Korynt w epoce Pawła Apostoła

Abstract

Paul visited Corinth times in the fifties of the first century AD. At that time the town prospered. It was the capital of the Roman Senatorial Providence of Achaia, boasting the rank of one of the largest Greek towns and one of the leading metropolis of the Roman Empire. Thanks to the long-lasting archaeological research the layout of the city, its infrastructure and the life-style of the inhabitants of Corinth at the time of the Apostle have been well reconstructed. The large number of excavated monuments include numerous objects, directly or indirectly, connected with the Apostle of the Nations. The first category includes a stone platform for the accused, upon which Paul stood during so-called Gallion Court, as well as bema, on which Gallion presided in his capacity as a judge. Equally important are the architectural in Corinth took place, particularly its threshold with the fragment of the identification inscription and the pavement, discovered near the Muncipal Theatre, with the name of Erastus, its founder, who was probably the Apostole's friend and the host of the Corinth church. The remains of workshops in which Paul the Apostle worked during his Corinth mission to earn his living as a maker of tents, testifying to the conditions of his work, as well the remains of butchery place of the so-called Northern Market, where meat, sometimes of the sacrificial origin was sold, which sheds a new light upon the problem of consumption of this kind of meat by Christmas. Considerable interest are the uncovered relics of the villa in Anaploga, providing a stunning example of a wealthy Corinthian house, which might canstitute the model of the layout had been produced and the Municipal Theatre, which explain the trem of sounding brass used by Paul in his „Hymn to Love”, as a bronze acoustic vase used for amplifying the voice in Greek theatres. On the other hand, the scant remains of the famous love goddess Aphrodite, which had been discovered, point at a controversial opinion about a more limited influence that previously thought, of the so-called sacral prostitiuton on the sexual promiscuity of the Corintians, deplored by Paul.