1 Corinthians 1:17

Note

The church in Corinth had split into parties behind human names, and Paul answers with one sentence about what he was sent to do. The verse opens the long passage on the cross and the wisdom of the world that follows it.

Some from Chloe's household had told Paul of quarrels in the church (1 Corinthians 1:11). Each party claimed a leader: Paul, Apollos, Cephas, and one even claimed Christ as its own. Paul answers with a question that shows how far wrong this had gone: "Was Paul crucified for you?" (1 Corinthians 1:13). He thanks God that he baptized none of them but Crispus and Gaius (and, he remembers, the household of Stephanas), so that no one could say they had been baptized into his name. Then he says where his commission lay.

There is no noun "gospel" in the Greek here. Paul uses the verb euangelizomai (εὐαγγελίζομαι), in the present middle infinitive euangelizesthai, ‘to bring good news’. Two infinitives hang on "sent" (apesteilen): to baptize and to preach the gospel, set against each other by ‘not … but’. Paul is not making little of baptism. He did baptize, and Christ sent the apostles to baptize the nations (Matthew 28:19). But the heart of his calling was the announcement. The ‘words of wisdom’ are sophia logou, the wisdom of speech: the art of the trained orator, which the Greek cities prized. The last clause uses kenoō (κενόω), ‘to empty’, in the aorist passive subjunctive: polished speech could hollow the cross out from within.

The KJV has "not with wisdom of words, lest the cross of Christ should be made of none effect." The BSB's "emptied of its power" keeps the picture of the Greek verb, the same verb Paul uses when he says that Christ "emptied Himself" (Philippians 2:7). The LSV, which keeps close to the root sense of its words, has "to proclaim good news" and "not in wisdom of discourse." Each version shows a side of the same sentence: the message, its proclaiming, and the danger of letting the manner of speaking take its place.

Matthew Henry writes that "the plain preaching of a crucified Jesus, was more powerful than all the oratory and philosophy of the heathen world" Matthew Henry, and adds: "Christ crucified is the foundation of all our hopes, the fountain of all our joys" Matthew Henry. Wesley reads the first clause as "That was not my chief errand" Wesley, and on the wisdom of speech he notes that the effect of Paul's preaching "might have been imputed to another cause, had he come with that wisdom of speech which they admired" Wesley.

Around AD 96 Clement of Rome, writing to a Corinthian church in strife again, bade them take up the letter of the blessed apostle Paul: what Paul wrote then about himself, Cephas and Apollos, he wrote because even then they had formed parties 1 Clement 47. Around AD 200 Tertullian asked, "What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" Tertullian, Prescription against Heretics 7 His quarrel was with blending philosophy into the gospel until it became another teaching. Paul himself argued and reasoned: at Corinth he spoke in the synagogue every Sabbath, "trying to persuade Jews and Greeks alike" (Acts 18:4). What he refused was a manner of speaking that would turn the hearer's eyes from the cross to the speaker.

The power of the gospel does not lie in the skill of the one who tells it. What a hearer holds on to, then, is not the messenger but the cross he points to.