1 Corinthians Through The Eyes Of Radical Christianity — Dean Taylor

Corinth Through the Eyes of Radical Christianity

The first Corinthians through the eyes of radical Christianity. I'm going to tell you why I use this. I struggled over even the title and what am I going to call this? I thought of it called Corinthians from the chair of a pilgrim or a sojourner or something.

But there's a lot that I feel that I relate to at Corinth. And in my life and in my journey, Corinth, I don't, I feel like I get it. I get Corinth and I'm sure I probably really don't. And if I was there, they would say, Dean, you don't get it.

But I don't know if there's ever a place that I feel that kind of feels like the church experiences that I've been a part of in my life. Not so much. I mean, but the whole general, the way it comes together would be in Corinth.

So here's why. And some of these are kind of funny and how I'm going to engage in this book. So my journey as on into radical Christians, I've since I got out of the army, I first lived with David Brousseau and that church down there, this early Christian fellowship for for 10 years.

And and as I was there, you know, it was all the different radicals that would come together. I mean, you know, we would have kind of like all the people who didn't fit in anywhere else would come to Texas, you know, and it was fun.

It was it was kind of like Boston. It's it's and it was a lot of fun for us to to just be anything we could to follow Christ the the best we could. And then from there, I moved up to Pennsylvania and spent kind of raised my older children all in Pennsylvania.

And they're amongst the charity churches. And the one of the things that I really appreciated about the charity churches that I was a part of was the attempt to bring these two cultures together. And that's this next point.

And I know this is a terrible thing to do for a historian to kind of put your culture and put it on to Corinth. And that's a really big mistake. But I don't know. There's so many things that I relate to of trying to mix the Anabaptists and the evangelical culture, in my experience, amongst radical Christians.

And so they're a charity. I know there was a decided effort to try to not to get locked into a decided Mennonite culture and have all the different influences that brought together Brother Denny and Brother Mose together.

And that did something. And it was a certain thing that they were trying to do. Now, it causes a lot of problems. You know, when you're in churches that have just a homogenous culture, it really there's, you know, stability is not all bad.

And being, you know, just everything going to the normal every day, it's not all bad. But I don't think that was the way New Testament churches were. It brought these cultures together. And when you do that, it's it brings up things.

It's, you know, right now in Lesbos Island, I'm working there with the refugees and even working with the Persians and the Arabs and the Africans, you know, trying to get them into one culture. It's amazing how much they're saying, oh, this isn't good.

We shouldn't be doing this. And I'm like, no, we're going to be together in the body of Christ. And having to do that has been difficult. And so I see that in Corinth. You see the Jewish community and you see lots of the Gentiles and the Greek community trying to come together.

And there's so much of this I feel like I relate to when I read through Corinth. I read the New Testament differently now, now that I'm older than I did when I was younger. And what I mean by that is, I don't know, I read Paul differently.

I read these scriptures differently. So this is my perspective through the eyes of going through the different experiences I have is what I'm going to allow the Holy Spirit to put in me and to come out in the series.

I don't know if I'll do a chapter per Sunday when I counted up, you know, by the time we get to next fall, we're going to maybe be doing a different church situation with the students and everything next year.

So I don't think I even have that many chapters in time to go. So I may skip some, but that's the way I'm going to try to do it. And I'm going to let these my life experience come out and what I and how I relate to the book of Corinth and the Corinthians there and my life experiences going through radical Christianity.

Yeah, from there, from charity, I was a part of, you know, this sort of charity eyes community, progressive Hutterite community coming out and then over implanting the churches in Greece. And now here again, another expression of radical Christianity.

And as I've always been a part of those churches and that's been where we've settled there when we got out of the army and it's been good for me, I've actually always longed to make a bigger bridge. And you hear that coming out of me a lot and trying to appreciate different groups and different people.

And that's going to come out, I guess, and even in chapter one, as we discuss, not today, but as we discuss unity and the body of Christ and those types of things. The other thing is my hermeneutic, my style of preaching is a historical theology.

Historical Theology and the Apostolic Quadrilateral

And that's not necessarily history. It's that I see the strain of historical theology through the centuries. And that's the perspective I give to it to reflect upon scripture. Nothing should ever replace scripture.

But I use history in the early church to look at and to look at and to interpret scripture. And this is my little, I use this, my students hear this. This is my personal hermeneutic. It's the, I call it the apostolic quadrilateral.

This is me, doubting Thomas, looking at Jesus's scar. And I use this acronym SCAR. And so it's scripture, crystal centric, antiquity and real. And what I mean by this scripture is the ultimate. So the Bible is to be received as the sole infallible source of authority in Christian faith and practice.

So, you know, in my earlier days and Tyler and Texas, when we were trying to deal with the early church, it was almost like sometimes we would move the canon of scriptures just like up to 199 or something, you know, but it doesn't do you any good because then you got people arguing over what the early Christians thought instead of what Paul and John thought.

So really, I can tell you from my years of experience, trust only the word of God and only it for the things that we we have to have. And that's just a foundational position for me. The next is crystal centric.

All of scripture points to Jesus Christ. All of the Old Testament points to Jesus and Jesus reflects upon all the New Testament and everything is to be read in a crystal centric fashion. At the end of the day, if there's what, however you're interpreting scripture, your life, your teaching, whatever you're producing does not look like Jesus, sound like Jesus, come off like Jesus.

It's wrong. It is a crystal centric interpretation that I look at scripture. And the other one is antiquity. And this is where I get into my historical theology side. Doctrine and practice should endeavor.

And I emphasize endeavor. This is not on the level that I put scripture, but it should endeavor to be supported by the early church. And this is important to me as I look at different doctrines. And this is the perspective that you'll hear coming out again and again in this in this.

This is important. Even in scriptures, we see that the Bible saying, beloved, while I was very diligent to write to you concerning our common salvation, I found it necessary to write to you, exhorting you to contend earnestly for the faith, which was once for all delivered to the saints.

And that's a that's a bedrock passage for me and the way I view Christian and Christian doctrine, that the faith was given to us in a complete form in the apostles. And it's us. It's our desire to to look to that.

The second Thessalonians 2 15 says, therefore, brethren, stand fast and hold the traditions which you were taught, whether by word or our epistle. And this is the passage that I would look at to try to see what was the early church word.

We have the epistles and what was their word and those sorts of things. And these are important to me. One of my favorite quotes from his history quotes from one of my favorite historians, Yaroslav Pelikan, he says this, get this quote, it's a good one.

Tradition is the living faith of the dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. And the difference of that as we look at it to things of church history and how we we see the church of the past and these great cloud of witnesses that have gone before us.

There's a big difference in there. We've known many times, maybe than ourselves or in others, that the traditionalism comes out a dead faith of the living. But we want to bring alive that church that still exists, the church triumphant and be a part of that.

Reading Corinth Inductively and Speaking Freely

But this is my perspective. Now, here's here's I want to give a challenge to the brothers here. I want to be able to speak freely from my church experiences. There's a lot of topics and a lot of controversy.

I mean, there's whole nations probably that have been different over interpretations of different Corinthian passages, certainly different schools of thought and denominations and things like that. And so as I give this historical theology perspective and allow that to reflect upon the scriptures, I really like those who have studied Greek.

And many of you, Brother Finney, a lot of you have are your more Greek scholar and more coming of it in that way and us to reason together. So here I have the first Corinthians 14 passage, and we'll get to that eventually, that one should prophesy and the other brothers should judge.

And so let's allow ourselves to let Corinthians come alive for us. You know, we stress the inductive Bible reading around here, and I want to do the inductive history reading, too, and allowing instead of us to put our interpretations into them, allow Corinthians to come alive and to shape us.

And I want to be able to speak freely. So I want to be open that at the end of the day, you said that. But did you consider this? I really want to challenge you to do that. You won't offend me. I'd rather us just truly.

Because I think that's the way church was ran in Corinth right there. They were speaking from some sort of experience as we talk about Corinth. Let's do it in that way. In real, it's a conviction of mine that I try to find a living faith and that faith is not just a coffee table revival where we talk about radical things that never practice.

And so it should be living. It should be active. It should be living in the early church. It should have been living throughout time. And again, this is an endeavor to to be supported by genuine practice.

Acts 18 and the Gospel’s Arrival in Corinth

So today, I'd really like to look at the background text. And then I'm going to show you a lot of really cool archaeological stuff that I found in my trip to Corinth. But let's look at the background text real quick.

And that's found in Acts 18. Turn to that. So in Acts 18, what starts in Acts 15, I have a little passage here. We're in Paul's second missionary journey. And this is where the gospel comes to Europe.

And this is about the year 49 A .D., when Paul sets out from Antioch, Antioch, Syria, to visit the churches he had established. We get this clue from Acts 15, 36, and it says sometime after, sometime later, that's after staying in the city of Antioch for about three years, Paul said to Barnabas, let us go back and visit the believers in every town where we preached.

And this begins the second missionary journey of the Apostle Paul. And we get to pick this up in this amazing, incredible journal called the Book of Acts, where we get to see a spirit inspired history.

And what I'm going to show you in a few of the archaeological discoveries that they've got, and you can see there at the book, and you can see that in Corinth, is that it really builds your faith that many times, like particularly like in the 19th century and things where liberal scholars were doubting the Book of Acts and saying this wasn't historical scholars, that's not historically accurate and these types of things.

Archaeological evidence has even given so much more support for it that it just builds your faith. But let's look at this incredible spirit inspired journal of Luke and see what he said here. So in Acts chapter 18, verse one.

So after these things, Paul departed from Athens and went to Corinth. He just finished. He got to Athens. He was preaching there on Mars Hill. You remember all that? It was a great scene. I've been able to stay and stand there on Mars Hill.

I hope you all get a chance to do that. And it's just an incredible view of the city, looking up at the incredible pantheon or the Acropolis and all the different things that are around there. It's amazing.

Verse two. Now he's on the way to Corinth and he found a certain Jew named Aquila, born in Pontus, who had recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla because Claudius had commanded all the Jews to depart from Rome.

And he came to them. So because he was of the same trade, he stayed with them and worked for by occupation. They were tent makers. There's a really some really neat archaeological stuff you're going to see about why this is significant that they were all tent makers in Corinth.

Verse four. And he reasoned in the synagogue every Sabbath and persuaded both Jews and Greeks. It is interesting that that Corinth was one of the only cities or one of the fewer cities that were allowed to proselytize as long as it's not Roman citizens.

You could you could do that. Would I do? You could do that in Corinth as long as you weren't converting Roman citizens, you could proselytize other people. So here in the synagogue, you had you had the the Jews and you had the Gentiles.

And so there was already this radical, if you would, mixed people in Corinth and Corinth is extremely cosmopolitan. It's extremely mixing of these different cultures together, which has been my it's been my journey.

It's hard, much better just to stay in Jerusalem and to and to have a church there. But these churches are rocky. They're they're tough. But that's verse five. When Silas and Timothy had come from Macedonia, that's the northern part of Greece, which this is where Macedonia is very important because this is where Alexander the Great comes from.

And even to this day, like when I was over there in Greece, it's amazing how serious they took that region being called Macedonia. I mean, they literally almost went to war over it because it's a lot of pride that Macedonia is part of the Greek culture.

How dare you call yourself Macedonia? Anyway, Macedonia is a as a very significant region of the northern area of Greece then and now. When Silas and Timothy had come from Macedonia, Paul was compelled by the spirit.

And testified to the Jews that Jesus is the Christ, but when they opposed him and blasphemed, he shook his garment and said of them, your blood be upon your own heads, I am clean. From now on, I will go to the Gentiles.

Now, he appears to be saying this only in Corinth, because when he gets to Ephesus, the first thing he does is goes back to the goes back to the synagogue. So verse seven. And he departed from there and entered the house of a certain man named Justice, one who worshipped God, whose house was next door to the synagogue.

Then Crispus, the ruler of the synagogue, this is the synagogue leader. You can see this incredible revival that's happening here, believed on the Lord with all his household. And many of the Corinthians hearing, believed and were baptized.

So I just think this is an exciting scene. It's a it's a imagine Paul coming in. He's wanting to be a church planter. He's he's he didn't have a lot of success in Athens. It's interesting, as big as Athens was and as well, he got some converts there at the end of his Mars Hill discourse.

But you'd never see in an early church history, a church starting in Athens. You don't get a church in Athens. You get it in Corinth. And so it's interesting how he didn't get the success there, but he did here in verse nine.

Now, the Lord spoke to Paul in the night by a vision. He's there, he's preaching, people are getting converted, the the he had some conflict, the head of the synagogue is converted. Now he's meeting with them.

And now Paul, who's received several of these visions, I mean, really important visions from Jesus Christ, gets this incredible one. I love this vision. Verse nine. Now, the Lord spoke to Paul in the night by a vision.

Do not be afraid, but speak and do not keep silent. Now, either that's a rebuke to what he just said to the synagogue, I don't know, or something. But Jesus is telling him and encouraging him to go out into Corinth and to preach.

And I'm going to hope by the end of today to give you an idea in your mind what Corinth looked like, what it felt like, what it was like to be in the city of Corinth by showing you some of the archaeological evidence there.

For I am with you. That's a great thing to hear from Jesus Christ. And no one will attack you to hurt you. For I have many people in this city. And that's interesting. So there was several people that were hearing him and listening to him.

You know, it's funny. I've been in some situations before in Lancaster County where there's been some revivals going on and people who have been like in churches and churches that weren't able to go to the revival meetings would literally be like in the cornfields listening and hearing.

People would sneak into the church building and get tracks and tapes and things. So a lot of times more people are hearing you and more people are listening than you realize. So Paul is glad that he has this little gathering, which is pretty impressive.

But Jesus is letting him know that even more people than you realize are my people already. He's already calling them my people. I have many people in this city. Jesus, don't you want to be one of those that Jesus would say, I have, these are my people in this city.

May God call us that, that I have many people in this city. And verse 11, and he continued there a year and six months teaching the word of God among them. So this was fruitful. It was a little time in Athens.

Now he's in Corinth. Things are going great in Corinth. And then verse 12, it gets exciting. Now things are starting to grow. Remember, you can, you can proselytize in Corinth according to the Roman law, but you could not proselytize who?

Let me ask you Roman citizens. So now the Jews now are going to want to bring a charge against them and they're going to try to use this against him. Acts 18 verse 12. So when Galileo pro council of Achaia, the Jews with one, with one accord rose up against Paul and brought him to the judgment seat.

I'm going to show you this judgment seat saying, this fellow persuades men to worship God, watch now, contrary to the law. And when Paul was about to open his mouth, Galileo said to the Jews, if it is a matter, if it were a matter of wrongdoing or wicked crimes, old Jews, there would be no reason why I should bear with you.

But if it is a question of words and names and your own laws, look to it yourself for I do not want to be a judge among such matters. So he's done with this and he drove them from the judgment seat. Then the, then the Greeks took Sothenes, the ruler of the synagogue, this is the next ruler and beat him before the judgment seat.

But Galileo took no notice of these things. So in other words, you can imagine the scene. I'm going to try to show you that archeological site where this occurred and then verse 18. So Paul still remained a good while.

Then he took leave of the brethren and sailed for Syria and Priscilla and Aquila were with him. Amazing scene. One of my favorite revival scenes and of early Christianity of how it came in, the conflict, how he worked it out, the vision from God, God speaking to him and, and seeing the church and the state and the interaction.

And then there we have it. And, and here I have a little map. It's kind of small, but you can see the journey that he was having. This man was busy and the ships in the, the, by, by land and by sea, it's inspiring to see him.

Archaeology and the Historical Reliability of Acts

So I'm going to show you now the, the we're going to go to Corinth and for the rest of this message, I'm going to try to show you some archeological things that I was really impressed with that made that Acts 18 scene come alive.

And for me made it where I never read Corinth the same way. Now, one of the, my quotes that I give in my historical theology class that I learned in my, my study of historiography is this, the past is a foreign country.

They do things differently there. It's important as we try to read the book of Corinth in a inductive way, allowing the Bible to speak to us instead of us putting our culture on them is to allow it instead of changing it to us, allow it to be different.

If we're not there, if we're not doing it the same way, I mean, not everything they do in Corinth is certainly I want to do in Boston. Don't get me wrong. You know, I mean, there's some things, some mistakes they were made that were corrected, but nevertheless, allow it, allow ourselves to be taken aback, to allow ourselves to, to approach the Corinthians and their culture in a way that, that isn't, it's trying to prevent our anachronisms are, are putting our timeframe back on them.

Corinth’s Strategic Location Between Athens and Sparta

What is the significance of the city of Corinth? Ponder this. So we, we look at our New Testament, some of the most significant books, we have first and second Corinthians, which are filled with some of the most meaty things that have to do with church practice and things in the early church.

But not only that, it appears that first and second Thessalonians and Romans were written while he was in Corinth. And so as we look at that, it's, it's amazing that it's good idea for us to really understand the city of Corinth, the culture of Corinth and, and allowing that because it affects a lot of the, the culture and the way that we, we understand the New Testament.

And so this is why I think that the, the place it's, it's easy to get to Corinth. If you ever visit Athens, do not miss keeping an extra day to go to Corinth. It's just about an hour and a half drive from Athens out West, and you can pick it up and it's easy.

All right. So looking at Corinth, there's, um, there's some significant things about it. Even way, this is about 500 BC, the ancient Greek had these city states. So it was, it was ran like, um, instead of like a whole country, you had little cities that would literally go to war with each other.

Then of course, some of the most famous ones are, you know, the war, the war in Sparta and Athens. So you see Sparta way down here in Athens, right here. So Sparta is here in Athens here. And you've heard, you know, all your life about the fights between Spartans and the Athens, but what's right in between them.

Corinth. It's literally smack in the middle between the city states of Athens and Corinth. And it's on this little peninsula or little isthmus that's only four miles wide. And so anytime that you were going to be Spartans and go to Athens or Athens and go to Spartan, unless you did it by sea, you went through this area in the Corinthian isthmus.

And so it's, it becomes incredibly significant in wars. Many times Corinth was, was, uh, siding with, with the Spartans against Athens. And then, and then they would do that and go back and forth with, with the, with the, uh, Spartans.

Finally, the Persians, or excuse me, finally, the Spartans and the Corinthians use tried to use Rome and they got Rome got in on that. And after that, that was a really bad idea. Then Rome finally came in and took over, uh, completely.

Here's just some, a quick little timeline. Um, the glory days are 500 BC, and here's something really crazy to, to think about when you go to Greece or you see pictures of, of the, those ruins and everything.

When Paul got there in Athens, like, and he's seeing the ruins and he's seeing the different. That place, those, those places that we look at today were already 500 years old. I mean, that was old even at Paul's day.

I mean, Greece is old. And, and so a lot of them were probably not quite as good looking as they are today, even at Paul's time, but they had different times where they were being built up and things.

And, and, and about 146, when Rome came in, it totally wiped out Corinth. Corinth became one of the most prosperous cities before this time. Their, their seaport, I'm going to show you where they end up on the seaport was very important.

They were able to start different city states, but when Rome came in, in 146, there was a little scene where the Corinthians were trying to stop them and they were dumping a lot of their waste, human waste on the soldiers out their windows and such, and it infuriated the Romans and they just leveled it to the ground.

Flat. And it was a grand city, incredible city. And it laid, it laid barren for almost a hundred years until Julius Caesar brought it back in 44. So by the time you get to Paul, it's got about a hundred years of development and, and prosperity and a whole new city built under Julius Caesar and Augustus and those kinds of things.

So here, here's a good map here showing the peninsula there, the Isthmus. Now you see how, what, what it ended up being, and this is very fascinating. Okay. So apparently down here, the, the winds and the sea were just terrible and the people would cross, I'm going to show you a quote from an ancient historian.

And so literally what people would do is take their ships over the four mile Isthmus and get over here to get to the other side of the Mediterranean, or they would have another boat waiting here and would just do the cargo.

And so you had all of that transport that was happening here. An early, an early historian in those days said this, he says, if sailors pass the Southern tip twice, they ought to forget their home. So in other words, to give you an idea that down here that you might get through here once, you're probably not going to make it twice.

And so that's just giving you an idea that, that the sea was terrible. So people had to get over this land. So lots of the different emperors tried to make a canal. Nero tried to canal and, and finally the different people did until, until they, they, they finally got this.

The Isthmus, Tentmaking, and the Isthmian Games

Here it is today. And so as you drive from Athens to Corinth, here's my family, we stopped right on the Isthmus and you can see standing in the middle is what you would look at there, looking to the right.

It's just a cut down. And then to the left, it's cut the other way. And there's the Isthmus, four miles. And to this day, ships cross through there. And it was quite an ordeal. There's another kind of a nicer picture.

And if you can look right towards the end, that would be a big cargo ship that's coming through there. You wouldn't want to be around that edge. You're like, Tanya's like really scared of heights. You just looking at it was making her nervous, you know?

And so I expect, no, she's more scared of the children around the heights. That's the way she gets. Here's a construction during the 1800s. They pointed out the Hungarian engineer put it together in the late 1800s.

But that road that went over there, you see these grooves over that four mile Isthmus where they brought there. Here's a nice view there where you could see they would have these boards and they would roll these ships and the cargo over the four miles and come to the other side.

Now, that took a while. So if you're a bunch of sailors and you are waiting for your ship to unpack on one end and get to the other pack the other end, and it takes about two weeks to do this, and you're a bunch of sailors, what do you think you're going to be doing?

Partying, exactly. You're a bunch of sailors, you're away from your wives, you're away from your home. You've got a little money in your hand and you're in Corinth. That. And where are you going to live?

Where are you going to live if you went off the boat? In tents. So you end up needing to rent a tent, you end up living there, and this becomes the culture and the things that are happening in Corinth.

And it really affects the town. Another interesting thing in this area is the Isthmian Games. It was just like another Olympian contest that was going on. And they're just now, they're doing some different archaeological discoveries to find these different places.

And it's fascinating to think of Paul and the Corinthian culture there with all these Olympic Games going on right down the street from Corinth. Here's just a recent archaeological site here that I was looking at.

This one guy did a really good job, this David Winning visit to Corinth, and he was showing some of the archaeological sites there. And this shows like a starting line. And if you ponder it, the rules and during this time to do these races, you had to swear an oath that you would not cheat and that you would do this race in a lawful way.

And ponder this archaeological stuff with some of Paul's writings, like in 2 Timothy where he says, and also if anyone competes in athletics, he is not crowned unless he competes according to the rules.

He would have seen people training along the mountains with these different places here for these different, the Esmean Games. And of course, right in 1 Corinthians 9, and everyone who competes for the prize is temperate in all things.

I'll bring this up when we get to this passage and how these races that were right in the Corinthian area. Now they do it to obtain a perishable crown, he says, scorning them, but we for an imperishable crown in Jesus Christ.

And so this is, I think, really important archaeological discoveries. It's a fascinating city. So when you're there and you're visiting, there's many things that's been studied and looked at and then compared to the day.

And I'm going to show you a few of these. You go there, you kind of feel like you're back. Here's one of the, you're back in the area. Here's one of the gates getting up into the north, to the higher mountainous region.

I'm just going to show you several of these pictures that we visited. You look down at the road from the Roman era, they would have used more of these small Roman road styles. And those were around the marketplace and around the different ways, these Roman roads.

It's really a scenic spot. If there's one thing that hit me, and I never read Corinthians the same way, it is beautiful. You're standing there and this is coming all up to the temple that's on the high mountain, which I'm about to show you.

And it's just gorgeous. These mountains towards that way that you're looking would be Athens, would be over that way. You're going to look out to the other side, and that's the Gulf of Corinth, where they became this wonderful port city.

This is where commerce, and they became such a wealthy city because they had this ability to do trade. They had this big walls that went around the ancient Corinth, and we see some of the early Christians actually having a role in working the city in that wall.

Here's one. Sorry about the telephone pole, but here you can kind of see right down, right over to the right around that mountain would have been the main part of ancient Corinth. And I'm kind of on the other side of the mountain, but I wanted you to take a look at those mountains in the distance, that beautiful blue water of the Gulf of Corinth, and what a gorgeous area Corinth is.

Here's a modern redoing of Athens, and I think it's a nice, it's nicely done. There's been some just remarkable reconstructions of the city looking at the archaeological evidence. Now stand where you are right there at that picture.

It's fascinating. To the right is a temple dedicated to Augustus, where you go to worship the emperor. Look to the top mountain though. This place, which would have been probably in ruins in its grandeur with this picture, but there was other different smaller temples at the time of Paul.

And this would be to the goddess Aphrodite or Venus by the time the Romans took over. And this is the goddess of love. And if you ponder the message of the Corinthians and the emphasis on love, love was the mark of the city, and not in a good way, love.

It was actually a very wicked type of thing. There was an early historian that spoke of, and he's known to exaggerate, but nevertheless, he wrote that on that road from here all the way up to that temple were 1000 cultic prostitutes that would have been all the way up to there.

There was 33 different bars, if you would, places where there'd be alcohol and prostitution. And Corinth was just a wicked city. And it just makes you thinking, why are you there, Paul? I mean, of all places, really?

And it just, the more I studied Corinth and the more I marveled that it didn't make it in Athens and it made it in Corinth and the culture and the problems, I just think it's got to be God, that he wanted a witness here and to see the way that they would have had to fight against these sort of wickedness and different things there.