Centering Chloe and decentering Paul

In Chloe and Her People, Mitzi J. Smith offers the first book-length womanist approach to 1 Corinthians. She masterfully weaves together womanist voices while engaging contemporary scholarship on 1 Corinthians and Pauline studies more broadly. Smith’s distinctive womanist approach centers Black women’s lives as she tends to “misogyny, racism, classism, dis-abilism, heterosexism, and the intersectionality of oppressions and violence.”

Smith’s discussion begins not with Paul but rather with Chloe (who appears by name in 1 Corinthians 1:11) and her people. Throughout the book, Smith decenters Paul. This is an important move since his canonical status renders especially dangerous his words that undermine women’s voices, leadership, and bodily autonomy. Offering a reading from below, Smith argues that Chloe was a freedwoman in Corinth and a leader within the Corinthian Christ assembly. Smith draws from material, literary, and other historical evidence to present how colonized Corinth’s large population of freed people should inform readings of this letter (as well as the Corinthian correspondence more broadly). This is especially true for those from whom Paul had heard rumors about the assembly’s dissension—Chloe and her people.

Highlighting how the name Chloe was frequently given to enslaved people in antiquity, Smith makes a connection that marks her crucial methodological intervention: she notes that Chloe was also a popular name for people enslaved in the antebellum United States. To this end, Smith pairs the freedwoman Chloe of Corinth with Aunt Chloe, the formerly enslaved woman (a freedwoman of sorts) in Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Sketches of Southern Life. Pairings of this sort run throughout the book. The pairings do not function as superficial correlations but rather as a hermeneutic strategy to allow for closer analyses of both ancient and contemporary times.