04_Peters_copiaaa_67-84 28/04/15 12:15 Pagina 83 CROWNS IN 1 THESSALONIANS, PHILIPPIANS, AND 1 CORINTHIANS 83 vision of Isis. Lucius’ crown has the roses of a funerary crown and the palm leaves of a military triumph, while also being radiate like the imperial god Apollo’s crown: Lucius gains “a crown of flowers with white palm leaves spouting out on every side like rays” (11.24). This crown of victory signifies that Apuleius’ protagonist over- comes the imperial stranglehold on the economy of immortality 55. Similarly, for Paul and the Corinthians, the individual athlete in the pagan games wins only a temporary crown in honor of another per- son, but the individual athlete in the Christian agōn receives a per- manent crown. * * * The image of the crown is found in 1 Thessalonians, 1 Corinthi- ans, and Philippians. The three crowns do not share a common purpose, representing a unified “Pauline” perspective. The three communities understand the crown in ways that are particular to their social locations and their relationship with Paul and his associates. Paul invokes the gold and often immortal crown of civic bene- faction in 1 Thessalonians and Philippians. In these letters, too, Paul requires believers to work toward unity. However, the configuration of unity in these epistles is different in that the community is a col- lective that constitutes an honor; individual members are not distin- guished by honor. The communities at Thessalonica and Philippi are envisaged as Paul’s laurels, a recognition of the communities’ choice of Paul as a spiritual leader and support of Paul’s ministry in their respective communities and as an apostle to the “churches of God”. The unified collective constructed by the crown in the Thessa- lonian and Philippian communities runs counter to the most exten- sive evidence that we have for early hierarchical configurations of these churches. In Philippians, we find influential female leaders Euodia and Syntuche at 4,2. Paul intimates that they operate in an apostolic capacity as opposed to being an undifferentiated part of 55 For the prevalence of female funerary wreaths, examples of the Egyp- tian tradition of the “crown of justification” deriving from chapter 19 of the Book of the Dead, see C. RIGGS, The Beautiful Burial in Roman Egypt (Ox- ford 2005) 82-83.