Testing Christ
The transgression of verse 9, putting Christ to the test,
continues the portrait of ancestral unfaithfulness, but with startling
language. The manuscript evidence is divided on whether or not
"Christ" is the one who is put to the test. The earliest witness
(p46) and a number of others read "Christ." Other witnesses, often
deemed reliable, vary on this issue. Codex Alexandrinus includes θεον, and Codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus κυριον. These later variations echo Israel's
scriptures and are probably harmonizing. Putting the Lord to the test recalls
the destruction of some by serpents in Numbers 21. The people complain against
the Lord's provision in the wilderness, and God sends poisonous snakes to
plague them (Num 21:6-7; 1 Cor 10:9). Realizing that the snakes were sent by
God, the people tell Moses that they are being punished for speaking against
the Lord (Num 21:6-7). Furthermore, the retellings of exodus traditions in
Psalms 78 and 106 both equate the actions of the Israelites as putting God to
the test (Ps 78:18, 41, 56; 106:14; cf. 78:8, 37). Based on Paul's allusions to
Israel's exodus traditions, there is rationale for conforming Paul's language
to these exodus traditions and deliberately recalling the people's testing of
the Lord. As Metzger argues, "The difficulty of explaining how the ancient
Israelites in the wilderness could have tempted Christ prompted some copyists
to substitute either the ambiguous κυριον or the
unobjectionable θεον."
According to Metzger, since Paul inserts Christ into the story in 10:4, it
seems more reasonable that Paul is deliberately inserting Christ into the story
in verse 9.
Putting Christ to the test reads the plight of the
ancestors through the lens of the Corinthians’ situation, as Paul has been
doing throughout 10:1–13. The Corinthians are the ones in danger of putting
Christ to the test through their actions of eating and drinking in an idol’s
temple. Paul relates the dilemma of eating meat offered to idols to a matter of
testing Christ when he reminds the Corinthians in 8:4–6 that there is only one
God: “but for us one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we
exist and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and we exist
through him” (8:6). Their status in Christ has implications for their life
together as the church. In 8:10–13, Paul warns them that causing someone with a
weak conscience to be led astray is tantamount to sinning against Christ. Their
flirtation with idolatry threatens to test Christ and places them in the
perilous position of all the Israelites who rejected the Lord either through
blatant idolatry or through speaking against God and thereby testing the Lord
(Num 21:4–5; Ps 78:18, 41, 56; 106:14). As Paul asks them in 10:22: “Shall we
provoke the Lord to jealousy?” (Carla Swafford Works, The Church in the
Wilderness: Paul's Use of the Exodus Traditions in 1 Corinthians
[Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament · 2. Reihe 379; Tübingen:
Mohr Siebeck, 2014], 75-76)
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