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7. Lawsuits in 1 Corinthians

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1 Corinthians 6:1-11

1 Corinthians 6:1   The Corinthian Christians were taking each other to court in the city. Although chapter 5 had dealt with sexual immorality (incest) and the second half of chapter 6 also dealt with sexual immorality (prostitutes), this section (1 Cor 6:1-8) deals with lawsuits. What ties this together?

  • Dale Martin: “What underlies and connects all these issues is Paul’s anxiety about the boundaries of the body. … Paul’s primary concern is to maintain the boundaries separating the church from the cosmos; he considers it inappropriate for internal arguments to be settled by outsiders.”1

    • Roman Legal System

    • Cassius Dio: “It is imperative that anyone who from time to time commits a crime should pay the penalty. Most men are not kept within the bounds of moderation by mere admonition [warning], or even by example; it is absolutely necessary to punish them by disfranchisement, by exile, or by death. Moreover such penalties are not infrequent in an empire the size of ours which contains such a vast population, especially at the time of any change of government. …[I]f a man is accused of committing a private offence, he is brought before a private court and must answer to a jury of his equals. If he is charged with a public crime, then in this instance too a jury of his peers, who are chosen by lot, judges the case. This makes it easier to accept the verdicts which are reached by these juries, since men recognize that whatever penalty they suffer neither originates from a judge’s power nor has been wrung from him as a favour.”2 (Cassius Dio, The Roman History7)
    • Public crimes (criminal law): crimes against society where the government prosecutes the defendant for murder, bribery, forgery, adultery, robbery, etc.
    • Private crimes (civil law): lawsuits between private individuals regarding theft, property damage, breaching a contract, fraud, etc.

      • High Status and Wealthy Individuals Had Advantages at Court

      • Seneca the Elder: “Is it any wonder to you that a poor man hasn’t summoned up the courage to accuse a rich man? He keeps quiet, yet finds himself accused.… This rich man was powerful and influential, as he himself acknowledges: he thought he could never have anything to be afraid of, even if he were accused.”3 (Seneca the Elder, Controversiae1.6-7)
      • Juvenal: “Can I afford to accost her? It’s the same with court witnesses: morals don’t count. If Numa or Scipio took the stand – and he escorted the Mother goddess to Rome! – or Metellus who rescued Minerva’s image from the blazing shrine, the immediate question would still be: “How much is he worth?”, with only an afterthought on his character. “How many slaves does he keep? What’s his acreage? How big, how good, is his dinner-service?” Each man’s word is as good as his bond – or rather, the number of bonds in his strong-box. A pauper can swear on every altar between Samothrace and Rome – he’ll still pass for a perjurer.”4 (Juvenal, Satire 136-145)
      • Bruce Winter: “If the defendant was a parent, a patron, a magistrate, or a person of high rank, charges could not be brought by children, freedmen, private citizens, and men of low rank respectively. Generally, lawsuits were conducted between social equals who were from the powerful (οἱ δυνατοί) of the city, or by a plaintiff of superior social status and power against an inferior. The reason for these proscriptions was to avoid (i) insulting the good name of the person concerned or (ii) showing lack of respect for one’s patron or superiors.”5

        • Reputation of Lawyers

        • Dio Chrysostom: “…clever pettifogging lawyers, who pledge their services to all alike for a fee, even to the greatest scoundrels, and undertake to defend unblushingly other men’s crimes, and to rage and rant and beg mercy for men who are neither their friends nor kinsmen, though in some cases these advocates bear a high report among their fellow-citizens as most honourable and distinguished men.”6 (Dio Chrysostom, Orations 123)
        • Although criticized by some (like Dio Chrysostom), lawyers were respected for their knowledge of the law and their expert skills of persuasion (rhetoric). Cicero (106–43 bc) was a very famous Roman lawyer whose career enabled him to became a quaestor, a praetor, and a consul.

          • 1 Corinthians 6:1-3

          • Here we’re not talking about criminal cases, but civil ones as the phrase “trivial cases” in v2 makes clear.
          • Bruce Winter: “Legitimate reasons for pursuing enmity relationships into the civil courts included: to settle scores with political opponents; retaliation for breaching relationships of trust and obligation; to take up the baton on behalf of offended relatives and friends; to compete for a rung on the ladder of the cursus honorum of political posts in the city; jealousy of a young rising star, to undercut the powerful because of their disproportionate influence in politeia; to retaliate against those who interfered with one’s political aspirations; and to undermine a power base secured by one’s clients by attacking them.”7
          • Paul reminds them they are going to rule the world, so they should be competent to sort out such issues internally.

            • 1 Corinthians 6:4-6

            • Paul is exasperated with their behavior.
            • He calls their cases “trivial” (v2) and “ordinary” (v4).
            • David Gill: “Young men drawn from the social elite might bring “trivial cases” to demonstrate their forensic skills. Perhaps some of the social elite from the church at Corinth are bringing “trivial” civil cases against fellow Christians in order to establish their own position (and harm their opponents), and this has caused tensions within the church.”8
            • v5 “I say this to your shame” is a massive statement. Shaming someone in their society was taken very seriously. Anyone would agree that it is shameful to take one’s brother or sister to court.
            • Bruce Winter: “It is easy to overlook the significance of the highly unusual way in which Paul used a familial term here and elsewhere (1:10, 26; 2:1; 3:1; 4:6; 5:11; 6:6). No Roman would have used the term ‘brother’ of another person except one who shared the same bloodline or a male who had been formally adopted into the family. When Paul used this term, he indicated that the Christian community is ‘family’ and, as such, it would be unheard of for its members to engage in litigation. It was the role of the paterfamilias to rule in disagreements among blood or adopted brothers.… Romans considered it highly inappropriate to engage in intrafamily litigation.”9
            • They didn’t have a strong understanding of boundaries between the body of Christ and the world. Paul labors to increase their solidarity within the community of faith. Ironically, when the Jews brought Paul to Gallio, he told them to resolve the matter internally (Acts 18:14-15).

              • 1 Corinthians 6:7-8

              • Going to court involved slander. That was standard operating procedure. From a community perspective then, it was a loss because both would be attacked.
              • Bruce Winter: “The proceedings were not conducted disppasionately but with great acrimony. ‘What the Romans called reprehension vitae or vituperation – a personal attack on the character of one’s opponents – was taken as normal; and manuals of rhetoric dealt in great detail with the most effective ways to construct a vituperation’.… The prosecutor, with his hostile speeches and damaging evidence of his witnesses, caused great personal resentment and loss of dignity for the defendant. No areas were immune from ferocious attacks.… ‘In Quintilian’s manual on rhetoric…we are expressly told that the beginning of a court speech should contain a consideration of the persons involved, and this must involve the blackening (imfamandam) of the person on the other side.’”10
              • It would be better to just take the hit and be defrauded than to exacerbate enmity within the community through vexatious litigation.

                • 1 Corinthians 6:9-11

                • They didn’t have to be that way anymore. Those old behaviors that had characterized them were behind them now. They’ve been washed, sanctified, and justified. They are now high-status people in Christ—those destined to rule the world in the kingdom of God.

                  • Faulty Application

                  • Sometimes Christians have chosen to cover up internal crimes on the basis of what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 6:1-8. This is a faulty application since Paul was not addressing criminal activity, but civil cases (lawsuits) between private individuals. Christians have the same duty to report serious crimes that other citizens have.

                    • Community Application

                    • It’s really easy to judge outsiders, but that’s not what we’re called to do.
                    • Bruce Winter: “[T]he Corinthian church appeared to have judged the outsider when they had no right to do so (5:12) but failed dismally to judge the insider [who was sleeping with his father’s wife] when that was their task (5:13). Paradoxically, they had allowed the unrighteous outsiders to judge the insiders (6:1) when they should have resorted to using a fellow Christian who, by reason of his legal training, would have had the requisite qualifications to act as a private arbitrator.”11
                    • Instead, we should judge ourselves. Where are we out of alignment with what the Bible says?
                    • T. Wright: “[W]here in today’s church — in my church — are we behaving in such a way that we are shaming the gospel in the eyes of the world?12
                      • Bibliography

                      Chrysostom, Dio. Discourses 1-11. Translated by J. W. Cohoon. Vol. 1. Loeb Classical Library. London, UK: William Henemann, 1932.

                      Dio, Cassius. The Roman History: The Reign of Augustus. Translated by Ian Scott-Kilvert. Penguin Classics. London, England: Penguin, 1987.

                      Elder, Seneca the. Controversiae, Suasoriae. Translated by M. Winterbottom. Vol. 2. Loeb Classical Library. London, England: William Heinemann, 1974.

                      Gill, David W. J. “1 Corinthians.” In Romans to Philemon. Edited by Clinton E. Arnold. Vol. 3. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2002.

                      Juvenal. The Sixteen Satires. Translated by Peter Green. 3rd ed. London, England: Penguin, 2004.

                      Martin, Dale B. The Corinthian Body. New Haven, CT: Yale University, 1995.

                      Winter, Bruce W. After Paul Left Corinth. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001.

                      1. Dale B. Martin, The Corinthian Body (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 1995), 174-5.
                      2. Cassius Dio, The Roman History: The Reign of Augustus, trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert, Penguin Classics (London, England: Penguin, 1987), 92-3.
                      3. Seneca the Elder, Controversiae, Suasoriae, trans. M. Winterbottom, vol. 2, Loeb Classical Library (London, England: William Heinemann, 1974), 377.
                      4. Juvenal, The Sixteen Satires, trans. Peter Green, 3rd ed. (London, England: Penguin, 2004), 17-18.
                      5. Bruce W. Winter, After Paul Left Corinth (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001), 60.
                      6. Dio Chrysostom, Discourses 1-11, trans. J. W. Cohoon, vol. 1, Loeb Classical Library (London, UK: William Henemann, 1932), 357.
                      7. Winter, 65.
                      8. David W. J. Gill, “1 Corinthians,” in Romans to Philemon, ed. Clinton E. Arnold, vol. 3 (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2002), 131.
                      9. Winter, 70-1.
                      10. Winter, 66.
                      11. Winter, 73.
                      12. N. T. Wright, Paul for Everyone: 1 Corinthians (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 66.
                      The post 7. Lawsuits in 1 Corinthians first appeared on Living Hope.
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