificed to idols was present (Coutsoumpos 2005, 22–23). Yet, this claim is weak because it is an argument from silence. Brief invitations are hardly an indicator of what is not involved in said events.
Of the three groups negotiating about dining ritual in Corinth—with Paul playing authority figure—only the weak appear to be aligned with Paul. Paul criticizes the second group, the knowledgeable, as isolated and therefore in the wrong, and he claims that the third group, the officiants at the local temples, are ignorant about what we are doing. Behind the scene that Paul paints was the reality of three groups in juxtaposition that had to negotiate the meaning of dining ritual; how participation was to occur; and why a claim of ritual failure might be made. To the knowledgeable, who participated in meals that included meat offered to idols, they saw the rituals and those that conducted them as failing at their ritual task because, in their eyes, nothing really happened. The idol meat was not contaminated to them nor did eating it call into question their loyalty to Jesus.
Subversion enters when actors in the process of negotiation disagree and question or change ritual perscriptions, ritual roles, and power relations. The weak had evidently cast aspersions on the knowledgeable in this regard, noting that they took part in forbidden rituals and therefore had betrayed the identity of the community. In turn, the knowledgeable subvert the ritual context of Greek and Roman sacrifice and the dining connected with it by simply dismissing it. Paul counters that the subversion of the knowledgeable is inappropriate because it causes rifts in the community, harming the weak based on their understandings of the ritual (1 Cor. 8:9–13). Moreover, Paul sets up the knowledgeable when he, the one who claims to have access to divine knowledge, claims that in fact the knowledgeable actually know nothing (10:20–22). Ritual specialists in Greek and Roman temples do indeed sacrifice to something, but it is not the god to which they intend but rather to demons. Paul claims ritual authority here, just like he does throughout the letter. By claiming that the ritual specialists in Greek and Roman contexts do not know what they are doing and thereby implicating the knowledgeable in the effective outcome of the ritual, consorting with demons, Paul condemns Greek and Roman practices along with anyone who participates in them. Paul acts as though he is the preeminent ritual specialist, claiming that all who do other than what he says have lost their identity in the Christ community.
This leads to Hüsken and Neubert’s third part of ritual negotiation: contextualization. While many studies have looked at the Jewish and Greek–Roman meal contexts of the Corinthians, I would like to turn to the social implications of Paul giving the knowledgeable no options, ritually speaking, at least in Paul’s eyes. For Paul, the knowledgeable either have to abandon their connections and identity with the Christ community and become in league with demons or aquiesce to his ritual authority and cut social ties with those who participate in what Paul consideres demonic ritual contexts. A quote from Isaeus illustrates what Paul is commanding the Corinthians to do:
We also have other proofs that we are sons from the daughter of Kiron. For as is natural since we were male children of his own daughter, he never performed any sacrifice without us, but whether the sacrifices were great or small, we were always present and sacrificed with him … and we went to all the festivals with him. But when he sacrificed to Zeus Ktesios he was especially serious about the sacrificial rite, and he did not admit any slaves or free men who were not relatives but he performed all of the sacrificial rites himself. We shared in this sacrifice and we together with him handled the sacred meat and we put offerings on the altar with him and performed the other parts of the sacrifice with him.
(Isaeus 8.16; Stowers 2011, 130)
Participation in sacrifice and sacrificial meals establishes and maintains familial ties and identities. In asking the Corinthians to abstain from idol meat, Paul does not simply ask the knowledgeable to avoid idolatry or contamination from such things. First, he asks them to trust him with ritual authority. They must accept his claims about right and wrong action and ritual failure. Second, if ritual is an indicator of identity, Paul is asking—commanding, really—the knowledgeable to distance themselves from familial activities and their ties to households outside of the Jesus group. For the knowledgeable, it was vitally important to continue such familial and patronal ties. So what Paul demanded of them amounted to social violence, an act that would cut them off from social, as well as material, resources (Taussig 2009, 169).
One other observation can be made about the ritual context of 1 Corinthians in regard to eating idol meat. While some of the Corinthians, the weak, were in agreement with Paul’s order of abstinence from idol meat and those contexts, there was a decidedly bodily claim in the prohibition. As stated above, rituals are somatic. Food rituals are especially somatic because they involve the ingestion of food, giving a number of sensations to the senses. So what Paul asked of the knowledgeable was not simply a cognitive shift in perspective but rather a somatic shift that would place them outside the circles of people they knew and, perhaps, to whom they were very closely related. Here, Paul called for the splitting of families, friends, and patron–client relationships. There was a genuine violence embodied in Paul’s demands that aimed at fealty to a new group, the Jesus group, at the expense of all other social ties. Couple these demands with Paul’s insistence that those who wish to keep said ties had no place at the negotiating table and that, if they did not acquiesce to his requests, they were cursed (16:22). In response, one can imagine that many in the Corinthian community not only rejected Paul’s authoritative maneuvers but also continued to innovate ritually in his absence. It is clear that Paul anticipated this reaction, since he spent time at the end of the letter, before issuing the curse in 16:22, noting that he was indeed going to visit and spend time with them (16:1–12). Some in the community may have seen this as a threat rather than as welcome news.
Conclusion
Paul’s overall argument in 1 Corinthians 8–10 is based on his claim to authority and the ability to make demands of the Corinthian Jesus followers. Models from ritual studies, in this instance ritual negotiation, provide the interpreter with the means to help the reader see more clearly the messiness of life, as a burgeoning community sorted out its own ritual contexts and, by extension, its own ritual identity. Furthermore, interpretive questions surrounding rituals lead to a more nuanced understanding of Paul’s relationship to his clients. Paul, generally understood to be an exemplar of faith and always correct, becomes a more complex figure when one takes into account the ritual context of the Corinthians and the fact that ritual is fluid in nature. Without Paul present, the community found it necessary to innovate and adjust to its own lived experiences. Within this context, groups with varying opinions about how that ought to operate in ritual contexts formed. Via the first letter to the Corinthians, Paul attempted to assert his authority in order to smooth out those group differences. It appears that Paul was not entirely successful in his efforts, if 2 Corinthians is any indication, and it is difficult to know how the other side of negotiations played itself out in the long run. What one can conclude is that ritual studies gives us new lenses through which to understand early Christian lives within their historical context. Also, the important questions that ritual studies prompt should no longer be ignored by the larger academic community.
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