The Corinthian Letters

Rome destroyed Greek Corinth in 146 BC. Julius Caesar refounded it as a Roman colony in 44 BC, settled largely with freedmen and veterans, and by Paul's day it was the capital of the province of Achaia and one of the busiest places in the Mediterranean. It sat on the isthmus with a harbour on each side, Lechaion to the west and Cenchreae to the east, and cargo was dragged across the neck of land rather than sailed around the Peloponnese. It hosted the Isthmian games. It was a city of new money, new names and hard competition for status, which is the background you need for almost every conflict in these letters.

One caution about a detail you will meet in older commentaries. The claim that a thousand sacred prostitutes served the temple of Aphrodite on the Acrocorinth comes from the geographer Strabo and refers to the old Greek city that had been destroyed two centuries before Paul. Jerome Murphy-O'Connor and others have argued that Roman Corinth's reputation for vice is largely a scholarly inheritance rather than a documented fact, and that Corinth was probably no worse than any port. Do not build a sermon on it.

The church was mixed and the mix is the problem. Paul says in 1:26 that not many were wise by human standards, not many powerful, not many of noble birth, which implies that some were. Gerd Theissen's social analysis in the 1970s set out what became the widely accepted picture: a congregation with a majority of modest means and a minority of patrons with houses large enough to host it, and much of the friction running along that seam. It is not unchallenged. Justin Meggitt argued that virtually all early Christians lived at or near subsistence and that the wealthy minority has been read into the evidence, and Steven Friesen's poverty scale has been used to press the same objection. Erastus, described in Romans 16:23 as the city treasurer, may be the Erastus named in a paving inscription found near the Corinthian theatre recording that he laid the pavement at his own expense in return for his aedileship. The identification is plausible and is disputed on grounds of date and title.

Then the correspondence itself. 1 Corinthians 5:9 refers to a letter Paul had already written, which we do not have. 1 Corinthians follows. Then something goes badly wrong: 2 Corinthians speaks of a painful visit and of a letter written 'through many tears' (2:4). We do not have that letter either, unless, as some argue, part of it survives inside 2 Corinthians. So the two documents we possess are the second and fourth items in a conversation of at least four, and we have neither side of the Corinthians' own contributions.

The first four chapters address a single problem. People are lining up behind teachers: 'I follow Paul', 'I follow Apollos', 'I follow Cephas', 'I follow Christ' (1:12). The last of the four is probably the most self-righteous, not the most spiritual.

Paul does not respond by adjudicating between the parties. He attacks the frame. 'For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God' (1:18). Jews demand signs, Greeks search for wisdom, and what God has actually done is execute his Messiah as a criminal. Nothing in that event can be used as a platform for status, which is exactly why God chose it: 'so that no one may boast in His presence' (1:29).

Chapter 2 continues in the same direction, with Paul saying he came in weakness and fear and much trembling and decided to know nothing among them except Jesus Christ and him crucified. In a city where public speakers were rated like athletes, that is a deliberate refusal to compete. His opponents later throw it back at him, and 2 Corinthians 10:10 reports what they said: 'His letters are weighty and forceful, but his physical presence is unimpressive, and his speaking is of no account.'

Chapters 3 and 4 then redescribe the leaders the factions are fighting over. Paul planted, Apollos watered, God gave the growth. They are servants, stewards, and, in the extraordinary image of 4:9, apostles at the end of the procession, like prisoners appointed for death, made a spectacle to the whole world. Whatever else the Corinthians thought they were getting when they signed up with a teacher, this is Paul refusing to be a patron with a clientele.

Chapters 5 and 6 deal with reported scandals: a man living with his father's wife and a congregation proud of its tolerance, and believers suing each other in the civil courts, which in a Roman colony meant the wealthy suing the poor before judges drawn from their own class. Then 6:12-20 on sexual immorality, with the argument built not on rules but on ownership: your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, you are not your own, you were bought at a price.

Chapter 7 begins the answers to their letter, and its first sentence is one of the most disputed in the book. The BSB prints it as Paul's own statement, 'It is good to abstain from sexual relations', with the literal Greek in a footnote, 'It is good for a man not to touch a woman'. Several other major translations, among them the ESV and NIV, put the same words in quotation marks as a Corinthian slogan Paul is about to qualify. Section 5 works through both readings. What follows is a set of case-by-case rulings on marriage, singleness, mixed marriages and widows, delivered with unusual care about which parts are the Lord's command and which are his own judgment (7:10, 7:12, 7:25, 7:40).

Chapters 8 to 10 handle food sacrificed to idols, which was most of the meat in a Greek city and was bound up with civic and family life. Paul's answer runs in three movements. Knowledge is real but it is not the governing consideration, because knowledge puffs up and love builds up, and a brother may be destroyed by your freedom (chapter 8). Then chapter 9, which looks like a digression about Paul's right to be supported and is actually the worked example: Paul has rights and does not use them. Then chapter 10, where the line is drawn: eat what is sold in the market and ask no questions, but do not sit down at the sacrificial table itself, because you cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons.

Chapters 11 to 14 concern the assembly: head coverings, the Lord's Supper being eaten in a way that humiliates those who have nothing, and then spiritual gifts. The great image of chapter 12 is the body, where the parts that seem weaker are indispensable and the parts we consider less honourable are treated with greater honour, which is a direct attack on a congregation ranking itself by visible gifting. Chapter 13, so often read at weddings, is a weapon in that argument: tongues of men and of angels without love are 'a ringing gong'. Chapter 14 then subordinates the impressive gift to the intelligible one, because the standard is whether the church is built up.

Two verses in this stretch require an honest footnote. 14:34-35, restricting women from speaking in the assembly, appear after verse 40 rather than in place in a group of Western witnesses: Codex Claromontanus, Codex Augiensis, Codex Boernerianus, the original hand of minuscule 88, and the Old Latin manuscripts d and g. A second and different kind of evidence is the margin of Codex Fuldensis, where Victor of Capua had verses 36 to 40 rewritten; Philip Payne argues this shows knowledge of a text that lacked 34-35, and others read the marginal note otherwise. Gordon Fee argued that the verses are a later interpolation. Others, including Curt Niccum, point out that no surviving manuscript omits them altogether and that displacement is weaker evidence than omission. The question is live, it interacts with 11:5, where women pray and prophesy in the assembly, and the fuller treatment belongs with 1 Timothy 2 in lesson 6 of this module.

1 Corinthians 15 opens with something older than the letter. 'For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that He was buried, that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures.' Received and passed on, paralambanō and paradidōmi, are the technical verbs for handing on a fixed tradition. The list of appearances that follows, including one to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom Paul says are still alive, is material Paul did not compose. Scholars across the theological spectrum date this formula to within a few years of the crucifixion, which makes it the earliest datable statement about the resurrection that exists.

The problem at Corinth was not the afterlife. It was the body. Educated Greeks were comfortable with an immortal soul escaping the flesh and profoundly uncomfortable with a raised corpse, and 15:35 puts their objection in their own voice: with what kind of body will they come? Paul's answer is neither a resuscitated cadaver nor a disembodied spirit but transformation, illustrated by seed and plant, and summarised at 15:44 as sown a natural body and raised a spiritual body. The adjectives describe what animates the body, not what it is made of.

The stakes are set out without hedging at 15:14: 'And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is worthless, and so is your faith.' Paul does not offer Christianity as a useful philosophy that survives the failure of its central claim. He says the whole thing stands or falls on a historical event. Verse 29 mentions people being baptised on behalf of the dead, a practice nobody can now explain with confidence, and Paul neither commends it nor condemns it. Commentators have proposed dozens of readings. The honest teaching position is that we do not know what it was.

Between the letters something ruptures. Paul makes a visit he calls painful (2 Corinthians 2:1), writes a letter 'out of great distress and anguish of heart' and 'through many tears' (2:4), and then waits in Troas and Macedonia in agony until Titus brings news that the church has repented (7:5-7). Someone had wronged him publicly, and 2:5-11 asks the congregation to forgive and comfort that man now, so that he will not be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow.

2 Corinthians is the result: the most personal, least orderly and most emotionally exposed thing Paul wrote. Chapters 1 to 7 defend his ministry and his changed travel plans. Chapters 8 and 9 press the collection for Jerusalem. Chapters 10 to 13 turn suddenly severe against rivals he calls, with heavy sarcasm, super-apostles, and contain the strangest boast in ancient literature: a list not of victories but of beatings, shipwrecks, hunger, sleepless nights and his daily concern for all the churches (11:23-28), ending with a thorn in the flesh he asked three times to have removed, and the answer he was given, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is perfected in weakness' (12:9). The abrupt change of tone at chapter 10 has led many scholars to argue that 2 Corinthians is a compilation of two or more letters, possibly including part of the tearful one. Others hold that Paul simply took up the pen again after a pause or fresh news. There is no manuscript evidence for any division, which is the strongest argument for unity.

Here is the methodological problem these letters force on you, and it is one of the most important things a Bible student can learn. Paul is answering questions we do not possess. We have his replies. We do not have the Corinthians' letter, we do not have Chloe's report, and we do not have whatever the visiting teachers were saying. Reconstructing the questions from the answers is called mirror-reading, and every reader of Paul does it whether they notice or not.

It is unavoidable and it is dangerous. John Barclay set out the difficulty carefully in an article on Galatians in 1987, and his warnings apply here. A polemical writer exaggerates. He may attack a position nobody actually holds, in order to show where an argument leads. He may be answering something he has been told secondhand and misunderstood. And the interpreter who reconstructs an opponent is always tempted to build one convenient to his own reading. Barclay proposed working criteria: give more weight to statements that are assertive rather than incidental, to themes that recur, to material that is unfamiliar enough that Paul would not have raised it unprompted, and to reconstructions that are historically plausible in the setting. Then grade your own confidence honestly, from probable down to merely possible.

Work an example. 1 Corinthians 7:1 says, 'Now for the matters you wrote about', and then gives a sentence, literally 'It is good for a man not to touch a woman'. If that sentence is Paul's own principle, chapter 7 is an argument for the superiority of celibacy with concessions for the weak. If it is the Corinthians' slogan, chapter 7 is Paul restraining an ascetic enthusiasm that was already damaging marriages in the congregation. The Greek can support either, since ancient texts had no quotation marks, and the pastoral consequences run in opposite directions. Translations divide. The BSB, which this course quotes, prints it as Paul's own words, and that reading has real support: Paul says 'it is good' again in his own undisputed voice at 7:8 and 7:26, and wishes in 7:7 that all were as he is. The ESV, NIV and NRSV print it as a quotation, and that reading has real support too: the letter quotes Corinthian slogans elsewhere, and 7:2 turns at once to 'But because there is so much sexual immorality', which reads like a correction. Either way it is a judgment, and the honest teacher says so.

Now count the cost. Every time we apply one of these verses, we carry a reconstruction with it, usually unexamined. A woman told to keep silent, a couple told that celibacy is higher, a believer told never to eat anything associated with another religion: each of those applications rests on a guess about a question in a lost letter. That is not an argument for ignoring the text. It is an argument for a particular discipline: state the reconstruction out loud, mark it as a reconstruction, and let the weight of the application match the strength of the evidence behind it.

There is also a gain hidden in this, and it is the reason these letters have been treasured. Because they are occasional, they show a pastor thinking. You watch Paul decide when to command and when to advise (7:25), when to insist on his rights and when to give them up (chapter 9), when to be severe and when to stop being severe (2 Corinthians 2:5-11). A treatise could not have taught that. Only a half-heard conversation with a difficult church could.