Roi Ziv, “First Corinthians 6.1-6: Roman Court or Private Arbitration?” New Testament Studies 70 (2024), 170.
Paul in 1 Cor 6.1–6 is objecting to the identity of the judge chosen by disputing members of the community. The nature of this objection assumes a practice of dispute settlement in which the parties have the freedom to choose and appoint the person who will make the ruling. After showing that official Roman courts in Corinth hardly fit this category, I suggest private arbitration as an alternative….
[W]e have encountered much of Paul’s legal language in the context of private arbitration and mediation: σοφός, πρᾶγμα, κρίνω, διακρίνω, and the resemblance of the phrase ἀνὰ μέσον τοῦ ἀδελφοῦ αὐτοῦ to the later mediation formula. This terminological evidence suffices to support the argument that Paul’s legal terminology in 1 Cor 6.1–6 makes sense in the context of private arbitration. While most of it can also make sense in the context of adjudication in court, the notion of the ability to freely appoint judges serves as the tipping point, and makes private arbitration the more probable conclusion.
The Amateur Exegete 
Hi Ben, I was wondering — what led you to reject the idea of biblical inspiration? I ask because many Christians engage in critical biblical studies and still maintain a belief in some form of inspiration.
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I think it boils down to my rejection of theism, especially Christian theism. (If there is no god, there is no divine inspiration.) But I’m not sure that even if I believed in God I could affirm inspiration since it seems an unnecessary idea. Is the Bible inspiring? Sure, at times. But would that entail it being inspired by God? I don’t see why that would need to be the case.
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I’ve read a bit about your deconversion story, and I was wondering — would you say you became an atheist mainly because apologetic arguments felt unsatisfying? Was it more due to philosophical, historical, or scientific concerns?
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I think my move to atheism was caused mostly by looking at the suffering in the world. It is an unfathomable amount of pain that is endured not only by humans but by animals as well. The process of evolution itself entails megajoules of veritable torment that seem incongruous with the deity portrayed in certain monotheistic religions. And a quick survey of the world today doesn’t alleviate my concern: starving children in Gaza, flash floods that wipe away scores of lives, mass shootings that defy reason, and so much more. If God exists and he is as powerful as he is purported to be, then his failure to act is in my estimation an indictment on his character. But I’m inclined to think that the reason there is no divine intervention to prevent childhood brain cancer or to stop a rapist from destroying an innocent life forever is because there is no one looking out for us from above. We are on our own. I’ve not found an apologetic strong enough to counter that intuition, though it wasn’t for lack of trying nor because I wasn’t already aware of and had even taught such arguments prior to my deconversion.
Now I do think there are certain arguments for theism that are interesting, chiefly the fine-tuning argument. I sometimes hear atheists use the multiverse explanation as a way to account for why our universe is better suited to life than another, but I often feel like this is just cheating. But the fine-tuning argument, whatever its value, hasn’t gotten me back to theism. And even if it did, it wouldn’t come close to bringing me back to Christian theism (or Jewish or Muslim). That would take more narrow arguments with which I am already familiar (more or less).
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