Sermon Tone Analysis
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1 Corinthians 1:1-9 Reading someone else’s letter
1 Corinthians is a letter written 2,000 years ago.
Yet Christians across the world, in hundreds of countries and over 2,000 languages, read this letter, and they take it seriously.
They believe it has things to say to them.
They treat it as Holy Scripture.
So over the next many-many-many weeks, we’re going to read it together.
Today I’m going to cover the first few verses, and my main focus will be to give a bit of an overview, so that we can get the most out of this series!
Who wrote this letter?
GET ANSWERS.
Well done.
You don’t need to be an expert to know that - it says it in the first line.
When I write letters, I put my name last.
In Paul’s culture, the name of the sender came first.
So it’s from Paul, and Sosthenes.
Let’s look at who Paul and Sosthenes are.
What does the letter tell us?
That’s quite a claim.
It’s similar to the way Paul introduces himself in some of his other letters.
He’s an apostle - that’s from a word that means someone who is sent with authority.
Whose authority?
Christ Jesus.
Christ is a title given to Jesus - it means the anointed one that God had promised to send.
And there’s an extra layer - Paul says that he has been appointed by the will of God.
Two ways to read it
I guess there are two ways to read this.
We could read it cynically.
Paul is kicking things off by telling them ‘don’t you know who I am?’
I don’t think that’s what he’s doing.
As we read on, we will build a picture of a man who isn’t proud, of a man who really wants to bring glory to God and not himself.
I read it as him saying ‘I’m only here because God chose to send me, not on my own merit.’
We’ll come back to that.
What else do we know about Paul and Sosthenes?
Again, I want us to focus on the stuff that any old person with access to a Bible can find out - you don’t need to be an expert for any of this.
I’m going to summarise some stuff today, but if you want some references give me a shout.
I think it’s worth spending a bit of time on this.
Imagine if someone found Paul’s CV kicking around somewhere under Rome...
SLIDE with CV
Name
Paul has two names.
You can see it mentioned casually in Acts 13:9.
There’s not much in that.
It was really common at that time.
Living under a Greek-speaking, Roman Empire, lots of people would have a name from their own ethnic background, and a Greek name.
Shaul was a good old Jewish name, and Paulos is a good Greek name even today.
Age, Gender, Ethnicity, Nationality
We first meet Paul as a young man:
There he is.
He’s participating in the first religiously motivated killing of a Christian.
And in case we are tempted to think he’s an innocent bystander, a nice boy who just happens to end up standing by a pile of coats...
Paul is convinced that these people (they’re not yet called ‘Christians’) are a threat to the One God.
He believes he is doing his duty to that God by putting a stop to what they are doing.
The believers scatter, and he goes to the High priest for letters of authority - kind of becoming an apostle for the High priest, ironically.
An apostle of death.
Then the Damascus Road.
On his way to lock up more of them.
There’s a bright light.
Paul is blinded.
He has a vision of Jesus.
He is still blind.
God sends a Christian to him, someone who was terrified that Saul would arrest him.
And then Paul goes on to do exactly what God has said.
He travels around to a lot of places, staying in some of them quite a while.
The young man who carried the coats is not so young any more by the time he visits Corinth.
But clearly from his self-introduction, that commission from God has stayed with him.
He was an apostle of death who became an apostle of Jesus.
Paul was Jewish by faith and also by ethnicity.
And he was a Roman Citizen.
That meant he had certain rights and privileges, which saved his skin once or twice:
As for Paul’s marital status… we don’t know.
He doesn’t mention having a wife.
He might have been a bachelor.
He might have been a widower.
He might have been divorced as a young man.
A huge amount of the New Testament was written by, or about Paul.
That’s because, after his Damascus Road encounter with Jesus, he became one of the great travellers of the Eastern Mediterranean.
He was on the move a lot, talking with Jewish people and philosophers and whoever would listen about Jesus.
He started churches, trained up leaders, and formed really close friendships.
He was jailed multiple times, stoned, beaten, shipwrecked, miraculously freed, and carried on.
He wasn’t a superhero.
He struggled with despair, was hurt by friends and colleagues who let him down.
He was frustrated by other Jewish Christians who were trying to apply some of the Jewish law to Gentile Christians.
That’s Paul.
He had a deep knowledge of the Hebrew Bible, and had trained under a prominent rabbi.
He spoke Greek and Aramaic as a bare minimum.
And he loved people, deeply.
He was seriously angry if anyone tried to mess with young believers, teaching them nonsense and distracting them from the Gospel of Jesus.
All that I’ve just said is from the New Testament.
One thing that we know from outside the New Testament is that very early on, people treated Paul’s letters as scripture.
Within a couple of decades, other people, like Clement, were quoting this very letter as authoritative, as God’s word.
Who is Sosthenes?
Anyone?
It’s ok, I cheated and looked it up.
When Paul first visited Corinth, things went well for a while, and then it kicked off.
He was brought to the Roman proconsul, or chief magistrate, and accused of leading people astray.
The proconsul is totally not interested.
He is super patronising:
So...
And that’s Sosthenes.
Former synagogue leader in Corinth.
Presumably not the synagogue leader any more, after the beating incident.
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