1 Corinthians: to a divided church

About the book

Corinth, the capital of the Roman province of Achaia in southern Greece, was a rich city between two harbours, where ships and traders met. Julius Caesar had refounded it as a Roman colony in 44 BC, and it prospered. Paul founded the church there and stayed a year and a half (Acts 18:11). It was a young church in a proud city: the letter shows believers who prized wisdom and fine speech, and who split into parties around Paul, Apollos and Cephas (1 Corinthians 1:12).

Paul wrote later, from Ephesus: "I will stay in Ephesus until Pentecost" (1 Corinthians 16:8). Some from Chloe's household had told him of quarrels (1 Corinthians 1:11), and the church had written to him with questions (1 Corinthians 7:1); an earlier letter of his has not survived (1 Corinthians 5:9). The usual date is about AD 54, in the map's era of the church (c. AD 30–90).

The letter opens in the names of Paul and "our brother Sosthenes" (1 Corinthians 1:1), and Paul writes the last greeting in his own hand (1 Corinthians 16:21). Scholars hardly dispute that he wrote it. Before the first century was out, the church in Rome, writing to Corinth in the letter known as 1 Clement, bade the Corinthians take up again the letter of the blessed apostle Paul, who had warned them even then against parties around himself, Cephas and Apollos.

How it unfolds

Paul takes up, one after another, the troubles of a young church.

Key passages

To a quarrelling church Paul holds up the cross:

For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

1 Corinthians 1:18

In Corinth he "resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified" (1 Corinthians 2:2). Matthew Henry writes, "Christ crucified is the foundation of all our hopes, the fountain of all our joys" Matthew Henry. The church is Christ's body: "The body is a unit, though it is composed of many parts" (1 Corinthians 12:12), and its gifts are given to build one another up. Set in the middle of the chapters on gifts, chapter 13 ends, "the greatest of these is love" (1 Corinthians 13:13).

Christians read two of these matters differently. On gifts such as prophecy and tongues, many Reformed Christians and some others hold that they confirmed the apostles' gospel and then ceased, Pentecostal and charismatic churches that they continue until Christ returns, and many others are open to them with careful discernment (Gifts of the Spirit). And Paul assumes that women pray and prophesy in worship (1 Corinthians 11:5), yet writes, "Women are to be silent in the churches" (1 Corinthians 14:34): some churches read this as keeping the teaching and ruling office for men, by the order of creation, others as correcting disorder in worship at Corinth (Does the Bible put women down?). The words of the Lord's Supper that Paul passed on (1 Corinthians 11:23-26) are read at the Lord's table to this day; how Christ is present there, the churches understand differently (The Lord's Supper).

Chapter 15 sets out the heart of the gospel:

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that He was buried, that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures

1 Corinthians 15:3-4

Paul names witnesses of the risen Lord, among them more than five hundred at once (1 Corinthians 15:6), and says, "if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is worthless, and so is your faith" (1 Corinthians 15:14). On the resurrection, see The resurrection, in the doctrine course.

The book and Christ

Twice in that summary of the gospel Paul says "according to the Scriptures" (1 Corinthians 15:3-4): Christ's death and resurrection are what the Old Testament foretold. Matthew Henry notes on the passage that "This truth is confirmed by Old Testament prophecies" Matthew Henry, and the Nicene Creed takes up Paul's words: ‘the third day He rose again, according to the Scriptures’ Nicene Creed.

Paul sees Christ in Israel's story. "Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed" (1 Corinthians 5:7). The spiritual rock from which Israel drank in the wilderness "was Christ" (1 Corinthians 10:4). Christ is "the last Adam" (1 Corinthians 15:45). What happened in the wilderness, Paul says, was written down to instruct us (1 Corinthians 10:11): the same reading of the Scriptures as the risen Jesus gave when he explained himself from Moses and all the Prophets (Luke 24:27).

Reading it

Two chapters a day takes eight days; begin with 1 Corinthians 1. From chapter 7 Paul answers, one by one, the questions the church had written to him. "Now about" opens several of his answers (1 Corinthians 8:1), on virgins, food offered to idols, spiritual gifts and the collection: as you read each, keep the Corinthians' question in mind. Chapter 13 is often read at weddings, but Paul wrote it for a church quarrelling over gifts; read it where he set it, between chapters 12 and 14. Then go on to 2 Corinthians.

Practice