Introduction to 1 Corinthians

Title and authorship

The letter names its author in its first word and signs itself in its last paragraph: Paul, called to be an apostle of Jesus Christ through the will of God, and our brother Sosthenes 1 Corinthians 1:1, and at the close, this greeting is by me, Paul, with my own hand 1 Corinthians 16:21 — a body dictated to a secretary and a signature added in the writer's own hand, the ancient way of authenticating a letter.

He writes as a founder, not a visitor. Paul had spent a year and six months in Corinth teaching Acts 18:11, and he says plainly what that makes him to them: I planted. Apollos watered. But God gave the increase 1 Corinthians 3:6. The authority in this letter is a father's rather than an official's — he calls them my beloved children and reminds them he became their father in the gospel 1 Corinthians 4:14–15.

Sosthenes is joined to the greeting and never mentioned again. A man of that name had been the ruler of the synagogue in Corinth and was beaten in front of the governor's tribunal Acts 18:17; whether it is the same man the text does not say, and if it is, the greeting carries a quiet history.

No book of the New Testament has been less doubted. The letter names its author, its city, its situation, and a dozen people in it — Chloe's household, Stephanas, Fortunatus, Achaicus, Aquila and Priscilla, Apollos, Timothy 1 Corinthians 1:11 1 Corinthians 16:17 1 Corinthians 16:19 — and it argues about matters no later writer would have invented, since several of them are embarrassing.

One fact about the correspondence should be held from the start: this is not the first letter Paul sent to Corinth. He refers to an earlier one: I wrote to you in my letter to have no company with sexual sinners 1 Corinthians 5:9. That letter has not survived. What is called First Corinthians is the first that did.

Date

The letter dates itself by where its author is standing: but I will stay at Ephesus until Pentecost 1 Corinthians 16:8. Paul is writing from Ephesus, near the end of the long stay recorded in Acts — some three years of work in that city Acts 19:8–10 Acts 20:31 — and he is planning to leave after the feast, cross to Macedonia, and winter in Corinth 1 Corinthians 16:5–6. That places the writing in the spring, roughly five years after he founded the congregation and around the middle of the 50s of the first century.

The travel plans in the letter also mark it as the middle of a longer story. Timothy has already been sent ahead 1 Corinthians 4:17 1 Corinthians 16:10, and Paul intends to follow. The second letter to Corinth reveals that the plan changed, that a painful visit and a severe letter intervened, and that he was by then coming to them a third time 2 Corinthians 2:1 2 Corinthians 13:1. So this letter sits inside a sustained pastoral struggle, not at the end of one.

What prompted it can be reconstructed from the letter itself, and it came from three directions at once. A report reached him — it has been reported to me concerning you, my brothers, by those who are from Chloe's household, that there are contentions among you 1 Corinthians 1:11. A delegation arrived: I rejoice at the coming of Stephanas, Fortunatus, and Achaicus 1 Corinthians 16:17. And a letter came with questions, which he begins answering at chapter seven: now concerning the things about which you wrote to me 1 Corinthians 7:1.

That last phrase is the letter's structural hinge, and it recurs. Some form of now concerning introduces six sections 1 Corinthians 7:1 1 Corinthians 7:25 1 Corinthians 8:1 1 Corinthians 12:1 1 Corinthians 16:1 1 Corinthians 16:12 — marriage, the unmarried, food offered to idols, spiritual gifts, the collection, and Apollos. The first six chapters deal with what Paul had heard; from chapter seven he answers what they had asked.

Backgrounds

Corinth was new money in an old country. The classical city had been destroyed by Rome and lay largely desolate for a century before being refounded as a Roman colony — so the Corinth Paul knew was barely a hundred years old, populated by freedmen, veterans, traders and immigrants, without the aristocratic families or long memory of Athens. It was the capital of the province of Achaia and it was rich, and its wealth came from its position: a city on a narrow isthmus with a harbor on each side, so that cargo crossed the neck of land rather than risk the voyage around the southern capes.

That geography explains much of the letter. A transit city is a city of arrivals and departures, of patrons and clients, of self-made men with something to prove — and the congregation's characteristic sins are the sins of such a place: competition, faction, litigation, boasting about status, and a party spirit organized around celebrity teachers 1 Corinthians 1:12 1 Corinthians 3:3–4 1 Corinthians 6:1. Paul's reminder that not many were wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, and not many noble 1 Corinthians 1:26 lands in a city where those three things were the currency.

The city also hosted the Isthmian games, one of the great athletic festivals of the Greek world, held nearby every second year — which is why an argument about self-denial reaches for a runner in a stadium, a prize, and a boxer who does not beat the air 1 Corinthians 9:24–27.

And it was a city of temples, with the consequences that follow. Meat from sacrifices supplied the markets and the dining rooms attached to shrines, so a believer's ordinary social life — a guild dinner, a family celebration, a patron's invitation — raised the question of chapters eight to ten 1 Corinthians 8:10 1 Corinthians 10:27–28. Corinth's reputation for sexual license was proverbial in the ancient world, and the congregation had absorbed some of it: a case of incest tolerated by the church 1 Corinthians 5:1, and men who apparently saw no conflict between their faith and the city's brothels 1 Corinthians 6:15–16.

The congregation itself was mixed in every way that can strain a church — Jews and Greeks, slaves and free 1 Corinthians 12:13, the poor and those with houses large enough to host 1 Corinthians 11:21–22 1 Corinthians 16:19. Nearly every problem in the letter is a fault line between those groups.

Theology and purpose

This letter is practical theology throughout, and its method is the thing to notice: Paul never answers a behavioral question with a rule when he can answer it with the gospel. Faction is answered with the cross 1 Corinthians 1:18; sexual immorality with the resurrection and the indwelling Spirit 1 Corinthians 6:14 1 Corinthians 6:19; disorder at the Lord's table with the night he was betrayed 1 Corinthians 11:23; a squabble about gifts with the body of Christ 1 Corinthians 12:27; and doubts about the future with an empty tomb 1 Corinthians 15:20. Every correction runs back to something God did.

The cross governs the first four chapters and sets the letter's logic. The word of the cross is foolishness to those who are dying, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God 1 Corinthians 1:18 — and wisdom, the word that sounds fifteen times in this letter and eleven of them in the first three chapters, is the thing Corinth prized and the thing the cross overturns. Paul had come determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified 1 Corinthians 2:2, and he preaches Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Greeks 1 Corinthians 1:23. A congregation ranking its teachers by eloquence is told that its founder deliberately declined to compete on that ground.

Against boasting, the letter sets one question: what do you have that you didn't receive? 1 Corinthians 4:7. Everything the Corinthians were competing over had been given to them, which makes the competition absurd — and Christ himself was made to us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification, and redemption 1 Corinthians 1:30, so that even the categories they wanted to excel in are his gift rather than their achievement.

Then the letter's most surprising instrument: the body. The word appears in thirty-six verses, and Paul uses it to settle four different disputes. Your own body is a temple of the Holy Spirit and not your own, for you were bought with a price 1 Corinthians 6:19–20. The bread is a participation in the body of Christ, and the many are one body because they share one loaf 1 Corinthians 10:16–17. The church is the body of Christ, and members individually 1 Corinthians 12:27, which is why no gift may be despised and none may be paraded. And the dead are raised bodily, in a body sown perishable and raised imperishable 1 Corinthians 15:42–44. Corinth had a low view of the body in both directions — indulging it and disparaging it — and Paul's answer to both is that God takes it seriously enough to buy it, feed it, join it, and raise it.

The purpose is stated in the letter's own imperatives. Let all things be done decently and in order 1 Corinthians 14:40, because worship that edifies nobody has failed. Follow after love 1 Corinthians 14:1, because gifts without it are noise 1 Corinthians 13:1. And at the end of the resurrection chapter, the reason any of it matters: be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the Lord's work, because you know that your labor is not in vain in the Lord 1 Corinthians 15:58. The most abstract argument in the letter ends in a reason to keep working.

Additional notes

Note — how the letter uses Don't you know. Ten times Paul asks it 1 Corinthians 3:16 1 Corinthians 5:6 1 Corinthians 6:2 1 Corinthians 6:3 1 Corinthians 6:9 1 Corinthians 6:15 1 Corinthians 6:16 1 Corinthians 6:19 1 Corinthians 9:13 1 Corinthians 9:24, and the question is never a request for information. It is a reproach: they did know, and were not living as though they did. Six of the ten fall in chapters five and six. Much of what this letter corrects is not ignorance but a failure to draw the obvious conclusion from what was already believed.

Note — the resurrection, and the sleep before it. Chapter fifteen is the fullest treatment of the resurrection in Scripture, and its argument is that the whole faith stands or falls with a historical event: if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith also is in vain 1 Corinthians 15:14. The chapter also settles the condition of the dead in the meantime, and it does so casually, in the vocabulary it assumes its readers share. The dead are asleep — witnesses who have fallen asleep 1 Corinthians 15:6, those who are asleep whom Christ's rising makes a first fruit 1 Corinthians 15:20, and the dead in Christ who will be raised at the last trumpet 1 Corinthians 15:51–52. Christ is the first fruit, which is a harvest word: the first sheaf guarantees a crop that comes later, at one time, not a trickle of individuals. And the change is dated — at the last trumpet, when the perishable puts on the imperishable 1 Corinthians 15:52–53. If the dead were already raised or already glorified, the chapter's entire argument would be unnecessary. See the treatment of the same question in the letters to Thessalonica and Philippi.

Note — baptism for the dead. In the middle of the resurrection argument Paul asks, else what will they do who are baptized for the dead? 1 Corinthians 15:29. He mentions the practice, does not describe it, does not commend it, does not say who they are, and never returns to it — and no other passage in Scripture refers to it. What the argument needs is only that somebody was doing something that presupposed a resurrection. Everything beyond that is reconstruction. Where Scripture names a thing once and explains it nowhere, the honest course is to say so and stop.

Note — the two passages about women, and why they are treated carefully. The head covering at 11:2-16 and the instruction about speaking at 14:34-35 are among the most contested paragraphs in the New Testament, and readers who hold the whole of Scripture in the same regard have long divided over them. Two facts internal to the letter must be held together with whatever reading is taken. Paul assumes women pray and prophesy in the assembly — that is the premise of the head-covering passage itself 1 Corinthians 11:5 — and he lists prophecy among the gifts given by the Spirit as he wills, to each one 1 Corinthians 12:7–11. Read inside the letter, the two resolve together: the head-covering passage binds a principle — the sexes honored as distinct and interdependent in worship — in the dress of its century, and the silence of 14:34-35 is the third conditional silence of its own chapter, quieting disruptive questioning rather than the praying and prophesying chapter 11 regulates. The difference among readers here is old and honestly held; what no reading may do is set the letter against itself.

Note — the collection. Twice this letter and twice the next give directions for money being gathered for the poor believers in Jerusalem 1 Corinthians 16:1–4 2 Corinthians 8:1–5 2 Corinthians 9:1–5 Romans 15:26. Paul's instructions are strikingly practical: a weekly setting aside, proportioned to income, so that nothing has to be raised in a hurry when he arrives, and independent men appointed to carry it so that no one can question his handling of it 2 Corinthians 8:20–21. The theology of generosity in these letters always arrives attached to an accounting procedure.

Outline

How the book is built

Love at the center of the gifts chiasm 12:1-14:40

• A 12:1-31 The gifts are many and the Spirit is one; the church is a body whose members cannot despise or dispense with one another.
• B 13:1-13 Love — without which the most spectacular gift is noise, and which alone outlasts prophecy, languages and knowledge.
• A′ 14:1-40 The gifts in the assembly: prophecy preferred to languages because it builds others up, and everything done for edification, decently and in order.

Paul opens the question of spiritual gifts, interrupts himself for a chapter on love, and then resumes the same question — and the resumption says so in its first words: follow after love, and earnestly desire spiritual gifts. The arrangement is the argument. Love is not a further gift to be sought alongside the others; it is the center the others have to be placed around, and the chapter on it is deliberately set where a reader cannot get from the gifts to their exercise without passing through it.

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