The First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians

Overview

First Corinthians is about twenty-five pages, written from Ephesus around 53 to 55 CE, which makes it one of the earliest Christian documents in existence, earlier than any of the gospels. Paul had founded the church at Corinth a few years before and stayed eighteen months.

Corinth matters. It was a Roman colony rebuilt on the site of the destroyed Greek city, a port with two harbours, wealthy, commercial, full of migrants and freedmen, and with a reputation for vice that was partly deserved and partly a joke at its expense. The congregation was socially mixed in a way Paul keeps returning to, including slaves and people with money and houses large enough to hold a meeting.

The letter is reactive throughout, and knowing that makes it much easier to follow. Paul has had a report from members of Chloe’s household about quarrels, and he has received a letter from the congregation asking questions. Chapters 1 to 6 respond to the report. From chapter 7 onward he works through their questions, and you can hear him quoting them back: now concerning the matters about which you wrote.

It is not a systematic treatise. It is a pastor dealing with a difficult church, and its theology arrives as a consequence of practical rulings.

The argument

Chapters 1 to 4: the factions. The congregation has split into parties naming Paul, Apollos, Cephas and Christ. Paul’s response is not to adjudicate but to attack the basis of the competition. The message he preached is a crucified man, which is a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Greeks, and it was delivered deliberately without eloquence so that faith would not rest on rhetorical skill. God chose the foolish, the weak and the despised. He and Apollos are servants, one planting and one watering, and the growth is not theirs.

Chapters 5 to 6: the scandals. A man is living with his father’s wife and the congregation is proud of its tolerance; Paul orders expulsion. Members are taking each other to law before pagan magistrates, which he says is a defeat whatever the verdict, and asks why they do not rather suffer the wrong. Then sexual conduct, and the argument that the body is not for immorality but is a temple, against a slogan the Corinthians seem to have been using, that all things are lawful.

Chapter 7: marriage. The first of the answers to their letter, and one of the more surprising passages in the New Testament for its evenhandedness: the husband has authority over his wife’s body and equally the wife over her husband’s. Paul prefers celibacy, says so, and repeatedly marks which of his rulings are the Lord’s command and which are his own opinion. The reason for the preference is stated plainly in the same chapter: he expects the present form of the world to pass away shortly.

Chapters 8 to 10: food offered to idols. A genuinely difficult practical problem. Most meat sold in a city like Corinth had passed through a temple. The educated members argue that an idol is nothing, so the meat is just meat. Paul agrees with the theology and refuses the conclusion, because a member with a less robust conscience may be damaged by the example. Knowledge puffs up, he says, but love builds up. He then spends a chapter on his own practice of surrendering rights he possesses, and becoming all things to all people.

Chapters 11 to 14: worship. Head coverings, and then a sharp passage on the Lord’s supper, where it emerges that the wealthy are arriving early and eating their own provisions while the poor, who cannot leave work, get nothing. Paul says that meeting like that is not eating the Lord’s supper at all, and gives the earliest written account of the words over the bread and cup.

Then spiritual gifts, over three chapters. There is one Spirit and many gifts, distributed as it chooses, and the congregation is a body in which the eye cannot tell the hand it has no need of it, and the parts that seem weaker are indispensable.

Chapter 13 sits in the middle of this argument and is directed at it. Tongues without love are noise; prophecy, knowledge, faith that moves mountains and even giving your body to be burned are nothing without it. What follows is a definition entirely in verbs: it is patient and kind, it does not envy or boast, it is not puffed up, it seeks not its own, it bears and believes and hopes and endures. And it does not end, whereas prophecy and tongues and knowledge will, because now we see in a mirror dimly and then face to face.

Chapter 14 returns to practicalities and ranks intelligible prophecy above ecstatic speech on the ground that the assembly must be built up, with a preference for five words that teach over ten thousand in a tongue.

Chapter 15: the resurrection. Some in Corinth are denying that the dead are raised. Paul begins with a formula he says he received and passed on, that Christ died, was buried, was raised on the third day, and appeared to Cephas, then the twelve, then to more than five hundred at once, most of whom are still alive, then to James, then to all the apostles, and last to himself. This list is the earliest written account of the resurrection appearances and predates the gospels by decades.

Then the argument. If there is no resurrection of the dead, Christ has not been raised; if Christ has not been raised, the preaching is empty and so is the faith, the apostles are liars, and those who have died are lost. He refuses every softening. The chapter ends with the transformation of the body, the last trumpet, and the taunt to death.

Chapter 16 is practical: the collection for Jerusalem, travel plans, greetings.

How to read it

Read it as correspondence. Keep asking what question or complaint each section answers, and the shape becomes obvious.

Read chapter 13 in its place, between chapters 12 and 14, rather than on its own. Read as a wedding text it is a poem about feeling; read where Paul put it, it is a rebuke to people ranking themselves by their gifts, and it is harder and better.

Read chapter 15 slowly. It is the argument on which historic Christianity rests, laid out by the earliest witness whose writing survives, and it makes no attempt to be immune from disproof.

Handle chapter 14 verses 34 and 35 honestly. The instruction that women be silent sits three chapters after Paul has regulated how women should be dressed while praying and prophesying aloud, which assumes they do. Many scholars treat it as a later marginal note that migrated into the text, since it appears in different places in some manuscripts. Others defend it. The tension is real and no reading should pretend otherwise.

Notice how often Paul distinguishes his own judgement from a command. It is more frequent here than anywhere else he wrote.

Questions it raises

• Paul says he preached without eloquence on purpose, so that faith would not rest on rhetoric. Is a deliberately unpersuasive presentation a rhetorical strategy?
• The strong may eat meat offered to idols and should not, for the sake of the weak. How far does that obligation run, and who decides who is weak?
• Chapter 13 defines love entirely by conduct. Is that an account of love, or of how to behave when you do not feel it?
• Paul’s advice on marriage is shaped by the expectation that the world is ending shortly. What survives of the advice once that expectation does not?
• He stakes everything on the resurrection being a fact. Was that a risk worth taking, and does the letter offer any fallback?
• The same letter has women prophesying in the assembly and women keeping silent. What do you do with a text that contradicts itself three chapters apart?