Christ as Ancestor Hero

The Corinthian community members employed a Greco-Roman heroic model to graft their ancestral lineages, through the rite of baptism, to the genos Christ-hero. In doing so, the Corinthians constructed an elaborate ancestral lineage, linking their association locally through Christ to Corinth, and trans-locally through Moses to an imagined Ancient Israel.This study analyzes the Christ-hero association’s practices in the Corinthian cultural context through the passages in 1 Corinthians that highlight the contested spaces of authority.