By employing historical criticism, literary criticism, and social-scientific criticism, previous scholars have suggested various assumptions regarding historical Paul’s role in earliest Christianity. The weakness of these critical approaches lies in the hypothetical reconstruction of early Christianity in Paul’s time based on the limited available data. Technically, these critical approaches heavily rely on logical and deductive inference.
This study employs historical sociolinguistic approaches to the inquiry into Paul’s role in Christianity. The merit of sociolinguistics offers the uniformitarian principle on the basis of linguistic patterns of communicative competence, namely the ability to understand and use language appropriately to communicate successfully in light of the general norms and rules for language usages in the society. From methodological perspectives, reconstructing the social patterns of Christian communities based on the uniformitarian principles of previous critical approaches is not reliable; the social patterns for language usages are changeable since the social, political, and cultural elements are varied and ever-changing. However, the linguistic patterns for communication remain unchanged because all human beings inherently possess communicative competence as long as they do not have serious damage on their brain. Therefore, research should investigate biblical texts based not on the hypothetical reconstruction of the social patterns within the Christian community but on the writers’ communicative competence in linguistic patterns.
By using Nikolas Coupland’s “Identity Contextualization Process” model, this study will investigate Paul’s strategy in the identity formation of Christianity with the Corinthian Letters. Coupland’s model provides a methodological framework for how the writers collect sociolinguistic resources regarding others’ social identity (input data) and use them for projecting a particular social identity within the community (output data). Especially, Corinthian Letters provide valuable information regarding Paul’s role in the Christian identity formation. The First Corinthian Letter shows Paul’s strategy of how to deal with the conflicts within the Corinthian church and shape Christian identity based on the theological emphasis of spiritual purity; the Second Corinthian Letter demonstrates how Paul’s strategy for Christian identity formation, namely the dissemination of the first letter and the deployment of his associates to the church, modified the social identities of the Corinthian church theologically.
This study consists of two methodological procedures. Initially, this study explores Paul’s social networks presented in the books of the New Testament, revealing his strategy to collect sociolinguistic resources regarding conflicts within the Corinthian church and to send his coworkers to the church. Subsequently, this study investigates Paul’s theological emphasis for the Identity Contextualization Process within the Corinthian Letters. In this study, consequently, I will argue that Paul utilized his global networks and the Corinthian Letters for not just solving the conflicts within the Corinthian church but also shaping a unified social identity theologically within the global networks of Christianity.