Crispus

• chief ruler of synagogue in Corinth; supported Paul

133:3.1By the time they reached Corinth, Ga­nid was be­com­ing very much in­ter­ested in the Jew­ish re­li­gion, and so it was not strange that, one day as they passed the syn­a­gogue and saw the peo­ple go­ing in, he re­quested Je­sus to take him to the ser­vice. That day they heard a learned rabbi dis­course on the “Des­tiny of Is­rael,” and af­ter the ser­vice they met one Cris­pus, the chief ruler of this syn­a­gogue. Many times they went back to the syn­a­gogue ser­vices, but chiefly to meet Cris­pus. Ga­nid grew to be very fond of Cris­pus, his wife, and their fam­ily of five chil­dren. He much en­joyed ob­serv­ing how a Jew con­ducted his fam­ily life.

133:3.2While Ga­nid stud­ied fam­ily life, Je­sus was teach­ing Cris­pus the bet­ter ways of re­li­gious liv­ing. Je­sus held more than twenty ses­sions with this for­ward-look­ing Jew; and it is not sur­pris­ing, years af­ter­ward, when Paul was preach­ing in this very syn­a­gogue, and when the Jews had re­jected his mes­sage and had voted to for­bid his fur­ther preach­ing in the syn­a­gogue, and when he then went to the gen­tiles, that Cris­pus with his en­tire fam­ily em­braced the new re­li­gion, and that he be­came one of the chief sup­ports of the Chris­tian church which Paul sub­se­quently or­ga­nized at Corinth.

133:3.3Dur­ing the eigh­teen months Paul preached in Corinth, be­ing later joined by Silas and Tim­o­thy, he met many oth­ers who had been taught by the “Jew­ish tu­tor of the son of an In­dian mer­chant.”

133:3.4At Corinth they met peo­ple of ev­ery race hail­ing from three con­ti­nents. Next to Alexan­dria and Rome, it was the most cos­mopoli­tan city of the Med­i­ter­ra­nean em­pire. There was much to at­tract one’s at­ten­tion in this city, and Ga­nid never grew weary of vis­it­ing the citadel which stood al­most two thou­sand feet above the sea. He also spent a great deal of his spare time about the syn­a­gogue and in the home of Cris­pus. He was at first shocked, and later on charmed, by the sta­tus of woman in the Jew­ish home; it was a rev­e­la­tion to this young In­dian.