What Was Corinth Like?

02-04-2018Weekly Reflection

We’re reading St. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians these days. What was Corinth like? It had a beautiful setting on an isthmus, about fifty miles from Athens. The location makes for very easy exchange by sea routes between Greece and Italy, a factor in its economic success even today. In Paul’s day it was a cosmopolitan and wealthy city with inhabitants drawn from all over the world, including a sizeable Jewish community.

When Paul arrived about the year 50, the city was only about a century old, but already five times the size of Athens. Paul lived in Corinth for a year and a half, and a few years later came back for three months. The community of Christians there struggled against the influence of a very secular and self-indulgent society that was blind to the plight of the poor. Pagan attitudes afflicted the community, which had a way of breaking Paul’s heart; he wrote to them sometimes “with many tears” (2 Corinthians 2:4).

Today, Corinth is a small industrial city. Its historic core has been destroyed by a series of earthquakes over the centuries, and what little remained was totally obliterated in a war with Turkey in the 1820s. There’s a core city with glamorous shops to catch the tourists, but it is mainly a cargo port, with piles of marble, tiles, and minerals everywhere, a huge oil refinery nearby, a busy canal, a modern fast rail line to Athens, and a meeting point of major highways. Today, the remains of the Temple of Apollo and the marketplace are more ruined than most such sites. The glory of the city Paul knew well has faded, but the relevance of his words shines through the centuries.