Re-Reading 1 Corinthians after Rethinking ‘Gnosticism’

Abstract

The recent scholarly tendency to dismiss the ‘Gnostic Hypothesis’ as a construct for contextualizing 1 Corinthians has not been distinguished by a strong engagement with either the ancient primary sources from Nag Hammadi or advances in the study of ‘Gnosticism’. The implications these two bodies of knowledge could have for our understanding of 1 Corinthians can be deduced from the main argument of Michael A. Williams’s Rethinking ‘Gnosticism’. Although Williams’s study offers powerful arguments against the use of ‘Gnosticism’ as a construct for classifying Christian groups of the first four centuries, his work also discusses alternative and potentially more useful tools for comparing these groups with each other. Ironically, by helping us to think about early Christian groups not in terms of whether they were ‘Gnostic’ or ‘non-Gnostic’, but rather in terms of how much tension they experienced with their general sociocultural environment, Williams enables us to see that some of Paul’s implied addressees in Corinth had very much in common with the authors of Nag Hammadi tractates like the Gospel of Philip.