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1 Corinthians
📖 1 Corinthians
Πρὸς Κορινθίους Α (Pros Korinthious A) — 'To the Corinthians, 1.' The numbering is a later convenience and slightly misleading: this is not the first letter Paul wrote them. He refers at 5:9 to an earlier one that has not survived, so what the Bible calls 1 Corinthians is at least the second, and the correspondence as a whole probably ran to four letters and several visits.
The most practical book in the New Testament — a working pastor answering a congregation's actual mess: factions, a lawsuit, a scandal, food, sex, money, worship, and what happens when everybody talks at once. And in the middle of the housekeeping, the love chapter and the earliest written account of the Last Supper.
Chapters
1 of 16 chapters translated · 6.2%
Gold chapters are published — click one to read it. The rest are still ahead.
Chapter by chapter
1 Corinthians 1The most practical book in the New Testament opens with the first recorded church split — and it is not about doctrine. It is about which preacher people liked best. Word has reached Paul in Ephesus, by way of a woman named Chloe and her household, that the congregation he founded in Corinth has broken into parties chanting slogans: “I am of Paul,” “I of Apollos,” “I of Cephas,” “I of Christ.” His reply does not adjudicate between them. It goes underneath them, to the thing all four parties are actually competing for — status, cleverness, a name to drop — and takes the ground away: “Has Christ been parcelled out? Paul was not crucified for you, was he?” Then the argument that has never stopped being difficult: God’s chosen instrument is an executed provincial, which to Greeks is an idiocy and to Jews an obscenity, and God appears to have picked it precisely because it is unimpressive. “Look at your calling, brothers — not many wise, not many powerful, not many well-born.” ⚠ Along the way the apostle loses track of who he has baptised and says so in writing; a co-signer appears who may be the man beaten for Paul’s sake in Acts 18; and the whole chapter ends where it was always going: “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”
About the book
Where it sits
The SEVENTH book of the New Testament and the second of Paul's letters by length. Its influence is out of proportion to its housekeeping: chapter 13 is read at weddings by people with no other interest in Paul, chapter 11 preserves the oldest written account of the Last Supper, and chapter 15 is the earliest surviving statement of the resurrection tradition — a formula Paul says he 'received', so older than the letter and within a couple of decades of the events.
Genre
A LETTER, and unusually visible as one: it answers both a verbal report (from Chloe's household, 1:11) and a written list of questions the Corinthians had sent, which is why the second half keeps starting paragraphs with 'now concerning…' (7:1, 8:1, 12:1, 16:1). Reading it is like hearing one side of a telephone call — the questions have to be reconstructed from the answers.
Author
PAUL, uncontested, with SOSTHENES named as co-sender in the first line — possibly the synagogue ruler beaten at Corinth in Acts 18:17. Chapter 16:21 has Paul take the pen for the greeting in his own hand, which means the rest was dictated.
Date written
c. AD 54–55, from Ephesus during the three-year stay of Acts 19 (he says so at 16:8: 'I will stay in Ephesus until Pentecost'). ⚠ It is anchored by the firmest date in New Testament chronology: an inscription at Delphi fixes the proconsulship of GALLIO, before whom Paul was hauled at Corinth (Acts 18:12-17), to AD 51-52.
Audience
The congregation Paul founded at Corinth in about AD 50 — a Roman colony barely a century old, refounded by Caesar largely with freedmen, rich on the traffic between two harbours, and short of pedigree. The congregation was mixed in a way that made trouble structurally likely: a synagogue ruler and a city treasurer in the same room as slaves and day-labourers, meeting in a house whose dining room would seat perhaps a dozen while the rest stood in the courtyard. Several of the letter's problems are that floor plan.
How it's laid out
1:1–4:21The factions — 'I am of Paul, I of Apollos' — answered not by adjudicating but by dismantling the wisdom and status the parties were competing over.
5:1–6:20Scandals reported: a case of incest the congregation is proud of tolerating, believers suing each other in pagan courts, and the use of prostitutes.
7:1–11:1'Now concerning the things you wrote about' — marriage and singleness; meat sacrificed to idols, and the rights Paul declines to use.
11:2–14:40Worship — head coverings, the Lord's supper (and the rich eating before the poor arrive), spiritual gifts, LOVE, and orderly speech.
15:1–58The resurrection — the earliest surviving creed, the argument that if the dead are not raised nothing else stands, and the spiritual body.
16:1–24The collection for Jerusalem, travel plans, greetings, and a signature in Paul's own hand.
What it's about
- The CROSS against status — the argument of chapter 1, and the solvent Paul applies to every subsequent problem: a congregation competing for honour is answered with an execution.
- The BODY — the letter's governing metaphor, used of the congregation (12), of the bread (10-11), of the believer's own body (6), and of the resurrection (15).
- FREEDOM limited by love — 'all things are lawful, but not all things build up'; the strong yielding to the weak, and Paul refusing his own rights as the worked example.
- LOVE as the measure of everything else, in a chapter placed deliberately in the middle of an argument about spiritual gifts rather than at a wedding.
- RESURRECTION, bodily — against a congregation that seems to have thought itself already spiritually arrived.
- ORDER — 'God is not a God of disorder but of peace'; the letter ends where a practical pastor would end.
Key words & people
Words this book turns on — each links to its dictionary entry:
People & places — each links to the encyclopedia:
The source text
Translated from the Greek of the SBL GREEK NEW TESTAMENT (SBLGNT), edited by Michael W. Holmes. The letter is well attested, with P46 (c. AD 200) carrying nearly all of it. Chapter 1 is textually quiet apart from the word order of verse 2, where the earliest text puts 'sanctified in Christ Jesus' before 'which is in Corinth' — awkward enough that later copyists tidied it, and this translation keeps the awkward order. ⚠ The letter's two famous textual problems fall later: 14:34-35, on women keeping silent, floats to a different position in the Western manuscripts, which some read as the signature of an interpolation; and 15:51 varies across the witnesses on who sleeps and who is changed.
Looking forward
1 Corinthians has the least narrative and some of the earliest tradition. Chapter 1 sets the terms — 'we proclaim Christ crucified', a stumbling-block and an idiocy, and the crucified man is named as 'the power of God and the wisdom of God'. Chapter 11 hands on the words over the bread and cup as something Paul 'received from the Lord'. And chapter 15 quotes a formula older than any Gospel: that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, was buried, was raised on the third day, and appeared — to Cephas, to the twelve, to more than five hundred at once, 'most of whom are still alive', which is an invitation to go and ask them.
Where the debates are
Whether 'I am of Christ' (1:12) is a fourth faction or Paul's own retort. Who exactly the 'wise' opponents were — sophists, proto-gnostics, over-realised enthusiasts, or simply the socially ambitious. Whether 14:34-35 is Pauline or a later insertion, and how it squares with 11:5, where women pray and prophesy aloud. What 'baptised for the dead' (15:29) means, on which there are said to be more than thirty proposals and no consensus. And how many letters and visits the correspondence actually contained. The library reports the positions; it does not vote.