⚠ “The congregation of God.” Ekklēsia is an assembly of people — in secular Greek a city’s voting assembly, and in Acts 19 the word for the Ephesus riot. It is not a building and not an institution, and this translation renders it congregation throughout, with Tyndale, who was forbidden to. King James’s third rule to his translators reads: “The old ecclesiastical words to be kept; as the word church not to be translated congregation.” So KJV, Geneva, ASV, Douay and NIV all print “church”; NWT prints “congregation.” The English word descends from something else entirely — kyriakon, “the Lord’s house” — and it drags the building along behind it. In a letter about a group of people who cannot get along in someone’s dining room, the difference is not cosmetic.

⚠ Sosthenes co-signs. Luke names a Sosthenes as the synagogue ruler in Corinth who was seized and beaten in front of the governor’s tribunal while Gallio looked away (Acts 18:17). If it is the same man — the name is not rare, so this is a probability and not a fact — then the letter’s co-sender is the man the crowd beat for Paul’s sake, and the Corinthians would have recognised the name instantly. Paul does not explain it. He never does.

“Sanctified… called to be holy ones.” Both words are from the same root, and both are already true of them before a single correction is made: a congregation about to be scolded for lawsuits, incest, drunkenness at the supper and chaos in worship is addressed, in the second verse, as holy. That is the letter’s whole strategy in miniature. NWT “called to be holy ones”; the rest of the shelf reads “saints,” and this translation follows the NWT for the same reason it did in Romans: hagios means holy, and “saint” now names a category these people are not in.

⚠ Two small oddities in verse 2. First, the word order: the earliest text puts “sanctified in Christ Jesus” before “which is in Corinth,” which is awkward enough that later copyists tidied it, and most versions still print the tidy order. We keep the awkward one. Second, “in every place, theirs and ours” can attach to the place (their place and ours) or to the Lord (their Lord and ours); the Greek will carry either, and the ambiguity may be the point — a letter about factions opens by refusing to let one congregation own the address.

⚠ Read this paragraph twice: once as praise, and once as a list of the problems. Paul thanks God that the Corinthians are rich “in all speech and all knowledge” and lack no gift. Those are precisely the three things the letter is about to spend sixteen chapters on: speech (chapters 1–4 on eloquence and rival preachers, chapter 14 on tongues), knowledge (chapter 8: “knowledge puffs up, but love builds up”), and gifts (chapters 12–14). Every commendation is a hand-grenade with the pin still in. It is not sarcasm — he means the thanks — but he is naming their strengths in the exact order he intends to take them apart.

“Not lacking in any gift.” Charisma — a thing freely given, from charis, grace; the word English borrowed for personal magnetism, which is very nearly the opposite of what it means here. Paul’s point is that a charisma is a gift and therefore not an achievement, which removes the ground from under the boasting the whole chapter is aimed at.

“Partnership with his Son.” Koinōnia — sharing, having something in common, and in the papyri an ordinary business word for a partnership, the arrangement two men enter when they own a boat together. KJV and ASV “fellowship”; NIV the same; NWT “a sharing.” We keep the commercial edge, because the letter is about people who have stopped behaving like joint owners of anything.

“God is faithful.” Three words, and they carry the argument for the rest of the letter. Every guarantee in this paragraph rests on God’s reliability rather than the Corinthians’ — which, given what chapter 5 is about to report, is just as well.

⚠ “No tears among you… mended together.” Two words, one metaphor, and English usually loses both. Schismata — the root of schism — are rips: it is the word the Gospels use for a tear in a garment, and for the temple curtain. Katērtismenoi is what you do to the rip: to mend, set right, put back in order — and it is the very word Matthew and Mark use of the sons of Zebedee mending their nets (Matthew 4:21). Paul is not asking for uniformity of opinion; he is asking a torn net to be repaired. KJV “no divisions… perfectly joined together”; ASV “perfected together”; NWT “fitly united.” We keep the cloth.

⚠ “By Chloe’s people.” Literally “by those of Chloe” — her household: slaves, freedmen, dependants, travelling on her business. Paul names his source, and his source is a woman’s household, which tells you both that Chloe was a person of standing known to the Corinthians and that Paul saw no reason to protect the informants by leaving them out. He is also, deliberately, not anonymous about it: the congregation will know exactly who has been talking.

The four slogans. “I am of Paul” — the founder. “I of Apollos” — the eloquent Alexandrian, “mighty in the scriptures” (Acts 18:24). “I of Cephas” — Peter, by his Aramaic name, which suggests a Jewish-Christian party. And then “I of Christ,” which is either a fourth faction or Paul’s exasperated sting in the tail; commentators have argued it both ways since antiquity and the Greek does not settle it. ⚠ Note what the quarrel is not about: no doctrinal difference is named anywhere in the chapter. It is about loyalty to personalities, and it is the first recorded church split.

“Has Christ been parcelled out?” Memeristai — to be divided into shares, apportioned, like an estate among heirs. Then two questions whose Greek expects the answer no and gets it by sounding ridiculous: was Paul crucified for you? were you baptized into Paul’s name? He puts his own name in the slot to show how obscene it looks there.

⚠ “Beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized anyone else.” One of the most disarming sentences in the New Testament. Paul lists two names, remembers a household, and then simply admits he has lost track — mid-argument, in a letter that will be read aloud to a congregation and copied for centuries. He is dictating, and it reads exactly like a man dictating. It is worth noticing that he does not go back and tidy it: the letter preserves the correction rather than the corrected version, which is a small window onto how these documents were actually made. TLB smooths it into “I don’t remember baptizing anyone else”; KJV keeps the shrug: “besides, I know not whether I baptized any other.”

Crispus, Gaius, Stephanas. Luke names a Crispus as the Corinthian synagogue ruler who believed (Acts 18:8) — so the two synagogue officials in this chapter are its co-sender and its first baptism. A Gaius hosts Paul and “the whole congregation” when Romans is written from this same city (Romans 16:23), which is a useful independent fix on where and when. Stephanas turns up again at the letter’s end (16:15) as the first convert in Achaia. Three names, dropped without explanation, that quietly date and place the whole correspondence.

⚠ “Not with wisdom of speech, so that the cross would not be emptied out.” Kenōthē — to be hollowed out, drained, made void; the same verb behind the theological term kenosis. The claim is startling and it is the hinge of the chapter: a sufficiently impressive delivery can empty the message of its content, because if people are won by the performance they have been won by the performer. Paul, whose opponents said his speech was contemptible (2 Corinthians 10:10), is making a virtue of it — and he knows he is.

“The word of the cross… is folly.” Mōria — the root of moron. Not “a hard saying” or “a mystery”: idiocy. And the tense of the two participles is worth keeping — “those who are perishing” and “us who are being saved” are both processes in motion, not verdicts already filed. KJV “foolishness… unto them that perish”; ASV gets the progressive right, “them that are perishing… us who are being saved.”

The quotation is Isaiah 29:14, in its Greek form, where the target was Judah’s own clever advisers negotiating with empires while ignoring God. Paul lifts a line about religious expertise and aims it at Greek philosophy, which is the sort of thing he does constantly and which is easy to miss.

⚠ “Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater?” Three cultures in one line. The sophos is the Greek sage; the grammateus is the Jewish scribe, the expert in Torah; the syzētētēs, “debater” or “disputer,” is a word so rare it may be Paul’s own coinage for the professional arguer of the agora. He is dismissing the entire credentialled class of both worlds in eleven Greek words. KJV “where is the disputer of this world?”; NWT “debater of this system of things.”

“God made the wisdom of the world foolish.” Emōranen — the same verb this library met in Romans 1:22, where those “claiming to be wise” were made fools. There the making-foolish was a judgment; here it is a strategy. The two chapters are doing the same thing to the same word from opposite ends.

“Jews ask for signs and Greeks look for wisdom.” Two entirely reasonable requests: show me the power, or show me the argument. The gospel answers neither, and Paul does not pretend otherwise. What he preaches is Christos estaurōmenos — a perfect participle, “Christ having-been-crucified,” a permanent state rather than a past event.

⚠ Why this was obscene, and not merely surprising. Modern readers meet the cross as jewellery, which makes it nearly impossible to hear the sentence. Crucifixion was a Roman punishment reserved principally for slaves, rebels and provincials — Cicero called it crudelissimum taeterrimumque supplicium, the most cruel and disgusting penalty, and wrote that the very word should be kept far from the ears of a Roman citizen. To a Greek, announcing a crucified man as the wisdom of God was an idiocy. To a Jew it was worse than absurd, it was a skandalon — originally the trigger-stick of a trap, then anything you trip over — because the law said that a man hanged on a tree is under God’s curse (Deuteronomy 21:23). Paul is not softening a difficulty. He is putting the offence in the shop window. KJV “unto the Jews a stumblingblock”; Douay “a scandal”; NWT “a cause for stumbling.”

“The foolish thing of God… the weak thing of God.” Greek can make an adjective into a noun and Paul exploits it: not God’s foolishness as a quality he possesses, but the foolish-thing-of-God, this specific idiotic act. He does not argue that the cross is secretly clever. He grants the charge and says the charge is the point — God’s worst idea beats our best one. ASV “the foolishness of God is wiser than men”; the comparative is doing something absurd on purpose.

⚠ “Not many wise… not many powerful… not many well-born.” The argument stops being theoretical and becomes a survey of the room. These are the three markers of standing in a Greek city — education, influence, and birth — and Paul says the congregation has almost none of them. ⚠ Notice the precision of not many: not none. Corinth’s congregation demonstrably included a synagogue ruler, a householder rich enough to host everybody, and (Romans 16:23, from this city) the city treasurer. The mixture is exactly what makes the letter’s later problems — lawsuits, and the rich eating before the poor arrive at the supper — possible in the first place. KJV “not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble”; NIV “not many were influential; not many were of noble birth.”

“The things that are not, in order to bring to nothing the things that are.” Ta mē onta against ta onta — the non-existent things against the existent things, and Paul is using the vocabulary of Greek metaphysics to describe a social class. Ta exouthenēmena, “the things counted as nothing,” is from a verb meaning to reckon as less than nothing, to treat as beneath contempt. The sentence takes the ancient world’s hierarchy and inverts it with the same verb three times: God chose… God chose… God chose.

“So that no flesh may boast before God.” Pasa sarx, “all flesh” — the Hebrew way of saying anybody at all, and a slightly rude word for the human race in a sentence about pedigree. This is the purpose clause the whole paragraph has been building toward: the selection was designed to leave nobody with anything to boast about. Boasting is the chapter’s real subject, and the factions of verse 12 were only its symptom.

“Who became wisdom for us from God — both righteousness and sanctification and redemption.” The grammar puts wisdom first and then unpacks it with three nouns, which is why we keep the dash rather than making a flat list of four: Christ is the wisdom, and righteousness, holiness and redemption are what that wisdom turns out to consist of. Dikaiosynē is the word Romans 1 was built on. Hagiasmos reaches back to “sanctified” in verse 2, closing the chapter’s own circle. And apolytrōsis is a ransom-word — the price paid to release a prisoner of war or to free a slave, a transaction any Corinthian had watched happen.

⚠ The closing quotation is Jeremiah 9:23–24, compressed. The prophet’s full sentence is worth having in view, because it is the same three-item list: “Let not the wise boast in his wisdom, let not the strong boast in his strength, let not the rich boast in his riches; but let the one who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me.” Wise, strong, rich — which is precisely the trio of verse 26. Paul has been quoting Jeremiah’s structure for five verses without saying so, and only reveals the source at the end. Geneva and KJV “He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord”; ASV the same; NWT “let him boast in Jehovah” — which is a decision about the Hebrew behind the quotation rather than about the Greek in front of it, and is worth recognising as one.