Transcription
Corinth was a city of entrepreneurs, get-rich-quick, a boom town, but also, uh, catering to sailors' other needs. We won't go there for the moment. So, you find in the archaeology of Corinth rows of shops, perhaps like nowhere else, lots of shops, lots of merchants plying their trade in whatever luxury goods from the East and other, maybe pottery and Samian ware and stuff like that coming from the West.
From the 6th century BC, we have a huge temple there, thought to be generally a temple of Apollo, not been proved, but very likely so, in the Doric style, which is an early style of Greek architecture. And, uh, on the acrocorinth, there was a temple to the patroness goddess of the city, who was Aphrodite, or in Latin, Venus. Um, this is a head of Aphrodite from about 300 BC, which is in the museum in Corinth. Aphrodite was the Greek goddess of sexual love and beauty, and you can see that that again would have resonance in Corinth.
In fact, Strabo, who was a Greek historian, lived about the time of the Emperor Augustus, about the turn of the about the time Christ was born, as you can see, about 64 BC to AD 25, wrote a geography, and you can buy it in the Loeb Classical Library with Greek and English on facing pages. That's the the edition I use. And he says the temple of Aphrodite was so rich that it owned more than a thousand temple slaves, prostitutes. The Greek word is *hetairai*. The ship's captain squandered their money, hence the proverb, "Not for every man is the voyage to Corinth."
However, let me challenge that a little. First of all, he's not referring to New Testament Corinth. That is a reference to the old Greek city before its destruction. And even then, the number 1,000 seems excessive, and so scholars generally don't take the statistic seriously. But there's still no question about Corinth's reputation. You don't get, even if he's not quite accurate, you don't get a statement like that from nowhere. And in fact, in classical Greek, the verb "Corinthianize," literally to act like a Corinthian, to play the Corinthian, means to practice fornication. The, uh, noun and, uh, adjective *Corinthia hetairai* or *Corinthia korai*, Corinthian companions or Corinthian girls, is a Greek expression for harlots or prostitutes, no matter where they were. So, wherever they applied their trade, you could call, "She's a Corinthian girl." A bad reputation for the city.
Um, by the way, in Greek plays, uh, classical plays, usually the Corinthian, Corinthian characters are shown either immoral or drunk. So, well, when you get that kind of trade, that kind of boom town, that's what you get. It goes with it.
Another important god was Asclepius, or Aesculapion if you prefer Latin or Greek, who was a god of healing. And he had a huge temple, uh, the foundations of which have been discovered, and the plan has been drawn of that, which was for healing. And people would go into rooms where they would spend the night and hope to have some kind of a dream that the god came to them and hopefully be healed. And in the Corinthian museum, in the Corinth museum, there are, um, what we call votives. These are objects, uh, made out of clay, of different parts of the human body, representing the part where you had a problem, and you brought that into the temple either to ask the god to heal that part, or if you felt you had been healed, you brought it in as a thank you. And so you find all different kinds of limbs hanging up there. They're from the 5th to the 4th centuries BC, before Christ. Remember, all this is old Greek Corinth, long before the New Testament. We're just building a picture through geography and archaeology.
Uh, there are a couple of feet. I took a picture of the hanging up. Some of it here. Obviously, when people didn't have motorized transport, he went everywhere on foot. Feet were important, and feet got injured, and he got hurt, and feet were very important. And a lot of them are feet, and a lot of them and lower limbs, and a lot of them are hands, and you'd expect that. But what's interesting, this is a little statistic. Um, there's a book I've got with it over here, uh, by the way, I put out some books here you might be interested in. And this is the report specifically on the, uh, Asclepian, uh, temple. And the 44 feet or lower limbs, 125 hands, 65 breasts, 35 male genitals. That is unusually high. That figure is a little bit striking. Uh, but when you see the reputation of the of the city, well, then it starts to make sense. So again, we're building a picture of what Corinth was like.
Look at the New Testament. What does Paul say? First Corinthians 6, verse 9: "Neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor male prostitutes, nor homosexuals, nor offenders, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor slanderers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God." And that is what some of you were, but you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. The gospel made a huge impact on Corinth, and people who were in all of those lifestyles that Paul has just named became Christians and were baptized in the Holy Spirit and became wonderful believers, and we'll meet them one day in heaven.
But you see what's happening here. We've used geography, we've used history from ancient texts, Strabo and so on, and we have also, uh, Strabo, if you want to anglicize it. And we've then used scripture, and we've used archaeology. We've brought the whole thing together. You