Money, Meals, and Honour: The Economic and Honorific Organization of the Corinthian Ekklesia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In standard portrayals of Paul’s Corinthian ekklesia, the Christ-group is said to have existed without the level of economic and honorific organization we know to have been rather generalized in Greco-Roman associations: it did not collect subscription fees, failed to appoint or elect temporary officers, and neglected presentation of formal honorific prizes to its service-providers (e.g., crowns, proclamations, honorific inscriptions). In contrast to ancient associations, the ekklesia, many scholars presently maintain with very little disagreement, had no true organization (Conzelmann, 1 Corinthians, 298), and its members shared a close relationship (Meeks, First Urban, 88) that is often described as ecclesiastical egalitarianism. \nThis dissertation offers a different perspective by setting the practices of the Corinthian Christ-group alongside practices that are much more fully known from Greco-Roman associations, and asks whether the structural features (economic and honorific) we know to have been common in Greco-Roman associations might also be evidenced in the Corinthian Christ-group. My argument is that the ekklesia was a structurally sophisticated group equipped with a common fund and a schedule for subscription fees, a hierarchy of elected temporary officers, and competition among members to perform services that would be reciprocated with crowns and other forms of formal commendation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".