Biblical Views: Sacred Meat

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Income inequality. As a commentator from the radio show Marketplace declares, it’s “not the sexiest of subjects.” But it’s a topic that interests the many who watched a six-minute video-gone-viral about wealth and income inequality in the United States (www.marketplace.org/topics/wealth-poverty/surprise-viral-hit-income-inequality-movie).

Income inequality existed in the Roman world, too. Roman economic historians debate whether 99 percent or 96 percent lived at or below subsistence level—that is, their lives were “dominated by the struggle for physical survival,” and they spent their lives primarily concerned with obtaining “the minimum food, shelter and clothing necessary to sustain life.”¹

Did the communities to which Paul wrote, the earliest Christ followers (we can’t even call them Christians yet since the term “Christian” emerges around 50 years later) care about income inequality or slavery? Didn’t they think that the end of the world was coming? If so, why care about wealth or hunger or humans being bought and sold? Why bother messing with a tragically broken, even evil, age that was about to pass away, with Jesus coming in the clouds (1 Thessalonians 4:14–17)?

Paul’s letters, the earliest texts in the New Testament, show that these communities—and Paul himself—were deeply concerned with wealth and poverty. For example, in two fund-raising letters (2 Corinthians 8 and 9), Paul identifies one of the goals of fund-raising as the relief of extreme poverty. Paul even uses the image of Jesus’ divesting himself of wealth (2 Corinthians 8:9) to bring home a very real and material message: Even out of your poverty, give.

In 1 Corinthians 11:22 Paul suggests that humiliating “those who have nothing” is equivalent to despising “the church of God.”² Hunger and access to food are concrete, material issues—and this brings us to Corinth’s marketplace or meat market (makellon in Greek) referred to in 1 Corinthians 10:25.

Those who lived in first-century C.E. Roman Corinth were thinking about the marketplace and about markets. In 146 B.C.E. the Roman general Mummius had largely destroyed this ancient Greek city. When Julius Caesar established a Roman colony here in 44 B.C.E., it was populated not by Roman veterans but by freedpersons—former slaves. Caesar allowed them to hold civic office. Many of them probably took on the role of businessmen, negotiatores. From a city that stood between two important ports, Lechaion and Kenchreai, they engaged in commerce for themselves and likely on behalf of their wealthy former masters, who did not engage directly in commerce.

“Eat whatever is sold in the makellon,” write Paul and Sosthenes, “without questioning anything on account of conscience” (1 Corinthians 10:25). But they also go on to say, “If someone should tell you: This is hierothyton [sacrificial meat], do not eat on account of the one who told you and on account of conscience” (10:28). What might Corinthians have known about meat markets?

Archaeological evidence from Corinth doesn’t tell us much about the makellon there, although a fragmentary early first-century inscription lets us know that there was one. Archaeological evidence elsewhere shows that many populous cities in the Roman Empire had a purpose-built market; these sometimes contained areas for butchery and often contained a small temple to a god, often Mercury or Hermes, the god of commerce.³ Meat and religion were linked.

The Corinthians would have known that meat was expensive, and there are indications that sacrificed meat was even more expensive. Literary references and isotopic analyses of ancient bones indicate that the majority of people subsisted on grains and legumes. By looking at physical evidence from the Roman world, we recognize that, unlike our grocery stores, the markets of the ancient world combined food sale and religion; like our grocery stores, some kinds of food were unaffordable for some people. The new community in Christ had to think carefully about eating. They had to consider how to eat when they and/or others in their community had limited access to food, how to eat when participation at a table might offend another and how eating and religious life were inextricably connected.

First Corinthians not only brings the populace into the meat market but also into the slave market. Twice in 1 Corinthians Paul tells those in the Corinthian ekklēsia (church), “You were bought with a price” (1 Corinthians 6:20a; 7:23a). In 1 Corinthians 7:22–23 we also find the only use in the New Testament of the technical Greek word for a freed slave, a freedperson (apeleutheros): “For he who was called in the Lord as a slave is a freedperson of the Lord. Likewise he who was free when called is a slave of Christ. Were you bought with a price? Do not become slaves of humans.”

Corinth was a colony largely founded by former slaves; I don’t think the appearance of the term in 068 this letter is coincidental. We can wonder: Would slaves within the community at Corinth have been offended or pleased at Paul’s words? What about masters? What about those who remembered the cost—literally—of buying their emancipation, something that we know from manumission inscriptions at Delphi to have been increasingly expensive?⁴

Ancient cities probably didn’t have buildings erected or renovated specifically for selling slaves, as there were in antebellum New Orleans or the Ottoman-era slave markets of Istanbul.⁵ In the case of Roman Corinth, neither the location of the makellon nor of the slave trade is clear. If we turn to the city of Ephesus, however, from which Paul likely wrote 1 Corinthians, we find a statue base that honored the proconsul of Asia (42/43 C.E.), C. Sallustius Crispus Passienus, for his role as “a patron of those who do business in the slave market.” This statue base was found in the vicinity of the Tetragonos Agora, the prime shopping location linked to the harbor by a road that ran north-south and lay to the east of the Arkadian way. In around 100 C.E., the Ephesians also honored Tiberius Claudius Secundus, a slave-trader who was himself a former slave.⁶ In Ephesus, slaves were in the market and were on the market.

While interpreters of 1 Corinthians usually conclude that we should interpret references to the market and what one can eat in 1 Corinthians literally, often the words “slavery” and “freedom” are read as metaphorical. When we think about the archaeological context of 1 Corinthians, and when we think of the real material conditions in which many in Roman Corinth lived, we are reminded that people were bought, sold and owned, including people who would have made up the earliest ekklēsia at Corinth. Whether slaves, free or freedpersons, the hearers of this letter are provoked to consider their monetary value, to think about themselves as things or commodities that God has purchased in the market.⁷ So too we’re reminded that the market of Roman Corinth was a space in which religion was present, and income inequality was also evident in what you could or couldn’t afford.

We can well imagine that different people in the ekklēsia at Corinth may have had different reactions to Paul’s complex and sometimes unclear comments on market food and on slavery. What is clear is that they, perhaps like us, were thinking about their place as commodities and as consumers, as implicated in the market.

Income inequality. As a commentator from the radio show Marketplace declares, it’s “not the sexiest of subjects.” But it’s a topic that interests the many who watched a six-minute video-gone-viral about wealth and income inequality in the United States (www.marketplace.org/topics/wealth-poverty/surprise-viral-hit-income-inequality-movie). Income inequality existed in the Roman world, too. Roman economic historians debate whether 99 percent or 96 percent lived at or below subsistence level—that is, their lives were “dominated by the struggle for physical survival,” and they spent their lives primarily concerned with obtaining “the minimum food, shelter and clothing necessary to sustain life.”1 Did the communities to which […]