Among all the disputations and misconceptions that plagued the prickly Corinthian church, Paul took extreme care with one in particular: the spiritual gifts phenomenon. New Christians encounter within the faith community varieties of spiritual gifts. Part of the difficulty with the Corinthian Christians was their inability to see the substantive differences between living as a Spirit-based Christ-body community and living as part of one of the dozens of other pagan cultic communities which also claimed to give their members a deity-directed existence.

From their previous experience with other ecstatic cults (such as the riotous Dionysians), the Corinthians knew firsthand the many different kinds of behaviors that believers readily attributed to outside spiritual forces. As "charismata" gif…