Paul, the Temple, and Building a Metaphor

David Anthony Basham argues that Paul and the Corinthians share a “system of associated commonplaces” about the Jerusalem temple. Basham proposes that when Paul applies temple language to the Corinthians by calling them naos theou (“God's temple”), he sparks a creative process of interaction between the temple and the Corinthian assembly - a process of selecting, emphasizing, and organizing information from the source domain (temple) to see the target domain (the Corinthians) in a new light...