Rel 342: on Kinds of Myth, Meals and Power: Paul and the Corinthians by Stowers

This is a much better article summary than the previous, though I should still remember to revise it at some point. We wrote these summaries as class assignments.


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Summary of Stowers' Kinds of Myth, Meals and Power: Paul and the Corinthians

Stowers sets out to consider the lens through which a Hellenistic audience might have interpreted Paul’s message in their context. He first discusses the method of what he characterizes academic Christian Theological modernism and its limitations. He concludes that this traditional approach, though it has accomplished much, leaves some questions of how Paul’s message came across on an actual practical level unasked and unconsidered. Basically Paul’s audience did not immediately agree with him and fall like dominoes into his church, but already had a social context through which Paul’s message had to find consumers. Stowers describes not only what this context was and what it meant for interpreting Paul’s message, but also how Paul worked within familiar social themes in a way that produced an acceptable message.

The main problem that Stowers sees with the academic Christian Theological modernism approach seems to be a tendency to assume that the audience addressed by Paul, in Corinthians for example, is a community – “a highly integrated social group based on a common ethos, practices, and beliefs” – and that it easily became one because the interests of these people coincided neatly with Paul’s preaching. The problem with this approach is that it skips over very necessary, relevant, and practical questions of recognition, interest, attraction, and social practicality regarding Paul’s message. The traditional approach seems to focus on what theological arguments Paul made and what he argued against. But, to the people on the ground level, who are probably less drawn by high-browed intellectual theological arguments in favor of practical religious concerns such as household and family which influence daily living and belief both by physical practice and by the meanings they carry. Stower maintains that while Paul did want to create a community ‘in Christ’, the Corinthians did not actually become Paul’s ideal community and differentially shared Paul’s interests. His reasoning is that there are many less specific organizations of people that do not fit the strict definition of ‘community’ above, the example of the Atbalmin people of Papua New Guinea shows that there is much variance and experimentation of belief systems among new religious groups, and he claims that Paul is a producer and interpreter of myths, not communities (not directly, anyway).

He further argues that the myths produced by Paul centered on kinship and ancestry in a way which people recognized as fit for consumption based on their own current social context of how their religion operated on ground level, practical issues: concern for the dead, kinship, ancestry, and the familiar common meals. Stowers differentiates between these practical, daily-life, taken-for-granted, (doxic) aspects of religion which he claims are centered on location (farm, family, household…) and the fields of paideia in which religion is a system of contested ideas about god and the cosmos which are both intellectual and free from associations with a particular place. Each has a market of producers and consumers that Paul had to navigate in order to find any reception. Paul’s message had to be new enough to be interesting to consumers, while being familiar enough to be interpreted and make sense within their social context.

We find evidence that some in Paul’s audience owned houses and were heads of their household, but as Stowers says, “It would be a mistake… , to think that only elites…might want to be consumers of Paul’s learning and performances.” Even if paideia consumers or producers are generally those who have the leisure to be in the market, anyone with the proper desire and learning skills could potentially be interested in and receive Paul’s intellectual teaching. Stowers considers the Corinthians as a collection of social and cultural differentiations rather than simply a myth and a community to go along with it.

Paul’s focus on kinship and ancestry is evident in the components of Scripture he focuses on: the Lord’s promise to Abraham and its fulfillment in the ‘grafting’ of Gentiles into the lineage (and thus, the inheritance) of Israel. This is possible because all can be united in Christ and into community by the pneuma, rather than by blood ancestry. The Corinthians, however, are not a blank slate in need of teaching. They have their own context, and experiment with the beliefs as demonstrated by how they adapt Paul’s teaching in a way that fits their context, i.e., baptism of the dead. Stowers’ explanation for to this is that both Paul and the Corinthians operate within a ‘web of practices’ that is their way of life, and to think of the logic of their values as embedded within the web of practices. To illustrate this, Stowers describes the Lord’s Supper and the comparable images of the common meal, the meal of animal sacrifice, and memorial meal for the dead, all of which are present in Jewish, Roman, and Greek culture. The related contextual components that arise are: the gender roles in preparing the different meals, the use of bread or meat, observing family and kinship ties, the division of the sacrificial animal’s body, and the oaths to a god ort the god’s dinner (bones and fat) at the sacrificial meal.

With these elements, Paul describes a Lord’s Supper that may be more inclusive of women (who prepare bread meals), observe the one-ness of family and kinship ties in Christ regardless of blood lineage, and a be memorial of a God by absence of sacrificial meat and presence of the bread. Paul did not speak into a vacuum, but into a social context that already had practices of the sort that Paul described, and viewed his message with respect to how they already understood their own practices. An example of how Paul’s message fits in to this understanding is that rather than looking to the oaths or smoke from the sacrifice for judgment, Paul teaches a divine judgment that encourages each individual to judge himself in the same way that one who is about to take an oath by a sacrificial animal would. Paul’s ability to navigate cultural context, write in terms of familiar images, and intellectualize and abstract current beliefs made his myth that much more marketable, though exactly who was consuming it is still a difficult question. Stowers puts forth several hypotheses about the potential blends of ‘elite’ men who would consume intellectual paideia with more practically-minded men, and even a consideration of women’s involvement due to the preparation of the Lord’s Supper.

Stowers has a convincing argument that the Corinthians may be considered to follow general sociological systems and changes when we give ourselves the opportunity to ask questions and allow them to be a different people group than one simply waiting to receive what Paul has to say. As a producer of myth, Paul sought to create a community, and succeeded in marketing the myth in a way that found consumers. In order to practically follow Paul’s religion, members had to recognize enough of his message to find a context of their own with which to consider its significance for their day-to-day living and be interested in, or attracted to it. It is unlikely that they all accepted his message in the same way, since different members come from different social or cultural contexts, and the example of Papua New Guinea demonstrates the possibility for experimenting with fitting a new practice into an already-present belief system and context. Paul’s images relating to kinship and ancestry could be manipulated and understood within the present social context, and were just different enough to produce interest and attraction, even if not strict community adherence.