Why Paul’s Fabulous Body is Missing its Belly: The Rhetorical Subversion of Menenius Agrippa’s Fable in 1 Corinthians 12.12-30 1

Fables as προγυµνάσµατα

A first-century rhetorical education included training in the rhetorical use of fables. Scholars have disputed whether Paul had such an education. One recent evaluation of patristic evidence concludes that, ‘to the ears of Paul’s earliest readers, friend and foe alike, Paul did not sound like a man of paideia’ (Schellenberg 2012: 168). On the other end of the spectrum of scholarly views, Jerome H. Neyrey (2003: 158) is convinced that the apostle was highly educated: ‘Indubitably Paul was educated to read and especially write at a high level of sophistication’. ⁵ Dale B. Martin (1995: 67) adopts a more measured position: ‘In spite of his disavowals of the use of rhetoric, Paul’s argument in 1 Corinthians 1–4 shows rhetorical finesse and power that prove beyond any doubt that he had received some kind of rhetorical training’. ⁶ Whether or not Paul progressed to the highest levels of Greco-Roman rhetorical education lies beyond the scope of this study, but few scholars would dispute Martin’s modest conclusions. ⁷

My proposed interpretation of 1 Cor. 12.12-30 provides additional evidence that Paul had at least begun the first stage of a Greco-Roman rhetorical education: ‘a series of carefully graded exercises known as progymnasmata, designed to lead up to the practice speeches which were the main activity of the schools of rhetoric’ (Clarke 1971: 25). ⁸ As Teresa Morgan (1998: 192-93) reminds us, ‘We cannot be sure whether a pupil was expected to work systematically through the progymnasmata, or whether they acted as a reference work of all possible exercises’. Still, even though customs would have varied in different times and places, the προγυμνάσματα followed a relatively stable sequence, often starting with the fable. ⁹ They everywhere ‘formed the transition from the study of grammar and the reading of texts … to writing and speaking’ (Webb 2001: 289).

In the handbooks of Aelius Theon and others, the exercises designed around fables (or μῦθοι) aim not simply to entertain, but to persuade. Attention to the rhetorical function of fables pushes us to expand our purview, given that the ancient fable remains ‘best known through collections’ (van Dijk 1997: xiii). Far too often, New Testament scholars have been content to sift through Greco-Roman collections of fables, in search of parallels to Jesus’ parables. This strategy, though not devoid of value, runs the risk of what Samuel Sandmel (1962) has famously labelled ‘parallelomania’. ¹⁰ Even more problematically, the study of decontextualized fables in larger collections has tended to replace the study of fables in their rhetorical contexts – a development similar to the substitution of taxidermy in place of the observation of living creatures in their natural habitats. Ancient Greeks and Romans did read fable collections, but they also exercised their nascent rhetorical skills with fables. Aristotle classes the fable (or λόγος) with the παραβολή and other proofs that should be ready-to-hand in a rhetor’s toolbox (Rhet. 2.20.1-4).

As Niklas Holzberg (2002: 1) puts it, ‘the fable was not regarded in antiquity as a literary genre per se, but was primarily used in poetry and prose as exemplum with which to illustrate all manner of observations’. Aristotle and Quintilian both refer to fables in their rhetorical treatises under the heading of proofs that can be adduced in support of a larger argument. ¹¹ The first-century ce handbook of Aelius Theon explains how to transform fables into rhetorical proofs: ‘As an exercise, mythos is treated in a variety of ways, for we state the fable and inflect its grammatical form and weave it into a narrative (καὶ συμπλέκομεν αὐτὸν διηγήματι), and we expand it and compress it. It is possible also to add some explanation to it or, if this is prefixed, an appropriate fable can be adapted. In addition, we refute it and confirm it’. ¹² Fables are not simply read and enjoyed; they are embellished, summarized, modified and deployed.

Body Fables in Other Ancient Contexts

As noted earlier, fable collections constitute our primary source for ancient fables. Gert-Jan van Dijk (1997: xiii), however, exhorts us to look outside the taxidermist’s shop: ‘Many a fable is to be found outside collections, in both ancient and modern literature’ (emphasis original). This study focuses on the fable of the Members and the Belly, an outstanding example of a fable found primarily outside of collections. ¹³ In fact, even though this particular fable circulated widely in the first-century Greco-Roman world, I am not aware of any extant witnesses prior to the medieval period in which the fable itself appears outside of a larger narrative context. ¹⁴ The narrative context – described similarly in the accounts of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Livy and Plutarch – consistently involves hostility and distrust between the patres and the plebs in ancient Rome. ¹⁵ Quintilian provides the most compact summary of the situation, also highlighting the role the fable played as an exemplary proof: ‘Thus Menenius Agrippa is said to have reconciled the plebs to the patricians by his fable of the limbs’ quarrel with the belly’ (Inst. 5.11.19). ¹⁶ According to R. M. Ogilvie (1965: 310), the events on which these later accounts were based took place in the first quarter of the fifth century bce, when a plebeian secession was remedied by the institution of the tribunate. In response to the hostility and distrust between the patres and plebs, the plebeian Menenius was sent by the patricians to his fellow plebeians to present the case for concord and unity. Ultimately, he succeeded in persuading the plebs to return, and the ancient historians tend to, like Quintilian, credit Menenius’s artful use of the fable of the Members and the Belly.

The historians offer more detailed accounts than Quintilian. Livy describes in greater detail this same occasion, recounting the speech of Menenius Agrippa as follows:

In the days when man’s members did not all agree amongst themselves, as is now the case, but had each its own ideas and a voice of its own, the other parts thought it unfair that they should have the worry and the trouble and the labour of providing everything for the belly, while the belly remained quietly in their midst with nothing to do but to enjoy the good things which they bestowed upon it; they therefore conspired together that the hands should carry no food to the mouth, nor the mouth accept anything that was given it, nor the teeth grind up what they received. While they sought in this angry spirit to starve the belly into submission, the members themselves and the whole body were reduced to the utmost weakness. Hence it had become clear that even the belly had no idle task to perform, and was no more nourished than it nourished the rest, by giving out to all parts of the body that by which we live and thrive, when it has been divided equally amongst the veins and is enriched with digested food – that is, the blood. Drawing a parallel from this to show how like was the internal dissension of the bodily members to the anger of the plebs against the Fathers, he prevailed upon the minds of his hearers (2.32.9-12).

In this fable, the hands, mouth and teeth conspire against the stomach. Yet, the discord between the individual members causes the health of the entire body to deteriorate. Livy goes on to explain that Menenius Agrippa successfully communicated his message: ‘Steps were then taken towards harmony (concordia), and a compromise was effected’ (2.33.1).

While Livy gives the impression that the successful speech consisted exclusively of the recitation of a fable, followed by its brief application to the situation, his Greek contemporary Dionysius of Halicarnassus crafts a much richer account. Before relating the speech, the narrator establishes Menenius Agrippa as a rhetorical virtuoso:

He seemed to employ in general the most persuasive (πιθανωτάτοις) arguments possible and those which gauged well the inclinations of his audience; and at the end of his speech he is said to have related a kind of fable (μῦθόν τινα) that he composed after the manner of Aesop and that bore a close resemblance to the situation of the moment, and by this means chiefly to have won them over (Ant. rom. 6.83.2).

While the fable is credited to Menenius Agrippa, the subsequent speech in the Roman Antiquities is clearly the work of Dionysius of Halicarnassus. The historian would have received a strong rhetorical training, including the προγυμνάσματα. Though he certainly honed his skills in the intervening years, the ability to meet the needs of a rhetorical situation by weaving a fable into a larger argument would have first been acquired and exercised early in that rhetorical training. ¹⁷

According to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, the lengthy speech of Menenius Agrippa concludes with an extended analogy between πόλις and σῶμα, between city-state and human body. The rhetor first enumerates the similarities between the two, and he then hypothesizes:

If, now, these parts of the human body should be endowed, each for itself, with perception and a voice of its own and a sedition should then arise among them, all of them uniting against the belly alone, and the feet (πόδες) should say that the whole body rests on them; the hands (χεῖρες), that they ply the crafts, secure provisions, fight with enemies, and contribute many other advantages toward the common good; the shoulders (ὦμοι), that they bear all the burdens; the mouth (στόμα), that it speaks; the head (κεφαλή), that it sees and hears and, comprehending the other senses, possesses all those by which the thing is preserved; and then all these should say to the belly, ‘And you, good creature, which of these things do you do? What return do you make and of what use are you to us?’ […] If, I say, they should decide upon this course and none of the parts should any longer perform its office, could the body possibly exist for any considerable time, and not rather be destroyed within a few days by the worst of all deaths, starvation? No one can deny it. Now consider the same condition existing in a commonwealth (Ant. rom. 6.86.2-3).

Dionysius of Halicarnassus clearly considers this to be a fable in the Aesopic tradition; as noted earlier, he says as much. Nonetheless, while Livy’s version could be snipped out of his narrative and pasted (back?) into a fable collection, Dionysius’s version is clearly embellished to fit a specific rhetorical situation. He appears to have begun with a precursor similar to Livy’s version and then woven it into his narrative, much like Aelius Theon recommended in the excerpt reproduced above.

Yet another retelling of Menenius Agrippa’s fable appears in Plutarch’s biography of Caius Marcus Coriolanus. While some minor details differ, Plutarch’s account is similar to those of Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Like Livy, Plutarch narrates Menenius Agrippa’s telling of the μῦθος in indirect discourse. ¹⁸ Plutarch’s account gives the belly a more active role:

[Menenius Agrippa] said, namely, that all the other members of man’s body once revolted (στασιάσαι) against the belly, and accused it of being the only member to sit idly down in its place and make no contribution to the common welfare, while the rest underwent great hardships and performed great public services only to minister to its appetites; but that the belly laughed at their simplicity in not knowing that it received into itself all the body’s nourishment only to send it back again and duly distribute it among the other members. ‘Such, then’, said Agrippa, ‘is the relation of the senate, my fellow-citizens, to you; the matters for deliberation which there receive the necessary attention and disposition bring to you all and severally what is useful and helpful’ (Cor. 6.3-4).

Dionysius of Halicarnassus includes statements from the feet, hands, shoulders, mouth and head condemning the belly. In Plutarch’s version of the fable, though, the belly is the only body part mentioned. Here, Menenius Agrippa adopts a more patronizing tone: the belly laughs at (καταγελᾶν) the other body parts, explaining what they have missed in their ignorance.

Paul’s Fabulous Body

Menenius Agrippa was sent to deal with στάσις between the Roman plebeians and patricians. ¹⁹ Recent events had ‘divided [the plebs] … from the patricians’ (Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Ant. rom. 6.83.5). Hence, his conciliatory speech serves as an example of what Wilhelm Nestle (1927: 353) has labeled ‘Homonoialiteratur’. Margaret M. Mitchell (1991: 296) places 1 Corinthians in the same category: ‘1 Corinthians is a unified deliberative letter which throughout urges unity on the divided Corinthian church’. Paul makes his unifying purpose known from the start: ‘I exhort you … by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all agree, and that there be no divisions (σχίσματα) among you’ (1 Cor. 1.10). ²⁰

As part of his plea for unity, Paul formulates an argument from analogy, comparing the individual human body with the body of Christ: ‘For just as the body is one and has many parts, but all the parts of the body, though being many, are one body, so it is with Christ’ (1 Cor. 12.12). In his letters, Paul repeatedly draws comparisons between the early Christian community and the human body, yet I believe that the material in 1 Cor. 12.12-30 is shot through with elements from our fable. ²¹ Paul here draws on his rhetorical training, reworking and embellishing a version of the fable of the Members and the Belly in order to strengthen his case against factions in Corinth.

This claim, however, requires some nuancing and further evidence, for it is immediately vulnerable to three counterclaims. First, it might seem doubtful that Paul, a Pharisaic Jew, would be familiar with a fable that may have been circulating primarily in Greco-Roman historical writings. Second, it is a strange version of the story of the Members and the Belly that says nothing about a belly. And finally, there is the simple point that Paul does not recount a fable in 1 Cor. 12. I will assess each of these reasonable, yet ultimately unconvincing, objections.

First, Paul himself confirms his Pharisaic Jewish background as an appropriately circumcised ‘Hebrew of Hebrews’ (Phil. 3.5). The details of Paul’s upbringing remain contested, but no widespread construal of the evidence rules out his familiarity with Greco-Roman fables. According to the portrait fashioned in Acts, for example, the Pharisee Saul hailed from Tarsus, described by Nestle (1927: 359) as ‘a center of Stoic philosophy’. ²² Paul’s (slightly earlier) contemporary Strabo claimed that ‘the city of Tarsus has all kinds of schools of rhetoric (σχολαὶ παρ’ αὐτοῖς παντοδαπαὶ τῶν περὶ λόγους τεχνῶν)’ (14.5.13). ²³ Furthermore, Tor Vegge (2006: 455) reminds us that Tarsus possessed no monopoly on rhetorical training in the eastern Mediterranean world: ‘Even if Paul’s upbringing and educational formation is transferred to Jerusalem in Acts, there is no consequent (theological or cultural) distancing from Hellenistic education’. The circulation of similar fables in later Jewish circles may be due in part to such influence. ²⁴ Ultimately, where Paul was raised matters little for our inquiry. If Paul underwent a rhetorical training, as I think he did, it is not at all far-fetched to suppose that he encountered the fable of the Members and the Belly either as part of his schooling or in the social circles to which his schooling gave him access. According to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, precisely because Menenius Agrippa so skillfully employed this fable, ‘his speech is thought worthy of record and it is quoted in all the ancient histories (ἐν ἁπάσαις ταῖς ἀρχαίαις ἱστορίαις)’ (Ant. rom. 6.83.2). ²⁵ Likewise, Plutarch testifies to the popularity of this ‘celebrated fable’ (Cor. 6.2). Any inhabitant of the eastern Mediterranean world who possessed a rhetorical training like Paul’s could have encountered our fable. Though his Pharisaic background may serve as a stumbling block to earlier generations of scholars, the current scholarly consensus on Judaism and Hellenism confirms that ‘Pharisaic Jew’ and ‘educated Greek’ cannot be held apart as distinct categories for first-century persons (Engberg-Pedersen 2001).

Still, supposing that Paul did have both some level of rhetorical training and exposure to Greco-Roman texts, how can Paul possibly rely on the fable of the Members and the Belly without making any reference to a belly? ²⁶ Should we not look to the more general body imagery of an author like Hierocles the Stoic? Timothy A. Brookins (2016: 83) has recently argued that Hierocles’s body metaphor yields ‘similarities’ to 1 Cor. 12 that ‘are not only linguistic and thematic, but also syntactical’. Consider this parallel from Hierocles’s arguments in favor of cooperation between siblings:

Just as eyes and hands, accordingly, if each should obtain its own soul and mind, would respect the other parts in every possible way for the sake of their declared communality, since they are not even able to perform their own function well without the presence of the other parts, so too we, who are human beings and confess to having a soul, should not omit any effort in behaving toward our brothers as one ought (frag. from Stobaeus, Anth. 4.84.20). ²⁷

Instead of a belly taking center stage, here we find comments on eyes and hands, both of which appear in 1 Cor. 12. We can also observe an emphasis on cooperation and mutual respect that would cohere well with the apostle’s aims. While Hierocles offers interesting parallels, we must keep chronology in mind. Hierocles flourished in the first half of the second century ce – several decades after the presumed composition of 1 Corinthians (Ramelli 2009: xix). Though we can rule out Hieroclean influence on Paul, Brookins successfully reminds us yet again of the pervasive nature of body imagery in the ancient Mediterranean world.

Why, then, should we champion a genealogical connection between the fable of the Members and the Belly and the bellyless body of 1 Cor. 12? As Brookins (2016: 78) admits, the scholarly consensus has identified Menenius Agrippa’s speech as ‘the closest parallel to Paul’s body image’. Despite the lack of a shared stomach, the two discourses both call on their audiences to subordinate individual freedom or desire and to privilege harmony or concordia. ²⁸ And while Paul never mentions the belly specifically, he does include other body parts mentioned in one version of Menenius Agrippa’s fable: feet (1 Cor. 12.15, 21), hands (12.21) and head (12.21). ²⁹ More importantly, the body parts in Paul, like the body parts described by Menenius Agrippa, have the ability to talk, to reason and to assert their independence. ³⁰

Furthermore, even though both Menenius Agrippa’s speech and 1 Cor. 12 are directed towards divisive audiences, the rhetorical situations feature important differences. The fable of the Members and the Belly assumes an audience that is identified with the rebellious members. The plebs must recognize that the elite patres, denounced as useless and oppressive, actually resemble the belly, which ‘nourishes the body even while it is itself nourished’ (Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Ant. rom. 6.86.5). If Paul were to preserve the rhetorical function of the fable without alteration, he would be arguing that the many members of the body of Christ need to submit to the smaller group of elite Christians. As Martin argues, this sort of conservative argument for the preservation of social hierarchy forms the antithesis of Paul’s claim in 1 Corinthians (1995: 92-95).

Essentially, Menenius Agrippa is arguing for the plebs to submit to the patres, restoring the normal hierarchy. Paul, on the other hand, urges all the members of his Corinthian audience to be reconciled to each other, calling on the elite to take their places alongside the ‘weaker members’ in a move to disrupt preexisting hierarchies. Before he even introduces the talking body parts of 12.14-21, Paul makes clear that he is addressing a group that should be unified as one body in one Spirit – ‘whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free’ (1 Cor. 12.13). For the fable of the Members and the Belly to be of use in the Corinthian context, the belly had to abandon its leading role.

In 1 Cor. 12, however, the stomach has not simply stepped out of the limelight; it is absent altogether. To solve the case of the missing belly, we must pause to consider Pauline views on the stomach. A quick survey of Paul’s comments on bellies makes clear why the apostle would want to avoid any mention of stomachs in this portrait of the body of Christ. He tends to associate bellies with idolatry and destruction. Karl Olav Sandnes (2002: 58) suggests the influence of ancient moral philosophy, which yields ‘numerous examples both of the concept of serving or worshipping the stomach, as well as being enslaved to it, or the belly as ruling a person’. In his letter to the Philippians, Paul issues a ringing condemnation of those whose ‘end is destruction, whose god is their belly (κοιλία)’ (Phil. 3.19). Likewise, his letter to the Romans addresses opponents who ‘do not serve (δουλεύουσιν) our Lord Christ, but rather their own belly (κοιλία)’ (Rom. 16.18). Finally, in the very same letter to the Corinthians, Paul has already mentioned a Corinthian slogan – ‘food is for the belly (τὰ βρώματα τῇ κοιλίᾳ) and the belly for food (ἡ κοιλία τοῖς βρώμασιν)’ – only to conclude immediately that ‘God will destroy both the one and the other’ (1 Cor. 6.13). ³¹ Paul omits the controversial belly from the Corinthian body for good reason indeed.

Finally, the counterargument that Paul neither recounts a fable nor uses the word μῦθος must be addressed. The absence of the term μῦθος is not surprising; the undisputed Pauline letters never use the term. And in the Pastoral Epistles, μῦθος is consistently a derogatory term in all four of its occurrences. ³² Paul does not use the word ‘fable’, his body imagery is not described as ‘Aesopic’ (Αἰσώπειος; cf. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Ant. rom. 6.83.2), and he does not even tell a story in 1 Cor. 12. At first glance, it appears that Paul simply uses the body metaphor for the purposes of ‘analogical comparison’, like any number of other ancient authors. For instance, Josephus compares the Jewish people to a sick human body, with the Jewish rebels acting like a chronic illness: ‘No sooner were these disorders reduced than the inflammation, as in a sick man’s body, broke out again in another quarter (ἕτερον μέρος ἐφλέγμαινεν). The impostors and brigands, banding together, incited numbers to revolt, exhorting them to assert their independence’ (B.J. 2.264). Philo speaks of the unifying effect of the high priest on the Jewish people, ‘that every age and every part (πάντα μέρη) of the nation regarded as a single body (ὡς ἑνὸς σώματος) may be united in one and the same fellowship’ (Spec. 3.131). ³³ Should we not heed Michelle V. Lee’s (2006: 12-13) warning against ‘parallelomania’ and speak only of Paul’s use of the ‘body metaphor’, rather than the use of a specific fable? ³⁴

Lee rightly warns against the danger of identifying one source or another as the source of 1 Cor. 12. After all, given what Dionysius of Halicarnassus says about the ubiquity of Menenius Agrippa’s speech, it would be impossible to pinpoint one extant text as Paul’s source. Though the talking body parts of the version found in Dionysius of Halicarnassus seem to resemble 1 Cor. 12 most closely, I do not believe that it is possible to establish a genealogical connection between 1 Cor. 12 and one particular extant text. The fable was too popular, and too many ancient texts have been lost. I simply want to propose Pauline reworking of the well-known fable of the Belly and the Members as the most plausible explanation for the formulation of Paul’s body imagery in 1 Cor. 12.

This proposal assumes that Paul’s rhetorical education informed his letter-writing. Paul does not follow Aelius Theon’s recommendation to ‘state the fable’, but I believe that he does indeed freely ‘weave’ the fable into his argument. ³⁵ Paul embellishes the fable that he has read or heard – whether he worked with it as a schoolboy or encountered it in the agora is immaterial – and he weaves it into his argument. Thus, like Menenius Agrippa, Paul envisions a fictive scenario in which body parts can speak, think, and act. Like Menenius Agrippa, Paul shows the disastrous results of intra-corporal conflict. And like Menenius Agrippa, Paul strives to convince his audience that the harmony of the whole carries a higher priority than the freedom of individual members.

As a result, even though Paul’s argument in 1 Cor. 12.12-30 opens with καθάπερ in v. 12 to set up the comparison, the two main subsections (12.14-20 and 12.21-26) both lead off with fabulous elements. ³⁶ In 12.15-16 and 12.21, Paul gives examples of talking body parts. First, he deals with identity problems:

If the foot should say, ‘Because I am not a hand, I am not part of the body’, it would not therefore cease to be part of the body. And if the ear should say, ‘Because I am not an eye, I am not part of the body’, it would not therefore cease to be part of the body (1 Cor. 12.15-16).

Paul here invents what David E. Garland (2003: 594) calls a ‘fablelike conversation’. The relative importance of the foot or of the ear is immaterial. Paul uses the members’ brief monologues to argue that each and every unique member forms part of the body: ‘there are many parts, but one body’ (1 Cor. 12.20).

More significant is Paul’s next rhetorical move. He re-creates the same intracorporal tension of the fable of the Members and the Belly, but he imagines a different scenario, where the hostility affects relationships between all members, not just between the belly and the others: ‘The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you”, or again, neither can the head say to the feet, “I have no need of you”’ (1 Cor. 12.21). As in the retelling of Menenius Agrippa’s speech by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, various members express rancor towards another body part. Whereas Menenius Agrippa argued for the importance of one seemingly useless member (the belly), Paul claims that every part is important. The apparently ‘weaker’ body parts prove ‘utterly necessary’ (12.22). Less honorable parts receive greater honor, and the oft-hidden genitals must not be overlooked (12.23). Fabulous elements here set the stage for Paul’s larger argument that the constitution of the body with all of its interlocking and mutually complementary parts requires that there ‘be no division (σχίσμα) in the body, but that the members might have the same care for each other’ (12.25).

Paul, Cicero and Seneca

Paul’s reworking of the fable of the Members and the Belly bears striking resemblances to other instances of ancient body imagery. In Cicero’s philosophical writing De officiis, a comparison is made between human body and human society:

Suppose, by way of comparison, that each one of our bodily members should conceive this idea and imagine that it could be strong and well if it should draw off to itself the health and strength of its neighbouring member, the whole body would necessarily be enfeebled and die; so, if each one of us should seize upon the property of his neighbours and take from each whatever he could appropriate to his own use, the bonds of human society must inevitably be annihilated (3.5.22).

Like Paul, Cicero does not follow the precise formula for telling a fable. Rather, he takes personified and articulate body parts and puts them to use in his argument for harmony or concordia. Unlike Paul, Cicero does not attribute direct speech to the members of the body. ³⁷ Still, his image of competing and conspiring body parts reproduces the same intracorporal strife of the fable of the Members of the Belly.

Similarly, Seneca’s argument against injuring a fellow citizen resembles the body imagery of Paul and Cicero:

What if the hands should desire to harm the feet, or the eyes the hands? As all the members of the body are in harmony one with another because it is to the advantage of the whole that the individual members be unharmed, so mankind should spare the individual man, because all are born for a life of fellowship, and society can be kept unharmed only by the mutual protection and love of its parts (De ira 2.31.7). ³⁸

Again we find a similar list of body parts engaged in strife that threatens the welfare of the whole body. Paul, Cicero and Seneca each incorporate similar elements of the fable of the Members and the Belly, which they then rework and ‘weave’ into their larger arguments. ³⁹

Conclusions

Jerome once asked, ‘What agreement is there between Christ and Belial? What has Horace to do with the psalter? Virgil with the Gospels? Cicero with the Apostle [Paul]?’ ⁴⁰ The analysis above indicates that one consensus between Cicero and the Apostle lies in the rhetorical use of fabulous elements in support of an argument for concordia. Cicero, Seneca and Paul all would have undergone a rhetorical training that featured the προγυμνάσματα. The pervasive presence of the fable of the Members and the Belly means that all three would likely have known this tale of strife between articulate and antagonistic members. Thus, we can read Paul’s use of body imagery in 1 Cor. 12 within its larger Greco-Roman milieu. Like other authors, Paul adapts the fable for his purposes, stripping it of its pro-patrician function and clothing it in the raiment of mutual concern (1 Cor. 12.25). We can only speculate with regard to how many of his letter’s initial recipients would have caught on to Paul’s refashioning of the popular tale. ⁴¹

Past explorations of the relationship between the Aesopic tradition and the New Testament have compared Jesus’ parables and Greco-Roman fables. Frequently, the comparisons have focused on parallels in content between a parable and a fable from a collection. ⁴² However, a fresh investigation of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians has enabled us to compare the rhetorical function of the same basic fable in different texts. In these texts, fables are employed, embellished, expanded and otherwise transformed to meet the needs of the rhetorical situation, just as the ancient rhetorical handbooks trained students to use them. While past studies of the fable exercise and the NT have focused on Jesus’ parables, 1 Cor. 12 provides a fabulous example of what Paul has to offer.