04_Peters_copiaaa_67-84 28/04/15 12:15 Pagina 69 CROWNS IN 1 THESSALONIANS, PHILIPPIANS, AND 1 CORINTHIANS 69 In this article, I will explore how Paul’s development of the crown in 1 Corinthians departs from his use of the image in his other epistles to create an image of individual achievement, related to the democratization of cultic practices in Second Temple Judaism and resistant to the increasing social stratification of traditional civic religious structures. While the race of faith and the crown are clearly intertwined in 1 Corinthians, they are not directly connected in any other Pauline epistle. Whereas the race of life also features in Philippians and Romans, the crown appears elsewhere in 1 Thes- salonians and Philippians. In his correspondence with the churches of God in Thessalonica and Philippi, Paul implicitly contrasts the crown of benefaction that is given to donors and the crown that he receives from the community in the form of community members themselves. Such an arrangement inverts the normal modes of pa- tronage and prestige. In his correspondence with the Corinthian house-churches, Paul departs from the construction of the crown that appears in his other correspondence. Paul’s reference to the Corinthians as having many pedagogues, his ascription of a desire of kingship to them, and his vision of the Corinthians in the most prestigious event of the Roman Greek athletic games work in con- junction to make the crown a symbol of an alternate political reality, the true discipline individuals should undertake. I. 1 Thessalonians The first Pauline image of a crown that we have comes in 1 Thess 2,17-20, where Paul calls the Christians at Thessalonica “our hope or joy or crown of boasting” (h`mw/n evlpi.j h' cara. h' ste,fanoj kauch,sewj) at v. 19. His use of the first person plural pronoun sug- gests that the community is not his personal accomplishment. Rather, the crown belongs to an unspecified group of Christian mis- sionaries associated with Paul. The first person plural pronoun fea- tures again in the next verse where Paul refers to the community as “our glory and joy” (h` do,xa h`mw/n kai. h` cara,). The crown, the only physical descriptive noun, appears to be equivalent here to the abstract concepts of hope, joy, and glory. That the crown is inter- changeable with hope indicates that this honor has an eschatologi- cal or more general future element. The community’s status as Paul’s “glory and joy” is only partially realized. As Gundry Volf