Welcome to the 10 Minute Bible Hour podcast. Right now, we're going through the entire Bible

to understand it is one big cohesive story. We're covering one book each day, and this

one's about 2nd Corinthians.

It looks like the Apostle Paul wrote at least four letters to the church in Corinth. Two

of those we still have, and both of the letters that we have between Paul and the church

in Corinth are in the New Testament. So in 2nd Corinthians, Paul is following up on stuff

that he wrote to the very troubled church in Corinth in 1st Corinthians. And the positive

note here is we turn the page from 1st Corinthians to 2nd Corinthians is it looked like they

kind of worked. It looks like things are getting better in Corinth, but they're not out

of the woods. This is clearly a very difficult church. And at first glance, from a couple thousand

years away, it might be easy to be like, well, these people were just clearly inferior.

They just weren't very good at being Christians. But if you look a little more closely at the

background of Corinth, like you and I tried to do in our last conversation on 1st Corinthians,

I think you feel a little more empathetic. Now, last time around, we talked about the reality

that there's an almost millennium old sex cult to the goddess Aphrodite that had always been

associated with Corinth. I mean, it's their patron goddess is the goddess associated with sex

and licentiousness. That's going to leave a mark on the culture. But something we didn't talk

about last time was the political instability of Corinth. Corinth as a proud history by the time

we encounter it in the 1st century, it's one of the great ancient Greek cities. Whenever you see

that fuzzy, topped Mohawk helmet in any kind of depiction of Greek warfare, that's called a

Corinthian helmet. They were proud allies of the Spartans. They also fought against the Spartans.

All the Greeks fought against each other at some point or another. But then in the middle of the

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