What's your Christian Number?

Today I had two interesting ideas, so maybe I will have two interesting posts. Or maybe one interesting post and one boring one. Or maybe I will get bored before I finish and only do one post. So many possibilities.

Today we read in 1 Corinthians about how the people were dividing themselves into groups, some claiming to be of Christ, some of Paul, some of Cephas, and some of Apollos (see 1:12). I have always seen this as a division of time of membership, meaning that those who were "of Christ" were converted in the times of Christ, while those of Paul were converted later when Paul came to preach at Corinth, etc.

Today this passage struck me more as a system of "Christian Numbers." Those who were taught by Christ had a Christian Number of 1, while those who were taught by either Paul or Cephas (a.k.a. Simon a.k.a. Peter) had Christian Numbers of 2, because each of these men was taught by Christ Himself. The Christian Number for Apollos gets a bit more tricky, but as near as I can tell, it is 3 (giving those he taught a Number of 4), because Apollos was taught by Aquila, who (it seems to me) was taught by Paul, who was converted by Christ Himself.

This idea of Christain Numbers is a very interesting one. If this is, in fact, the reason behind the divisions, it would teach us a great deal about their beliefs. I will leave most of the details of what it teaches us to you to decide for yourself, or maybe I'll just do it in another post another day. What I do want to mention is where I see this idea cropping up in the modern church.

In our parents' and grandparents' generations something very similar seemed to be widespread in the Church. They wanted Nauvoo Numbers ("My Grandpa lived in Nauvoo") or Joseph Smith Numbers ("My Uncle heard a sermon directly from Joseph") or any of a wide variety of connections to people and places in what was then recent Church History.

Now we do it with apocryphal doctrine ("Well, my friend heard in a religion class at BYU that the Narrow Neck of Land was Panama" " Oh yeah? I heard at institute that the whole thing took place on the Yucatan Peninsula"). My point, and Paul's point, is that none of that matters. The foundation is Christ, and we shouldn't try to justify our views by trying to see whose has the lowest Christian Number. That is not what is important.

I don't intend to end on what feels like kind of a harsh note, but that is all I have to say on this subject.

Zay gezunt

Herschel