Transcription
That happens to be my wife. That's her name. Now, by itself, it doesn't mean anything to you, but I can start to put that in context. It will then give that word some meaning.
Now, the same thing is true with a whole host of Greek words, thousands upon thousands of Greek words. And sometimes it's not easy at all. There is a word for example, sometimes words don't even mean what they mean, you know what I mean? That is, words are metaphors, they mean, they obviously are intended to mean something else than what they ordinarily mean, but they mean that metaphorical thing in this context. There is a Greek word, *skeuos*. The Greek word *skeuos* ordinarily means vessel. It is the word that if you were to say, "Somebody go out and put water in that *skeuos*, in that earthen vessel," it's the, the ostrachina type thing, you know, those kinds of things that are simply made of that earth. And where it's the ordinary word for pot, but other things can mean, you know, it means vessel. So a number of things, even a ship can sometimes be a *skeuos*, but not very often. That's as in English that becomes a transferred meaning, okay?
Now, in 1 Thessalonians 4:4, Paul says, well, I don't remember the exact Greek, so I'm going to have to, uh, check for a moment. Got the Greek right here in front of me. Paul says that, uh, uh, this is the will of God, even your sanctification, to abstain from, and here's another word, it's going to be difficult to translate, but to, to abstain from sexual immorality. That's the broadest possibility there, and I'll keep that one for now. To know that is, that each man is to know how to have his own *skeuos*, or to keep, or to control, whatever it means, or to acquire. The verb is very difficult there. But each man is to know how to acquire or to keep his own *skeuos* in holiness and in honor.
Now, clearly *skeuos* is metaphorical here. It will have nothing to do with earthenware vessels. But what is the metaphorical intention? Is it wife, or is it body? And if he means body, that's not the same thing as wife by a long shot. And the whole text hinges on the meaning of that word. And it is the most difficult passage in First Thessalonians precisely because it is a very difficult thing to try finally decide. There is good evidence on one side, and then there's some things that are against that, and then there's some good evidence on the other side.
Now, I happen personally to think it means body. Let each man know how to control his own body. His meaning, now, body, even body meaning in, in a more transferred sense, his own person. Not body, just, you know, the flesh, but his, his person. Let each man know how to keep or control his own body in holiness and impurity. But it might mean, let each man, you know, have his own wife. That is, take a wife instead of, uh, being an adulterer or a fornicator. Now that's another possibility.
Now, your translations are going to make a choice. You know, they've got to make a choice there. But you've got to come to grips with the meaning of words, and words only have meaning in context. So this is my moment to say my words against the Amplified Bible. And something needs to be said against that somewhere along the way for everybody. It is absolutely the worst imaginable thing that could have been done. It is not translation. It is a translation that tries to do lexicography at the same time. And you can't do that.
Now, this is what I mean. There are places where there are as many as 10 different choices that are being suggested for the meaning of a word. Now, you know what goes on in the person's mind who reads that? He says, "Haha, it can mean any one of these 10 things." And so you pick one, and you pick the one you like the best, quite apart from any study or any knowledge of what it could mean. You just simply, "Hey, I like that." And so since it could mean any one of these 10 things, according to the Amplified Bible, you pick one, and it might mean exactly the opposite of that. It might be totally, you know, away from what is intended.
The point is, the author intended something. And far better to make a mistake but choose than to let the lay person, as it were, simply do go around making his choices all the time as to the meaning of words. Here is one of those places where the person who knows the possibilities ought to, to give his gifts to the church, make a choice. Uh, far better that than to just put someone on his own and say, "Hey, it can mean any one of these 10 things." It can't either mean any one of those 10 things. It can only mean one thing in that text. Now, among those 10, it might, you know, one of those might be the possible one, but it can only mean one of those. And, and the Amplified Bible suggests it can mean any one of those 10 things. Just pick and choose as you go. Next time you read it, you might like it to mean the other thing, you know. So, whenever you read it, it means something different. Well, that is not possible. It means what it means what it means. And it only means what it means in context.
Therefore, a word has only, except, except in those rare instances where there are intentional double meanings, you know, double entendre. That's a, that's a perfectly good possibility. Uh, that's a play on words. But, uh, we ordinarily don't expect authors to be playing games with us. They use words with intention. So, context, content questions. Now, those are the kinds of things if you will where you need to learn to use commentaries. You need to learn to ask questions of those who are working with the material. You, you need to do that because the content questions are not always the kinds of questions that everybody reading an English text can have readily available to him. But for the most part, those answers can be found by consulting the proper, proper references. But the context questions, you can learn to ask. And it seems to me that that's where my, my urgency for you lies right here. We need to learn to start asking the context questions. Even if we don't always ask them correctly, and even if we don't always come to the right conclusions, we must learn to do it because that is what is, you know, heavy upon us. That's the urgency. What is the point?
Now, I want to just go back and deal with, uh, those two content questions then, uh, in a little bit of the time that we have, uh, remaining, uh, this morning. First of all, something about the historical context. Now, I suppose that it would be to our advantage to know something about the city of Corinth. Now, this isn't going to always be true. You know, Corinth is, Corinth is Ephesus is, you know, one pagan city in pagan antiquity is as pagan as another perhaps. But, uh, I would dare say to you that there's a difference between Lausanne, Switzerland and Kolkata, India. They both are pagan. And if you Swiss don't like me to say that, you need to come to grips with that's a reality. Just because it's western doesn't mean that it's not pagan. Pagan has to do whether in fact there is obedience to God going on. They're both pagan, but they're different, radically so. And in fact, in the same country, there's a difference between a city like New York City and a town in upstate New York, or between Boston and some town in New Hampshire in New England. There's, there are radical differences. There's the difference between the rural and the urban mind. Sharp, radical differences. So often so that sometimes a person from a town in Boston, a town in New Hampshire, and a person from the inner city in Boston can't even talk to one another. Uh, the, the, the person in one urban setting can sometimes talk with a person in a foreign country if they could get an interpreter. They could communicate with one another more easily than they could living in the same country and in the same so-called basic culture, but one being urban and the other being rural. It is that radically different in the United States. Even though they're watching the same television, it's just a demonstration that the television doesn't set all the things that that are going on culturally.
Now, what kind of city is Corinth? Well, it's helpful to know some things about the geography and history of Corinth. We're going to put on the, on the board, uh, Dr. Fe's rough and dirty map. Uh, ready, dirty, whatever. This is ancient Greece. All right. Looks just like it, right? Here is Athens. And here is Corinth. Sparta somewhere down in there. This peninsula, roughly drawn, is known as the Peloponnesus. It happens to be a very important factor in Greek history. In ancient Greece, all of these cities were independent city-states. They all served independently. I see those are looking on a map over here. I got a pretty good, pretty good drawing of it. It's not, uh, it's not too bad. See, right here is the, you can come up and look at it afterwards. It's close. The thing that I don't show, of course, is that down here, all of this bottom end of the Peloponnesus, there's not a single harbor in the entire thing. There's no harbor at all. It's just like the fjords of Norway, only worse because you can't come in. And it's just simply rocky cliffs coming into the sea.
Now, this became rather treacherous for mariners to travel many, you know, much of the year. So very, very early trade going from Rome east, or from east to Rome, simply learned to go through the Saronic Gulf, across to the Corinthian Gulf and here. Now, of course, there's a canal there that's only four and a half miles across, not more than 500 feet. I don't know how many kilometers that is, but you know, it's, uh, not very high. And Nero, in fact, started a canal. The canal was finally built at the end of the 19th century, and it's there now. Shipping goes through there. But back in antiquity, either they would, if the ships were small enough, they would put them on a pulley system and they would put logs under the ships and just pull the ship, you know, putting a log out in front of each, just pull it up over the top of the, what they call the diolkos, this isthmus here, and then hold it while it went down and, you know, pulleys on the other side, always putting a log in front of it and just slipped it down. That's a, a smaller ship. The larger ships simply came and, uh, unloaded their cargo, and then the cargo was landed across and then put on another ship and would go. And they would do the same thing.
Now, Corinth strategically sat not actually on the coast itself. It has little seaports right here. One here and one here, Lechaeum and Cenchreae. You know about Cenchreae in the New Testament because Paul went down to Cenchreae to, to sail away. That's where he made the vow and shaved his head. It's, that's the seaport on the other side. But Corinth stood in the strategic position of simply controlling all of that.
Now, right outside the city of Corinth, right outside, I mean, just, just simply the, the city of Corinth was was put up right next to this thing. There's a, there's a hill. Looks like a battleship. It goes 1,800 feet high, right up out of sea level. It sits there and it sits with a flat top. It's called the Acrocorinthus, the hill of Corinth. And on top of that hill there were, there was the temple to Aphrodite, which in antiquity, before Paul's time, was, uh, the, the place where the vestal virgins plied their trade. We're told over a thousand of them, uh, were, uh, part of the temple prostitution of the cult of Aphrodite, and this was in the time before Paul.
Now, what becomes important for us historically, and this is, this is the more important even than the geography, but the two things come together. The city of Corinth led the, the, uh, combined Greek city-states in its final stand against the Roman Empire. That is, Rome had flexed its wings. The eagle was flying and had pretty well taken over all kinds of places. In fact, it had taken over by now most of Asia Minor, touched down and touched on some things in Egypt, all the way across Africa. It was just simply, it was in the second century BC, and it was doing its thing. By now, Athens and Sparta have fallen into, you know, Athens is always Athens, but it was no longer leading the Greek city-states as it did at one time. And Corinth became the leading political center of this last hegemony of city-states over against Rome, and they held out for many, many years. In fact, it was called the Achaean League. Now, Achaea happens to be the name of the province of which Corinth is the capital. So the Achaean League was the, the league that is with, with Corinth as its head, resisted the Roman power until the year 146 BC.
In the year 146 BC, the Roman consul Lucius Mummius finally came and conquered Corinth. And in the process of conquering Corinth, he simply sacked and leveled the city. Now, he didn't knock every stone down because the temple of Apollo down in the heart of the city still stands with eight of its, uh, its columns still. You can still see those, but those come from the, the, the what we call the Greek city, the time in, you know, the city that belonged in the Greek era. But the city was literally devastated. Nobody of any kind lived in Corinth for over 100 years, or about a hundred years.
Now, this is what is really important because the city to which Paul came was an obviously bustling, clearly significant metropolis. But just 200 years before he had come, the city had been destroyed and it lay desolate for, for a hundred years. The city was refounded in the Roman Empire, in the Roman period. Now, we call what we call the Roman city as over against the Greek city. The city of Corinth was refounded in the year 44 BC, and it was founded as a Roman colony by Julius Caesar himself. And you can do your own little figuring, 44 BC and move that to zero and then up. Paul entered the city in the year 50 AD. That's one of the, that's one of the sure dates we have in the New Testament. We don't have many, but that one's sure. The reason for that is we have an inscription from Corinth in which Gallio, who was proconsul of Corinth, actually has the inscription of when he became proconsul in Corinth. And we know the years that Gallio was Gallio was proconsul in Corinth. And therefore Paul appeared before Gallio. We know when Paul was in Corinth. It's a happy, uh, coincidence for us. It's one of the sure dates in the New Testament.
Now, back up, and you've got less than a hundred years the city, in the city of Corinth has been going, uh, when Paul comes to it. Now, what happened was the city was founded basically by freedmen from Italy. But because the city was so strategically located, it simply had phenomenal overnight growth. It grew and just mushroomed. It became one of these, uh, cities like in western United States, a kind of Los Angeles or Las Vegas. It just, just blew, you know, just burst out and became a city overnight. Every kind of person was attracted to Corinth, Roman, Greek, Oriental, especially Jews. It was a totally cosmopolitan city. It was the cosmos in embryo. The entire known Greek world or Roman world all in one little package, even more than Rome in some ways because of the way it was founded.
Now, prosperity very quickly came to the city, and a kind of prosperity that by the time of Paul made Corinth the leading city in Greece and the third leading city in the empire. Right behind Rome and Alexandria, there is Corinth. Now, all you have to do is use your imagination now to think of what kind of a city that had to have been. First of all, it is going to be a city that has no landed aristocracy. You know, there's nobody who can say, "My father came over in the Mayflower," to use an Americanism. There is nobody who can say, "We have owned land in Corinth many, many years." No landed aristocracy, but it's going to have an aristocracy. But what kind of aristocracy? An aristocracy of wealth. Money. Money is what makes everything hum in Corinth. Commerce. It is a commercial city par excellence. And because it has an aristocracy of wealth, an aristocracy based on money, it was a city that had a fiercely independent spirit. You could go to Corinth and make it on your own. In this regard, it is precisely like Los Angeles, California in the United States. It has had a phenomenal growth. And the reason Los Angeles simply keeps growing and growing and growing, you know, it's a city of over 14 million people. I mean, there's lots of cities, but it's a city that you can start on, you can start and it takes you three hours to drive through, it's at, at, at 60 miles an hour, you know, just, it's just unreal. Well, it goes and goes and goes and goes and goes.