CTC30 Paul's Idea of Community

First Corinthians, in particular, offers an exclusive overview of the social life of an early Christian congregation, whose conflicts and divisions are largely due to the cultural, political, and religious environment of Roman Corinth. Thanks to this approach, controversial theological issues are clarified to shed light on doctrinal conflicts and divisions such as the topic of the Lord's Supper or Eucharist (1 Cor. 11:17-34), which are basically due to divisions between social groups, with a well-off class accustomed to receiving preferential treatment, and a poor class with no rights to anything, a situation that the Apostle Paul tries to correct. The author masterfully introduces us to the meaning of social meals in the Greco-Roman world, the social position of the early Christians of Corinth, the social stratification of the community, and the social context of Paul's ministry and mission, so that the Christian concept of community and united participation, rich and poor, in the Lord's Last Supper can be fully understood, what it means, and to what hope it points.

"As a historian specializing in the New Testament, Dr. Banks knows how to detect what were the socially distinctive ideas and customs of the churches in Greek cities in Paul's time. This work is based on the abundant existing material of academic and exegetical analysis of the New Testament churches, but it does so with such skill that the picture it presents is not overshadowed by technical and scholarly data, but rather is so vivid that any reader, whether an expert on the subject or not, will immediately recognize it." Edwin Judge, School of History, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

The author shows the distance between life and practice in current churches and the spirit of the New Testament; from which he seeks to illuminate the Pauline sense of the church as a community in order to, in this way, revitalize the experience of the Christian community of our days.