1. Menander and the Woman from Samos

The twentieth century was marked by several textual discoveries that had field-altering aftershocks for the study of the New Testament. By far the most celebrated and significant was the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, beginning in 1946. Similar in its impact on New Testament studies, albeit from the perspective of Wirkungsgeschichte, was the discovery and publication of the Nag Hammadi library, beginning in 1945.

Less celebrated by New Testament scholars, though by no means less extraordinary from a textual standpoint, was the simultaneous unearthing of several plays by the Greek poet Menander of Athens from the sands of Egypt. Until the early twentieth century, precious little of Menander had survived, despite his importance as an emulator of Euripides and as the father of New Comedy. This situation changed with the publication of several Egyptian papyri, including ones from Cairo, Oxyrhynchus and, most importantly, the Bodmer Papyrus in 1969.Footnote ²² As a result of these finds, one entire comedy, the Dyskolos (or Malcontent), was recovered and several others, including the Samia (or The Woman from Samos), could also be confidently reconstructed. With good warrant F. H. Sandbach, editor of the Oxford Classical Text of Menander, describes the dramatist's corpus as praeter spem auctas in the late twentieth century.Footnote ²³

The merits of comparing the Samia and 1 Corinthians will be tested in the subsequent analysis. It remains here briefly to introduce the plot and characters of this comedy. Despite its title, The Woman from Samos is far more a story of rift and reconciliation between a father and son – Demeas and Moschion. Moschion, as it turns out, is not Demeas’ biological but his adopted son – hence his father's heightened concern to provide a legitimate inheritance for him. The action begins with Moschion's two-word confession of sin in a prologue to the audience: ἡμάρτηκα γάρ.Footnote ²⁴ His sin, which he is unable to articulate in so many words, is that he has got ‘the girl next door’ pregnant (her name is Plangon).Footnote ²⁵ Happily for him, his father and the girl's (Niceratus) – recently returned from a long business trip together to Pontus in Asia Minor – have already planned for the wedding of their children. One problem remains: how should Moschion explain the baby to Demeas and Niceratus?

Enter the woman from Samos. Demeas has a Samian concubine named Chrysis – worth her weight in ‘gold’, as her name implies – whom he loves as a wife but cannot marry. She lives with him without any of the usual uxorial honour, but loves Moschion as a son nonetheless. When Chrysis sees Moschion's plight, she agrees to take Plangon's child as her own – at least until the marriage can take place and the child can be legitimised. That Chrysis might have had Demeas’ own child in his absence is believable enough – only she is under strict orders that no such child shall be kept and reared in the home, as though Chrysis were a wife. Chrysis risks Demeas’ wrath in order to save his legal grandchild.

When Demeas returns, he is predictably outraged by Chrysis’ baby, which he presumes is his and which she has kept against his wishes, as though she were a ‘wedded concubine’ (γαμετή ἑταίρα).Footnote ²⁶ Demeas tries to put the matter out of his mind and cheers himself with the prospect of Moschion's marriage to Plangon. As he is helping prepare for the feast, however, he overhears a servant speaking to the child as Moschion's, sharing his father's features.Footnote ²⁷ As Demeas puts two and two together (Moschion is the father, Chrysis is the mother), the embers of his previous rage are ignited into a tragic madness of Euripidean proportion.Footnote ²⁸ In a chauvinistic twist of dramatic irony, Demeas blames Chrysis rather than Moschion (whose moral weakness he forgives) for the child, and turns out his beloved concubine ‘to the crows’ as a common prostitute to die of abuse, drunkenness or heartbreak.Footnote ²⁹ This ejection of Chrysis represents the tragic nadir of the comedy. The final two acts of the comedy play out Demeas’ recognition of what has happened (Act 4) and his comic reconciliation with Moschion (Act 5). Demeas’ grandchild is saved, Moschion recovers his ‘manliness’, but in this largely androcentric comedy, the sacrifice of the woman from Samos is barely acknowledged. One can infer that Chrysis is reconciled with Demeas in Act 4, but this is never explicitly portrayed, and her penultimate line in the drama begins with the words ὦ τάλαιν’ ἐγώ, before she runs offstage, this time to save Moschion's baby from the threatened violence of an enraged Niceratus.Footnote ³⁰

2. 1 Cor 5.1–5: A Porneia Not Named Even among the Gentiles

With this sketch of the Samia in hand, I turn now to an intertextual reading of 1 Cor 5–15. One should recall that this part of the letter is often distinguished from the first four chapters on formal grounds. In 1 Cor 5.1, Paul begins to treat a series of situations in the Corinthian ecclesial household, some of which have reached Paul by way of rumour (1 Cor 5–6), others by way of writing, often introduced by the phrase περὶ δέ.Footnote ³¹ Whether one deduces from these data the existence of a series of letters that Paul has here redacted, or simply a string of discreet topics which originally comprised a unified piece of deliberative rhetoric,Footnote ³² it is easy enough to see in the canonical letter a number of situation dramas which in their totality could have made Paul the exhausted pastor laugh at the ‘arrested development’ of the Corinthian ecclesial household, as one might also (painfully) laugh at the familial tensions portrayed of the Samia.

Chief among these situations is the famed πορνεία in Corinth. Paul writes:

Given the tragic echoes in 1 Cor 1–4, it might be natural to conclude that Paul's call for the Corinthians to mourn this kind of sexual immorality is a call to tragic vision. However, Paul's central concern here is strikingly similar to Menander's in the Samia: that Demeas and his son have had intercourse with the same woman (from Samos). So disturbed is Demeas by this brand of sexual immorality that he is unable to speak it to the audience:

Demeas’ shame at potentially sharing even a concubine with his son renders the verbal expression of this situation a literal nefas. The similarity with Paul's ‘unnamable’ πορνεία in 1 Cor 5.1 is difficult to miss.Footnote ³⁵ One needs no theories of the strong and the weak or the permeable bodies of the lower classes to understand Paul's concern with this πορνεία;Footnote ³⁶ Demeas, who is clearly of the upper class, is concerned with this as well. Paul's command to remove the offending party for the sake of household holiness, ἵνα ἀρθῇ ἐκ μέσου ὑμῶν ὁ τὸ ἔργον τοῦτο πράξας, echoes the same idiom used by Demeas when he ejects Chrysis in Act 3 of the Samia: ἐκ τοῦ μέσου | ἄναγε σεαυτόν.Footnote ³⁷

Certain discontinuities between the situations in 1 Cor 5.1 and the Samia argue against any genetic dependence on the Samia by Paul: Chrysis is a concubine (albeit a ‘married’ one) rather than a wife; and she, rather than the male offender, is ejected from the household. These nuances in the Samia are intentional comic divergences from the ‘type-scene’ which Paul has heard is being enacted quite literally by certain members of the church in Corinth. Just as the book of Jonah represents a comic redeployment of elements of the stock prophetic narrative, so Menander modifies a standard ‘sexual immorality’ scenario to conjure up even greater sympathy for Chrysis and antipathy for Demeas. Although possessing none of the honours a real wife, Chrysis behaves like one. Demeas, by contrast, does not have the courage to follow through with his convictions regarding Moschion, and thus transposes the punishment from the guilty man onto the guiltless woman. Paul's echoes of the Samia represent the popular prevalence of this dramatic type scene in the broader culture of Corinth.Footnote ³⁸

Demeas’ inability to speak about the ‘sexual immorality named not even among the Gentiles’ reflects a similar reticence in Moschion to confess his fornication with Plangon – again with situational echoes in 1 Corinthians. As Moschion stutteringly puts it early in Act 1:

Comically, Moschion claims to have said what he has not said: the nefas – ‘this’ (τοῦτο), that is, his sexual immorality – using the same comic euphemism as Demeas.Footnote ⁴⁰ Moschion's shame over this lesser πορνεία and his questions about whether to marry Plangon reflect another situation that Paul encounters at Corinth: the questions about how one ought to treat a virgin in 1 Cor 7 (see esp. 1 Cor 7.2, διὰ τῆς πορνείας). Paul's scenario in 1 Cor 7.36, ‘if someone thinks he will act in an unseemly manner with his virgin, let them marry’ (εἰ τις ἀσχημονεῖν ἐπὶ τὴν παρθένον αὐτοῦ νομίζει … γαμείτωσαν), might well have been addressed to the conscience-stricken Moschion. This is comic advice of Menandrian stature – albeit rendered in a more direct, epistolary form. Paul's preference is for another kind of celibate (1 Cor 7.38), eschatological comic resolution – one which takes into account the penultimate place of marriage and an awareness that ‘the present form of the world is passing away’ (1 Cor 7.31). Ever the accommodating pastor, Paul also recognises that in some cases, an ordinary comedy of the ‘first Adam’ is a necessary concession – and one that still bears witness to the gospel.

3. 1 Cor 13.7: Love Endures All Things

In addition to sharing a number of ethical ‘problem situations’ that place the moral integrity of their respective ‘households’ at risk, the Samia and 1 Corinthians further agree in commending a pattern of guilt-bearing love within the family, even if it means suffering unjustly in the dramatic ‘meanwhile’. This too is a comic motif.

Paul's discourse on spiritual ἀγάπη in 1 Cor 13, which Rudolf Bultmann once called the theological ‘climax’ of the epistle, is much celebrated.Footnote ⁴¹ The Samia is also concerned with familial love, both ἔρως and ἀγάπη: the love between husband and concubine/wife, sons and parents, children and nurses, and between in-laws, neighbours and friends. Whereas the primary ‘situation’ that drives the comedy forward is Demeas’ misperception of a great πορνεία at the centre of his household, the character who ‘saves’ the family and ultimately effects reconciliation through her self-sacrificial love is Chrysis, the woman from Samos.

The first stage of Menander's comic soteriology is Chrysis’ transfer of Moschion's sin onto herself. As was mentioned above, Moschion begins the play by confessing his trouble with Plangon. To save their child, Chrysis accepts the child (and the offence) as her own – thereby changing the plaintiff from Niceratus to Demeas. Moschion's ἡμάρτηκα γάρ (Sam. 3) is echoed to tragic effect in Act 3, when Demeas describes the death Chrysis is to die as a common harlot: ‘then, you will really understand what you are and how you've sinned’ (καὶ γνώσει τίς οὖσ’ ἡμάρτανες).Footnote ⁴² Ironically, only Chrysis knows that she has not sinned, and that her actions aimed at saving Demeas’ grandchild have now turned Demeas into an unjust man, who will issue his own death sentence when he finds out how greatly he has misperceived the situation.Footnote ⁴³

Chrysis’ forbearance and silence before her unjust judge point to the second stage of Menander's comic soteriology: the ability of love to endure all things and lead to reconciliation. Agapic reconciliation is a major theme for Paul in the Corinthian correspondence – particularly in 2 Corinthians. The one occurrence of the verb καταλλάσσω in 1 Corinthians is fitting to the situation between Demeas and Chrysis (again, making adjustments for Chrysis’ odd position as a γαμετὴ ἑταίρα):

Just as Paul's advice to young lovers in 1 Cor 7.36 might have been issued to Moschion, his paraenesis in 1 Cor 7.11 seems uncannily suited to Demeas and his questions about putting Chrysis away.

When Paul turns from his second (1 Cor 5.1–11.1) to his third (1 Cor 11.2–14.40) series of proofs in the deliberative case for the end of schism in the Corinthian household, he describes just how such unifying work may happen, through the spiritual gift of love:

In addition to completing the theological virtues of faith and hope, love's role in 1 Corinthians is to cover, to hide and to keep secret – and to endure the consequences of such protection. This description seems aptly to describe the self-sacrificial love of Chrysis for Moschion, Plangon and their child in the Samia. Menander's diction confirms this insight in the words that Chrysis speaks to Moschion as they hatch their comic plot:

Demeas cannot see the hidden love at work in Chrysis’ actions. Menander highlights the dramatic irony of this situation, as Demeas taunts the ejected Chrysis:

Although smitten by this tragic blindness, Demeas retains a sense that some divinity is watching out for him: ‘Chance is, as it seems, a kind of god. It saves and cares for many invisible things.’Footnote ⁴⁸ Ironically, it is Chrysis who is the instrumental cause of the providence overseeing the fortunes of Demeas’ family. She is the Christ figure of Menander's drama, a Hellenistic Hermione avant le lettre.

To suggest this continuity between Menander's agapic ethic and Paul's is not to simply elide them. As in the case of the marriage advice in 1 Cor 7, so Paul's agapic ethic in 1 Cor 13 is not, as Karl Barth notes, merely a counsel to a ‘saving step backward into the orderly limits of a healthy bourgeois religious moderation’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Paul clearly sublimates such an ethic within a christological, eschatological framework. Such a sublimation, however, reveals a real continuity between Menander's ethics and Paul's. Rather than rejecting this dramatic openness to ἀγάπη and the numinous as insufficiently transcendent, Paul makes full use of it as an opportunity to engage the cultured Corinthians. In both Menander and 1 Corinthians, love that covers sins and endures all things is the virtue required to reach a comic ending.

4. 1 Cor 15.29–34: Aphoristic Argumentation, Comic Endings and the Rhetoric of Resurrection

If 1 Cor 5.1–11.1 contains a number of comic type scenes that initiate a dramatic action and 1 Cor 11.2–14.40 details the means of living with tragic (sinful) potentialities in the meanwhile, in 1 Cor 15 Paul expresses his epistolary equivalent of a comic resolution. Given that the letter is a piece of deliberative rhetoric rather than a comedy, the question of whether a comic ending will actually be reached between the warring factions within the Corinthian household necessarily awaits the reception of the letter. Paul's rhetoric expresses the firm hope that it will.

Within this broader argument for belief in the resurrection, 1 Cor 15.29–34 – the pericope in which Paul's citation of Menander's Thais occurs – sits uneasily. One recent interpreter finds this passage so foreign to Paul's thought as to suggest that it is a later interpolation.Footnote ⁵⁰ While such an extreme proposal is likely to garner few adherents, it reveals past interpreters’ perplexity with this locus and their inability to situate Paul's citation of Menander within a broader rhetorical strategy.

1 Cor 15.29–34 is seen by many commentators as an ad hominem amplification of the concerns expressed in 1 Cor 15.17–18.Footnote ⁵¹ So fiery is Paul's tone that Johannes Weiss even wonders if Paul has grabbed the quill and penned this pericope himself.Footnote ⁵² Most commentators attribute Paul's citation of Menander in 1 Cor 15.33 to a similar impetuousness. Gordon Fee, for example, writes:

Anthony Thiselton offers a similar appraisal of these verses’ theological merit, and an only slightly less thin account of why Paul quotes Menander.Footnote ⁵⁴ The implicit suggestion of both commentators is that the content of this aphorism seems to ‘fit’. Fee's further suggestion, that ‘it may be that [the Menander quotation] is simply a matter of style’,Footnote ⁵⁵ is forced and circular.

The reticence of Fee and Thiselton to press this quotation of Menander into further service in the interpretation of 1 Corinthians stems from observations about the popularisation of Menander in the Hellenistic period. As Fee writes, ‘one should not make too much of Paul's own acquaintance with such [dramatic] literature from this quotation, since it had become a popular epigram by the time of Paul’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Thiselton shows similar reserve, but more openness to Paul's knowledge of Menander: ‘Paul may have heard it cited more than once as a maxim, and we may infer neither knowledge nor ignorance of Greek literature on Paul's part from this quotation.’Footnote ⁵⁷

The opinion of German commentators on the provenance of Paul's quotation is likewise mixed. Weiss seems confident that the quotation is from Menander. Paul did not know the plays from the theatre, but may have known the quotation from his school days.Footnote ⁵⁸ Weiss suggests that Paul may even have known the metre of Menander, in spite of his citation of the less metrical form χρηστά instead of the more metrical, elided form, χρησθ’. One might write the maxim longhand, but pronounces the elision.Footnote ⁵⁹ Wolfgang Schrage gives a more aporetic judgement reminiscent of Thiselton. Citing the work of Robert Renehan, Schrage suggests that the quotation may be from Menander or Euripides, and consequently that Paul's referent must ‘remain open’ (‘offenbleiben muß’).Footnote ⁶⁰

One discerns in these commentaries a clear spectrum of critical judgements on the provenance of Paul's quotation: whereas all commentators acknowledge the proverbial status of this saying in the first century, (1) Fee argues against Paul's reference to Menander; (2) Thiselton and Schrage, drawing on the insights of Jerome and Tertullian, leave this issue open; (3) Weiss thinks a reference to Menander is intentional.

Helpful in assessing these three options is Abraham Malherbe's 1968 article, ‘The Beasts at Ephesus’.Footnote ⁶¹ While Malherbe suggests that the Menander quotation ‘need not suggest that Paul had extensive knowledge of Greek literature’, he never rules this out either.Footnote ⁶² Malherbe offers several arguments that tip the scales in favour of Weiss’s position – that Paul intends the quotation to be from Menander.Footnote ⁶³ First, with regard to 1 Cor 15.32a (‘If for merely human ends I fought with beasts at Ephesus, what gain would I have from it?’), Malherbe points out that Paul may here allude to Heracles – the Cynic–Stoic exemplar who was also called θηρομάχος.Footnote ⁶⁴ Recent scholarship on Heracles in the New Testament has emphasised that Heracles was a figure equally at home in comedy and tragedy – and that he is a figure both of gluttony and of Stoic self-control.Footnote ⁶⁵ Such a connection with the stage suggests a dramatic as well as a philosophical framework for this pericope. Second, noting the ‘Epicurean’ character of the Isaiah quotation in 1 Cor 15.32b, Malherbe draws attention to the fact that ‘Menander himself had been a fellow student of Epicurus at Athens’. Paul's use of Menander is thus either a well-tuned irony (if Menander is seen as following Epicurus) or, alternatively, a recognition of Menander's potential peripatetic criticism of Epicurus.Footnote ⁶⁶ Either way, the Epicurean overtones of 1 Cor 15.32b suggest Menander as the likely source of the iambic trimeter.

While Malherbe begins to recognise the dramatic contours of the pericope in which the citation of Menander is situated, what he and the other commentators miss is the relationship of 1 Cor 15.33 to the comic rhetoric of 1 Cor 5–15 more generally. Keeping our focus on 1 Cor 15.29–34 for the moment, there are several additional comic tropes that emerge from a close reading. First, Paul presents his own apostolic sufferings in a dramatic fashion:

The physical danger Paul willingly endures for the sake of his Corinthian brothers is not unlike that endured by Chrysis. Paul's use of the phrase ‘by your boast’ (νὴ τὴν ὑμετέραν καύχησιν) adds a particular comic tone, as the particle νή – used by Paul only here in his letters – is frequently used by Menander.Footnote ⁶⁸

The most salient rhetorical connection between Paul and Menander is the quotation of a maxim itself. At this point – and in light of the foregoing study of 1 Cor 5–6, 7 and 13 – one can see a clear overlap between Paul's rhetoric and that of Menandrian comedy, not merely on the level of topoi and ethical concerns, but at the level of persuasive technique. Paul's quotation of the Menandrian aphorism in 1 Cor 15.33b, ‘bad company corrupts good morals’, not only cites Menander as an authority, but imitates the comic rhetoric of many Menandrian characters.Footnote ⁶⁹ By adopting Menandrian rhetoric, Paul sets himself and the Corinthians within a dramatic scenario, in which Paul plays the role of a concerned older family member trying to effect a comic ending to the troubles in his household.Footnote ⁷⁰ As mentioned by Fee, the maxim Paul cites in 1 Cor 15.33 recalls the similar aphorism at the beginning of 1 Cor 5–15 in the discussion of πορνεία: ‘Do you not know that a little yeast leavens the whole lump?’ (1 Cor 5.6b). As in the case with πορνεία, so now in the case of the resurrection, Paul suggests that there are certain behaviours and beliefs incompatible with the well-being of the family. The exclusion of certain people from the family is, nonetheless, only for a little while, ‘so that [their] spirit might be saved on the day of the Lord’ (1 Cor 5.5). To make this case, Paul draws rhetorically on both Jewish and non-Jewish maxims, in an effort to present his argument to both ‘Jews and Greeks’ (1 Cor 1.24; 12.13). Paul's argumentation by maxim and his use of Corinthians slogans thus emerges as a kind of comic rhetoric, employed especially in 1 Cor 5–15.

The chapter on the resurrection (1 Cor 15) also throws the distinction between Paul's and Menander's generic mixture of tragedy and comedy into stark relief. As was mentioned earlier, both New Comedy and the New Testament bear witness to a post-classical blending of the traditional division of genres according to subject matter. This point has been emphasised by Friedrich Nietzsche, who saw post-Euripidean tragedy degenerate into New Comedy and Platonic dialogue;Footnote ⁷¹ and by Auerbach, who saw the Hellenistic hybridisation of tragedy, comedy and history reach its zenith in the Gospels and Paul.Footnote ⁷² In certain respects, Menander fits within the Nietzschean genealogy. His down-to-earth situation comedies bring elements of tragedy onto the comic stage. The potential πορνεία between Moschion and Chrysis begets a Euripidean madness in Demeas, and elicits a comparison with Oedipus.Footnote ⁷³ But the tragic potentials in Menander remain mere potentials or appearances; all's well that ends well, and with the help of good fortune, the simply human love of Chrysis manages to reverse the tragedy and lead to the happy marriage of Moschion and Plangon. Menander's comic ending is achieved on this side of the grave.

Not so for Paul in 1 Corinthians. The divine comedy of Paul's Gospel hinges on the death of the god-man Jesus – a full realisation of the tragedy inherent in the Christ drama. One might say that while Menander's comedies are wounded by tragic potentials only to avoid them by the patronage of good fortune,Footnote ⁷⁴ the early Christian epistles are pierced through to the heart by the tragic in the historical death of Jesus. The tragicomic mode of 1 Cor 15 is thus both darker and brighter than the mode of Menander's comedies, approaching in certain respects the ‘pro-satyric’ mode of Euripides’ Alcestis.Footnote ⁷⁵ Particularly in the light of early Christian martyrdom, which Paul regularly risks and which others before him have suffered, there can be no possibility of rendering the Christian eucatastrophe (for either Christ or the saints in Corinth) without an ontological account of how the comic ending will be achieved. In Paul's case, a precondition for the rhetoric of agapic reconciliation in 1 Corinthians – and the Corinthian correspondence as a whole – is the faith, hope and rhetoric of the resurrection. It is for this reason that Paul, in 1 Cor 15, speaks not of a communal ministry of reconciliation (καταλλάσσειν; cf. 2 Cor 5.18) but of a physical and metaphysical transformation (ἀλλάσσειν). Resurrection is the first declension in the grammar of the divine comedy at Corinth.Footnote ⁷⁶ Without such a theological hope, Paul could not speak with the comic bravado of 1 Cor 15.33b. Then, it would not be just ‘good character’ at stake, and Christians would rightly recognise their place in a cosmic tragedy, as those who are ἐλεεινότεροι πάντων ἀνθρώπων (1 Cor 15.19).

5. The Divine Comedy at Corinth

Stepping back from this intertextual study of 1 Cor 5–15 and the Samia, we are now in a position to draw some conclusions about the implications of this study for 1 Corinthians as a whole. First, while accepting Mitchell's argument that 1 Corinthians in its canonical form may best be described as ‘deliberative’ when viewed from the perspective of Greek oratory, to characterise 1 Corinthians as a string of ‘political’ topics does not provide a complete account of Paul's rhetoric in the letter.Footnote ⁷⁷ As previous studies have demonstrated, Paul also draws on elements of philosophical diatribe, textual commentary and inheritance law to construct a new epistolary rhetoric.Footnote ⁷⁸ The present study suggests that in addition to these influences, classical drama needs to be weighed as a component contributing to Paul's epistolary achievement.Footnote ⁷⁹ In the case of 1 Corinthians, this study demonstrates how many of the topoi in 1 Cor 5–15 are reminiscent of type-scenes and motifs in Greek New Comedy. Such resonances would have been clear to Paul's Corinthian hearers, and contribute significantly to the pathos of the letter.

Second, this study breaks new ground in the dramatic analysis of Paul's letters by demonstrating that not only tragedy, but also Greek New Comedy, shaped the dramatic modality of the Pauline letters. Paul is not only Paulus tragicus, as Friesen has rightly claimed; he is also Paulus comicus – with 1 Corinthians being potentially his most comic letter. It is striking that the new comedic echoes in Paul's letters have been found most extensively in 1 Cor 5–15, whereas 1 Cor 1–4 seems to represent a blend of tragedy and mime. The dramatic analysis of this letter thus reopens – but does not settle – the question of the rhetorical and compositional unity of the letter, which has classically posited a source division at precisely this juncture in the text.Footnote ⁸⁰

Finally, this comic redescription of 1 Cor 5–15 gives a new frame of reference from which to view the famous debate between Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann about the theological ‘peak’ or ‘climax’ of the canonical letter.Footnote ⁸¹ In a certain way, this new comedic reading of 1 Corinthians splits the difference between Barth and Bultmann, affirming aspects of both of their interpretations and potentially ending the factionalism between their followers. 1 Cor 13 and 15 both feature prominently in Paul's comic rhetoric. Barth's insistence that to speak of a love that never fails (1 Cor 13.8) is already to speak of ‘a great passing away of all those things that are not love, once more death’ provides a check to Bultmann's ‘this-worldly’ reading of the epistle.Footnote ⁸² In Barth's words, ‘in chapter xiii we already find ourselves in the midst of eschatology’.Footnote ⁸³ Conversely, Bultmann is right to call attention to the ethical ramifications of Paul's eschatology for the here and now – a point driven home by the close analogies between Pauline and Menandrian ethics charted in this paper. 1 Cor 15.32–3 lifts up this unison between faith and hope (Barth) on the one hand, and love (Bultmann) on the other.Footnote ⁸⁴ Given that the possibility of a comic ending in 1 Corinthians is tied by Paul to the resurrection, 1 Cor 15 remains the more important proof. The call to somatic restoration (καταρτίζεσθαι, 1 Cor 1.10), which Mitchell suggests is the ‘thesis’ of the letter, and the comic resolution of all the various divisions in the Corinthian body require a rhetoric and theology of resurrection.

As the existence of 2 Corinthians demonstrates, the churches in Corinth were not wholly persuaded by Paul's new comedic rhetoric in 1 Corinthians. Old schisms continued to fester, even as new opponents turned the Corinthians’ attention to the weaknesses of the apostle himself. The complete story of the ‘divine comedy’ at Corinth would require an epilogue – a study of 2 Corinthians, where Paul rearticulates the tragic face of his new comedic portraiture to address ongoing family quarrels in the ecclesial household. It is in 2 Corinthians that we witness the full transformation of the rhetoric of resurrection into the rhetoric of reconciliation.