Jewish Leadership and the Jews of Corinth in the Time of 2 Corinthians

The Politics of the Fifties: Jewish Leadership and the Jews of Corinth in the Time of 2 Corinthians

Martin Goodman

The Acts of the Apostles contain a graphic account of an attempt by the leaders of the Jewish community in Corinth to curb the activities of the apostle Paul:

When Gallio was proconsul of Achaia, the Jews made a united attack on Paul and brought him before the tribunal. They said, “This man is per- suading people to worship God in ways that are contrary to the law”. Just as Paul was about to speak, Gallio said to the Jews, “If it were a matter of crime or serious villainy, I would be justified in accepting the complaint of you Jews; but since it is a matter of questions about words and names and your own law, see it to yourselves; I do not wish to be a judge of these matters”. And he dismissed them from the tribunal. Then all of them seized Sosthenes, the official of the synagogue, and beat him in front of the tribunal.1

This event, if the story is not a fictional creation by the author of Acts,2 can be dated quite precisely to the fifties ce because the period of Gallio’s tenure of the post of governor of the province of Achaia is known from an inscription.3 Whether the tensions that led the Corinthian Jews to invoke intervention by the governor were also the cause of the formal judicial punishments that Paul claimed in 2 Corinthians at around the same time to have suffered at the hands of officials of the Jewish court – ‘Five times I have received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one’4 – is not certain. His claim to have earned respect from the recipients of his letter would be equally efficacious if his sufferings had been in the distant past, near the beginning of his missionary career, and if they had occurred elsewhere in the diaspora or in Judaea.5 But the narrative in Acts 18 suffices to illustrate the political quandary his mission created for the local Jewish leaders in the city, and it is worth investigating whether this

1 Acts 18:12–17. 2 On the historicity of Acts, see (for example) Hengel, Acts and History. 3 On Gallio, see Dittenberger, Sylloge 2: 801. 4 2 Cor 11:24. 5 On Paul’s career, see Sanders, Paul.

26 Goodman diaspora community is likely to have felt under particular pressure in this period.6

The Politics of Judaea in the Fifties

There are advantages to focussing attention on the politics of the Jewish world specifically in this decade. It is clear that the outlook of Jews living under Roman rule underwent considerable fluctuations in both the preceding and the subsequent periods. The forties had begun with a threat to the Jewish Temple by the emperor Gaius, and for a while Jews everywhere had feared a desecration of the sanctuary such as they had not experienced since the time of Antiochus Epiphanes,7 but the tyrant had died,8 the threat had passed, and for a few glorious years Agrippa I had reigned in Jerusalem, a Jewish king who could boast not only dominions as impressive as those of his grandfather Herod but also a close friendship with the new emperor Claudius, who had come to power in Rome at least in part through his machinations.9 It was true that Agrippa’s rule had been brought to an abrupt end in 44 ce by his sudden and unexpected death ‘eaten up by worms’,10 and that Claudius’ plan to allow his son, the younger Agrippa, to succeed to the whole of his realm in Judaea had been deemed inadvisable by the emperor’s ministers because of Agrippa’s youth,11 but the young man still clearly enjoyed imperial favour, since not long after he was given the kingdom of his uncle Herod of Chalcis and in due course – certainly before the death of Claudius in 54 – a role in Jerusalem as custodian of the Temple.12 For Jews to be optimistic about their future under Roman rule would not have been irrational as the decade drew to its close. The sixties, conversely, began with hope and ended in disaster. Josephus, describing the refusal of the Jerusalem authorities in 62 ce to take seriously the remarkably prescient pronunciations of doom offered incessantly by one Jesus b. Ananias, explained their attitude by the implausibility of Jesus’ proph- ecies at the time, when ‘the city was at a peak of peace and prosperity’.13 Four

6 For my earlier discussion on this issue, see Goodman, ‘Persecution of Paul’. 7 On Gaius’ threat to the Temple, see Josephus, War 2:184–203; Ant 18:261–309; Philo, Leg. 8 Josephus, War 2:204; Ant 18:305–309. 9 Schwartz, Agrippa. 10 Acts 12:19–23. 11 Josephus, Ant 19:362. 12 Ant 20:104 (kingdom), 222 (appointed curator of the Temple by Claudius). 13 War 6:300.