1. Introduction: Presenting the Argument

Margaret Mitchell's Paul and the Rhetoric of Reconciliation and Dale Martin's The Corinthian Body have convincingly identified the paraenetic calls to unity in Greco-Roman rhetoric as the key source of Paul's social application of oneness language in 1 Corinthians 12.Footnote ¹ Challenging a long-standing trend in Pauline studies of dismissing disunity as a major theme of this epistle beyond chapters 1–4, Mitchell argues that factionalism is indisputably the overarching pastoral concern throughout the entire letter. From the rich linguistic fund of the socio-political discourse of his day, Paul appropriated standard devices from homonoia or concordia rhetoric – most notably the ‘body’ analogy – in an attempt to salvage a volatile church on the precipice of fragmentation:

Dale Martin's study reinforces the idea that Paul is reliant on this arena of discourse, drawing particular attention to the political connotations of status intrinsic to rhetoric figuring the ‘body’ as a social entity. The conservative ideology of Greco-Roman elites employed this body language to enforce a ‘benevolent patriarchalism’, which, as Martin explains, is a societal arrangement that yields social concord as long as plebeians accept their respective (and unmistakably subordinate) positions in the given hierarchy.Footnote ³ Paul redefines this hierarchy, to some degree inverting it, in an innovative attempt to create a more egalitarian social organism.Footnote ⁴

The purpose of this essay is not to discount Paul's indebtedness to the rhetorical strategies in Greco-Roman homonoia discourse in his loaded ecclesial phrase ‘one body’.Footnote ⁵ The aim, rather, is to suggest that, in his use of the term ‘one’ in that phrase, Paul is also drawing on another linguistic fund to which the Greco-Roman discourse material is, at times, secondary. At his conceptual disposal was also the Jewish monotheistic usage of the Shema's oneness that could be allocated for social as well as theological purposes.Footnote ⁶ The Christological appropriation of the Shema in 1 Corinthians 8.6 (‘one Lord’) is expanded in 1 Corinthians 12.1–13 to include both a pneumatological (‘one Spirit’) and an ecclesial use (‘one body’). Christological monotheism presupposes a corresponding ecclesiology.

I will begin the argument with a brief survey of Old Testament and early Jewish texts in which the theological meaning of ‘one’ is extended and imbued with semantic versatility for expressing a social identity of divine association, thus providing solid plausibility for the claim that the Shema – alongside Greco-Roman exhortations on social concord – underlies Paul's ecclesial use of the oneness concept.Footnote ⁷ Next, I will trace the development of Paul's references to the Shema in 1 Corinthians 8 and 10, the connotations of which are not suddenly jettisoned when Paul revisits oneness in chapter 12. In the third section, on 1 Corinthians 12.1–13, attention will be directed to the pneumatological use of the oneness theme and to the context of Paul's concerns over spiritual manifestations, indicated in v. 2 as the Corinthians' previous experiences of pagan religion. Though the exercise of these supernatural gifts contributed to the divisiveness plaguing this congregation, the appeal to oneness language in 12.1–13 is made not only to shore up unity, but also to ensure that the Corinthians' practice and understanding of inspired speech stand in contradistinction to the mantic practices common in pagan cult life, a contradistinction expressed efficiently by the Shema's anti-idolatrous language of oneness. The concluding section will show that the threefold use of ‘one’ designating the ecclesial body in 1 Corinthians 12.12–13 is an extension of the Shema denoting an ecclesiology of Christological monotheism.

2. ‘One God, One People’: The Social Functions of the Shema in the Old Testament and Early Jewish Literature

Though the early Jewish usage of the Shema was certainly not hermetically insulated from Hellenistic influences,Footnote ⁸ the term ‘one’ that repeatedly punctuates Paul's opening exhortations on spiritual gifts in 1 Corinthians 12 fundamentally derives from the theological heritage of Israel's worship of the ‘one’ God. Stephen Barton writes:

As Barton's claim implies, this monotheistic oneness language rooted in Deuteronomy 6.4 could effectively serve two social functions. As in the Greco-Roman political usage, the term ‘one’ from the Shema could be used to promote group unity, since cohesion and communal integrity reflected positively on the identity of the one God.Footnote ¹⁰ Paul surely had this unifying function in mind while writing 1 Corinthians 12. But for reasons that will soon become clear, the idea of group unity for Paul was grounded in the Shema's related but more elemental social function, that of establishing and enforcing boundary demarcation lines that preserved the uniqueness of the people of the one and only Deity.Footnote ¹¹ A complex multivalence can attend the ostensibly simple term ‘one’, necessitating meticulous exegetical care in determining how each instance fits within the wider text and co-text under consideration.Footnote ¹²

To express this dual sense of internal unity and external communal distinctiveness, the term ‘one’ from the Shema could take on associative properties by which a thing, place, a time or the Jewish people could be correlated with the ‘one’ God. A biblical precedent for this associative versatility of theological oneness is found in Jeremiah:Footnote ¹³

In this passage, the Shema's language of ‘all my heart and all my soul’, clearly echoing Deuteronomy 6.5, is voiced by God, and – according to the Hebrew text – Israel will have ‘one heart and one way’.Footnote ¹⁶ The theological oneness of Deuteronomy 6.4 is here applied to the social entity of Israel in what Gerald Janzen has called a ‘redistribution of the terms of the Shema’.Footnote ¹⁷

This extension of the oneness of God to include multiple referents is also found in Josephus and Philo, approximate contemporaries of Paul:

Though Josephus may be implying social unity in some way, his pairing of God's oneness with the oneness of the temple, altar and the Jewish people seems intended to emphasise an exclusive association that renders them, respectively, as a unique place, a unique cultic object and a unique social entity in the world.Footnote ²⁰

This associative range of theological oneness is also found in Philo. In the following excerpt, he attributes to the created world a uniqueness that is in some way correspondent to God's uniqueness:Footnote ²¹

Like Josephus, Philo correlates the singularity of the Jerusalem Temple with the singularity of God using the language of monotheistic oneness:Footnote ²³

In the following passages, it is clear that the divine oneness of God evokes the social unity and solidarity of the Jewish people:

These selections from the Old Testament and early Jewish literatureFootnote ²⁸ present themselves as an alternative – or at least as an additional – source for understanding the social implications of the term ‘one’ in early Christian texts (i.e. John 17.11, 21–2; Eph 4.4–6; et al.). Even so, few scholars have allowed the Shema's oneness as a rubric for group designation. Christopher Bruno has recently argued that the confession ‘God is one’ is tied to Paul's vision of Gentile inclusion in Romans 3 and Galatians 3,Footnote ²⁹ and in Gospel of Glory, Richard Bauckham explores connections between the Shema and social oneness in John's Gospel.Footnote ³⁰ But aside from some brief (yet incisive) comments by Wayne Meeks,Footnote ³¹ the Shema does not seem to inform scholarly readings of 1 Corinthians 12.

3. The Shema in 1 Corinthians 8.6 and 10.17: The ‘One Body’ and ‘One Bread’ of the ‘One God’ and ‘One Lord’

That the Shema is referenced in the opening of 1 Corinthians 8 is now widely accepted.Footnote ³² In what is viewed as a key text for ‘Christological monotheism’, Paul inserts Jesus within the classic Jewish expression of monotheistic faith. In the creedal sounding formula of 8.6, the titles θεός and κύριος are attributed to God and Jesus respectively, suggesting a joint participation in the divine identity. This instance of the Shema outstretches the capacities of association seen in the texts cited above: in none of those examples is the language of monotheistic oneness attributed to a lone individual.Footnote ³³ Drawing attention to the dramatic implications for an early high Christology is entirely warranted.

Readers or auditors should not be surprised, however, to encounter the Shema's oneness language being extended into 1 Corinthians 10 with the phrases ‘one bread’ and ‘one body’. The issue broached in 8.1 ‘concerning idol food’ – the topic Paul resumes discussing in 10.1 – requires detailing the implications of Christological monotheism for a distinct Christian group inhabiting an idolatrous religious environment. Though the composition of the Corinthian church is predominantly Gentile, Paul refers collectively to ‘our ancestors’ (οἱ πατέρες ἡμῶν) in 10.1 while making an appeal to the Exodus narrative, thereby identifying these former ἔθνη with Israel.Footnote ³⁴ In the Corinthian Christians' capacity as constituents of this unique social group of God's chosen people, boundary lines must be drawn and maintained amidst a society saturated with idolatry, an enterprise for which the Shema serves as the most natural and well-suited (Jewish) source of rhetoric.Footnote ³⁵

Having drawn from the Shema in 8.6 to identify ‘one God’ and ‘one Lord’ amidst many other (at least ‘so-called’) gods and lords, Paul also identifies in 10.17 the ‘one bread’ amidst many available cultic meals that is alone suitable for the ‘one body’, an ecclesial reference to the Corinthian church.Footnote ³⁶ Mitchell's treatment of this text is surely on target in observing that Paul ‘urges the Corinthians to be united because their cultic participation in the same rites stresses their fundamental κοινωνία with the same deity and thus with one another as co-worshipers of that deity …’;Footnote ³⁷ but this reading would be enriched by an acknowledgment of the Shema's overtones in the phrases ‘one bread’ and ‘one body’ that indicate a call to social distinctiveness premised on Jewish theology as well as a call to internal social harmony premised on the rhetoric of homonoia discourse.Footnote ³⁸ Paul will address disunity over the eucharistic feast in chapter 11 (‘there are divisions among you’, 11.18), and it is certainly true that the eating of idol food by the ‘strong’ is divisive (‘take care that this liberty of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak’, 8.9); but in the multivalence of the term ‘one’, the context suggests that the immediate concern addressed by Paul's application of oneness here in chapter 10 is not the church's failure to be socially unified but its failure to be socially unique. It is with the exhortation ‘flee from idolatry’ in 10.14 that Paul refers to ‘one bread’ and ‘one body’, not with an exhortation similar to ‘be united [κατηρτισμένοι]’ as in 1.10.Footnote ³⁹

Acknowledging the Shema as a premise of oneness terminology allows us to trace more accurately the nuances of Paul's logic. Though ‘the strong’ in the church are partially warranted in their dismissiveness of other gods and other lords, cultic feasts are nonetheless participatory events; and as for the Christians in idolatrous Corinth – members of the ‘one body’ of the ‘one Lord’ – they can only be partakers of ‘one bread’. The versatility of the Shema's oneness language is here deployed, signalling an association between the oneness of God and Jesus and the distinctiveness of the Eucharist and of the social body that performs it as a ritual meal. Social harmony is undeniably an implicit ramification of Paul's argument here; but again, the dominating connotation of oneness in 10.17 is uniqueness expressed in exclusivity of worship more than unity expressed in a collectively harmonious rapport. In his typological use of the Exodus narrative the indictments levelled against ‘Israel according to the flesh’ (10.18) are idolatry, sexual immorality, testing Christ and grumbling (10.7–10) – internal disunity is not listed. In spite of Israel's baptism in Moses through cloud and sea, in spite of their typlogical eucharistic meal in the wilderness, the forbears of the Corinthian church failed to uphold their distinctive identity as a newly formed society. For Paul, this social uniqueness is sourced in the divine identity shared by the one God and the one Lord, Jesus Christ, who is embodied in the church's derivative group identity (‘one body’) and corresponding cultic eating practices (‘one bread’). Just as Josephus can refer in the same line of argument to ‘one holy city’, ‘one temple’ and ‘one altar’ on the basis that ‘God is one and the Hebrew race is one’ (Ant. 4.200–1), so Paul can refer to the ‘one body’, previously designated as a temple in chapter 6, who collectively partake of the ‘one bread’ of the ‘one God, the Father’ and the ‘one Lord, Jesus Christ.’

4. The Shema and the ‘One Spirit’ in 1 Corinthians 12.1–13: Inspired Speech in Christian Worship and Pagan Religion

The clarification has been made that I am not dismissing the rhetorical strategies and themes of Greco-Roman homonoia speeches as sources for Paul's use of the body metaphor. In chapter 12, to which we now turn, Paul explains that the Spirit's work in their collective midst is ‘for the common good’ (πρὸς τὸ συμφέρον), a phrase at home in that rhetoric.Footnote ⁴⁰ He urges ‘that there may be no σχίσμα within the body’ (v. 25), and his appealing for this purpose to the widely recognised trope of a body's various parts constituting a whole makes virtually incontrovertible sense. But as repeatedly acknowledged, oneness terminology can bear multiple layers of meaning discernible only by immediate contexts or interweaving lines of argument. My claim here is that any reading of 1 Corinthians 12 would be short-sighted if the resonances of the Shema from chapters 8 and 10 are exegetically ignored in Paul's use of the oneness motif.Footnote ⁴¹ The apostle is not simply promoting internal harmony for a church that enforces status distinctions on the basis of their use of inspired speech; once again, he is simultaneously calling for a social distinctiveness premised on an allegiance to and experience of the one God and one Lord whose one Spirit is active in their midst. Social harmony will indeed become the primary focus of the oneness theme beginning in 1 Corinthians 12.14–15 when Paul avails himself of the idea's semantic scope for expressing unity amidst diversity; but in 1 Corinthians 12.1–13 the thematic emphasis lies on uniqueness and contradistinction for which the rhetoric of monotheistic oneness is eminently serviceable.Footnote ⁴² To understand the ecclesial application of the Shema in the ‘one body’ language found in vv. 12–13, we now consider how the Shema informs Paul's construct of the ‘one Spirit’ in the early movements of 1 Corinthians 12.

Paul launches his entire discussion concerning τῶν πνευματικῶν with a reference to the Corinthian Christians' previous experience of pagan religion when they existed in their former social category as ἔθνη: ‘you know that when you were Gentiles you were enticed and led astray to voiceless idols. Therefore [διό] I want to make known to you …’ (12.2–3a). Though his treatment of spiritual gifts eventually entails a call to ecclesial unity, the entire discussion begins with a reference to prior idolatrous experiences. In spite of having been mystically resocialised into a new group – namely, that of the church of the one God and one Lord – these Corinthian Christians are inevitably burdened with religious baggage from their pasts complicating and potentially distorting their understanding of the supernatural phenomena occurring in their worship. Paul's comment should be noted in 8.7, ‘Since some have become so accustomed to idols until now, they still think of the food they eat as food offered to an idol.’ If these Corinthians' former religious devotions are still bound up with practices as commonplace and fundamental as eating, then the residual impact of their erstwhile experiences of idolatry are surely also bound up with the corporate experience of miracles and divinely inspired speech acts. That Paul is staging his discussion on spiritual manifestations with a contrast between idolatrous religion and ecclesial practice is uncontroversial and widely acknowledged; my point is to show presently how the oneness language of the Shema functions in the unfolding argument.

When Paul makes his initial references to oneness in chapter 12, this is in the context of the Spirit in relation to God and the Lord (who were paired together as ‘one’ in 8.6). A contrast is being made between the divine beings associated with idol worship and the ‘one’ Spirit of God and the Lord. In 12.2 idols are labelled as ‘voiceless’ (a standard derogation of pagan religion in Jewish polemicFootnote ⁴³ ), but Paul has already made clear that there are many spirits in the world whom he negatively labels as ‘demons’ (10.20–1). A cosmos populated with such a diverse variety of spiritual beings necessitates the ‘discernment of spirits', one of the spiritual gifts listed in 12.10: there are ‘spirits’, and there is ‘the one Spirit’. In a religious climate accustomed to the oracular communications of supernatural entities in the cultural soundscape (however silent their material representations may have been), Paul seeks to avoid any confusion over the diverse miscellany of supernatural manifestations in the Corinthian church. If these phenomena are grounded in the confession of Jesus as Lord, then, in spite of the potentially confusing variety (διαίρεσις), each of them is sourced in the Spirit of the same Lord and the same God who have been designated in 8.6 with the rubric ‘one’ from the Shema. This oneness of divine association therefore is being extended in chapter 12 to include the Spirit (a move perhaps less controversial than its Christological application in chapter 8). As Stephen Chester has argued, the Corinthian Christians would very likely have associated the act of baptism in the Spirit mentioned in 12.13 with the experiential initiation rites of mystery cults.Footnote ⁴⁴ The designation ‘one’ clarifies that the spiritual entity at the heart of Christian baptism is the Spirit of the ‘one’ God of Israel. The point, therefore, of Paul's opening treatment of spiritual manifestations where the oneness theme resurfaces is to draw a sharp comparison between the ‘one Spirit’ operative in authentic Christ-worship and the possible manifestations of other (malign) spirits that could be active in idol worship. Though the miraculous and oracular activity is diverse in form and appearance, it is nonetheless empowered by the ‘one and the same Spirit’ (v. 11) of the one God and one Lord of the Shema. The Corinthians' practice and self-understanding of inspired glossolalia and prophecy, therefore, must be regarded as categorically distinct from the mantic activities in idolatrous religion and resulting in the confession ‘Jesus is Lord’ (v. 3).

The early Jewish rhetoric of the Shema is as suitable a corrective to Greco-Roman idolatry as the rhetoric of homonoia speeches is suitable for addressing a potentially schismatic community. Both intentions are at play in the polysemy of ‘one’, with varied degrees of resonance, throughout 1 Corinthians 12 even though the Jewish theological usage is hardly noticed in current scholarship. Mitchell regularly cites Plutarch (writing in the late first or early second century ce) to demonstrate Paul's own reliance on political discourse for his use of body language. But Plutarch also uses body language to explain oracular speech. The parallels are by no means exact: the ‘body’ under discussion in the passage cited below is that of the priestess during the moment of inspiration, rather than a collective metaphorical expression. Even so, Paul's collective use of the body imagery to describe inspired speech in the Corinthian church is quite resonant with Plutarch's when the character Theon urges his hearers to recall

Because Apollo ‘neither tells nor conceals, but indicates',Footnote ⁴⁶ this further description of Delphic oracular inspiration is provided:

In continuation of the same discussion, Theon appeals to the authority of Homer in language that strongly resonates with Paul in 1 Corinthians 12:

Using similar language, Plutarch and Paul are both communicating that diversity of expression is sourced in the same divine power. For Paul, the spiritual being behind the speech acts in the Corinthians' worship is the one God of Israel's scriptural testimony. What is also clear from these texts is that Plutarch can use body language just as freely to explain the operations behind inspired speech acts as to argue for concord.

Though Paul denigrates idols as ‘voiceless’ in 1 Corinthians 12.2, ‘oracles and divination played a regular and significant role in the lives of Greeks and Romans from earliest times down to the triumph of Christianity over competing pagan religions in the fourth century ad’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Divine communication was primarily associated with oracles,Footnote ⁵¹ but it was not restricted to the professional muses in localised shrines: ‘prophetic persons were to be found everywhere, in the cities, the countryside, in every cultural zone of the Empire’.Footnote ⁵² It is in light of the Corinthian church's familiarity with these ongoing activities of idolatrous religious life that Paul employs the weightiest language at his disposal as a Diaspora Jew for drawing social boundary lines, that of the oneness of the Shema. The idea of drinking from the ‘one Spirit’ (πάντες ἕν πνεῦμα ἐποτίσθημεν) may well be intended to reinforce Paul's point that the spiritual manifestations in the Corinthian church's worship are sourced not in any other divine being but in the one and only Spirit of God and the Christ: the association between drinking and mantic inspiration was so widespread that Robin Lane Fox writes, ‘wherever there was water, indeed, there was a possible source of prophecy’.Footnote ⁵³ The comment in 1 Corinthians 12.2 referring to a not too distant past ‘when you were Gentiles … enticed and led astray to voiceless idols’ indicates Paul's insistence that the spiritual manifestations and divine speech acts in the Corinthian church be construed as sourced in the Holy Spirit and leading to the corporate confession ‘Jesus is Lord’. The oneness language in the opening of 1 Corinthians 12, therefore, is more grounded in the boundary-marking functionality of the Shema than in the homonoia speeches so familiar within Greco-Roman civic life.

5. Conclusion: The ‘One Body’ in 1 Corinthians 12.12–13 as an Ecclesial Application of the Shema

Beginning in 1 Cor 12.14–15, Paul's argument will shift more weight in the direction of a call for internal social harmony in a discussion that does seem more reliant on homonoia-related themes.Footnote ⁵⁴ But the connotations of the Shema discussed above in the phrase ‘one and the same Spirit’ in v. 11 are not to be eviscerated from the immediately following ecclesial phrase ‘one body’ in vv. 12–13.Footnote ⁵⁵ The Shema's language of oneness extends not just Christologically as in 8.6 and pneumatologically as in 12.4–11, but also ecclesiologically in 12.12–13. The majority of interpreters, relying almost entirely on the genre of Greco-Roman socio-political discourse to understand Paul's body metaphor, miss a profound ecclesial application of the Shema. The church's unity is certainly at stake in Paul's line of argument here, but the resonances of the Shema's enforcement of social distinctiveness do not fade from view with the appearance of the ‘one body’ language. After all, the ‘one body’ is ultimately the body of Christ, the ‘one Lord’ (1 Corinthians 12.27).

The outfacing uniqueness of the community in contradistinction to Greco-Roman religious norms is as significant a pastoral concern as inward unity; and again, this uniqueness (and likewise also the unity) is principally founded on the singularity of the one God and Christ (and their one Spirit) of Christological monotheism. Though diversity abounds with each member of the body entrusted with different spiritual gifts, deriving from diverse social backgrounds (‘whether slaves or freedmen’, v. 13), and even representing different ethnicities (‘whether Jews or Greeks’, v. 13), the Corinthian believers constitute a distinct group identified with the one God of Israel's religious heritage, a heritage now reconfigured through Christ. By implication, the members of this social entity must learn to operate in harmony, a vision we have noted as entirely compatible with the semantic range available to monotheistic oneness rhetoric in early Judaism. When Paul takes up the plea for internal unity in spite of constitutive diversity in v. 15, it is after having signalled that its basis is found in the responsibility to reflect in the Corinthians’ social embodiment the oneness, that is the singularity, of the one God and one Lord they worship, as well as the one Spirit from which they ‘drink’.

Though more could be said, this essay has argued that the Christological monotheism of 1 Corinthians envisions an ecclesiology. In his extension of the Shema into the phrase ‘one body’, Paul is affirming the emergence of a new social construct of a people bound to the scriptural traditions and theological heritage of the Jews, but distinct from those Jews because they embrace Jesus not only as Messiah, but also as somehow comprised within the divine identity. Paul's ecclesiology of the Shema draws boundary lines between these Christ-confessing Jews and ethnically Gentile Corinthians who have together been resocialised into a new communal sphere: the one body of the one God, one Lord and one Spirit. The Shema is no less fitting for the subject matter Paul must pastorally address in 1 Corinthians 12–14 than the homonoia themes common to the civic discourse of his day.