1 Corinthians: A Church That Ate Apart

At a Glance

Who wrote it: Paul, with a co-worker named Sosthenes listed beside him (1 Corinthians 1:1). Nobody seriously doubts it.

When: About 53 to 55, from Ephesus, where Paul says he will stay until Pentecost (1 Corinthians 16:8). That is about twenty-five years after I died.

Written for: The Christians of Corinth, a rich and proud port city. They were quarreling, eating apart and boasting of their gifts, and they had written to Paul with questions.

What it remembers of me: More than any other letter of Paul’s. The oldest written account of my last supper (11:23–26), a ruling of mine on divorce (7:10–11), and the oldest list of the people who said they saw me after I died (15:3–8).

How close it stays to me: Close on the poor, the weak and love. Far on slavery, and torn on women.

If you only read three chapters: 1 Corinthians 11, 1 Corinthians 13 and 1 Corinthians 15.

Words to Know

Corinth — a rich Greek port city, rebuilt by Rome as a colony a century before Paul arrived.

The Lord’s Supper — the meal my followers shared in memory of my last supper. In Corinth it was still a full meal.

Spiritual gifts — abilities the Corinthians believed came from the Spirit: prophecy, healing, speaking in tongues.

Speaking in tongues — speech in unknown languages during worship, highly prized in Corinth.

Cephas — the Aramaic form of Peter’s name. Both mean rock.

The Book in Brief

Paul writes to the church in Corinth, together with a co-worker named Sosthenes. He has heard from members of Chloe’s household that the congregation is splitting into parties, each following a favorite teacher. In chapters 1 to 4 he answers that the message of a crucified Christ looks like foolishness to the world, and that he and Apollos are only servants.

Chapters 5 and 6 deal with scandals. A man in the church is living with his father’s wife, and nobody has acted. Members are taking one another to court before unbelievers. Paul tells the church to put the man out, to settle its disputes among itself, and to keep away from sexual immorality.

From chapter 7 on, Paul answers questions the Corinthians wrote to him. Chapter 7 is about marriage, staying single, divorce, and whether slaves and free people should change their place. Chapters 8 to 10 are about meat offered to idols. Knowledge puffs up, he says, but love builds up. In chapter 9 he describes the rights he has given up, and in chapter 10 he warns them with the story of Israel in the wilderness.

Chapters 11 to 14 are about worship. Paul writes about what men and women should wear on their heads when they pray and prophesy. He rebukes the church for the way it eats the Lord’s Supper, with the rich eating first and the poor going hungry, and he recalls what I did on the night I was betrayed. Chapters 12 to 14 take up spiritual gifts. There are many gifts and one Spirit, as there are many parts and one body. Chapter 13 praises love above every gift. Chapter 14 asks that worship be orderly, and prefers prophecy to speaking in tongues.

Chapter 15 is about resurrection. Paul recalls what he handed on: that I died, was buried, was raised on the third day, and appeared to many people, last of all to him. Some in Corinth say there is no resurrection of the dead. Paul answers that if Christ has not been raised, their faith is empty. He describes the body the dead will have, and ends in triumph over death.

Chapter 16 asks them to set money aside each week for the believers in Jerusalem. Paul gives his travel plans, speaks of Timothy, Apollos and Stephanas, and ends with greetings, in his own hand.

Paul had heard bad news from Corinth. When the congregation met for the Lord’s Supper, it was not one meal. It was two.

For in your eating each one takes his own supper first. One is hungry, and another is drunken. What, don’t you have houses to eat and to drink in? Or do you despise God’s assembly and put them to shame who don’t have enough? (1 Corinthians 11:21–22).

Picture how it worked. My followers in Corinth met in the house of one of their wealthier members. A Roman dining room held perhaps nine or ten people reclining on couches. Everyone else stood or sat in the courtyard outside. The host and his friends, who did not have to work late, came early and ate well. The slaves and laborers arrived after work, to whatever was left. Some went home hungry. Some of the early ones were drunk.¹

Paul’s answer is to remind them what the meal was. For I received from the Lord that which also I delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night in which he was betrayed took bread. When he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “Take, eat. This is my body, which is broken for you. Do this in memory of me” (1 Corinthians 11:23–24).

This was written around the year 54, perhaps fifteen years before Mark. It is the oldest written record of the words you hear at communion. And Paul quoted it to shame the rich members of a church for eating before the poor arrived.

Then come the verses that have frightened people away from communion for centuries: whoever eats this bread or drinks the Lord’s cup in a way unworthy of the Lord will be guilty of the body and the blood of the Lord (1 Corinthians 11:27). Churches have read that as a warning about private sin, and have used it to keep people away from the table. Read in its place, it is about eating while your neighbor goes hungry. Paul’s own conclusion is simple: when you come together to eat, wait for one another (1 Corinthians 11:33).

Go deeperHow the supper stopped being a dinner

In Paul’s day the Lord’s Supper was a real meal. The bread was shared at the start of dinner and the cup after supper (1 Corinthians 11:25). In between, people ate. That is why some in Corinth could go hungry while others got drunk.

By about the year 112 the meal was fading. Pliny the Younger, a Roman governor on the Black Sea, wrote to the emperor Trajan about people he had questioned, some of whom said they had once been Christians. They told him they used to meet on a fixed day before dawn and sing to Christ as to a god. They bound themselves not to steal, commit adultery or break their word. Then they went home, and came together again later to eat plain, harmless food. They said they had given up that second meeting after he banned clubs and societies.²

About forty years later, a Christian teacher named Justin described a Sunday gathering in Rome. People heard readings and a sermon, prayed, and shared bread and wine mixed with water. He mentions no dinner. But he adds that those who could afford it gave what they chose, and that the leader kept the money to help orphans and widows, the sick, prisoners and strangers passing through.²

So the supper shrank from a dinner into a ritual. The gift for the poor did not go away. It stayed at the table.

The city

Corinth was a new city built on an old one. Rome had destroyed it in 146 BC. A century later, Julius Caesar refounded it as a Roman colony and settled it largely with freed slaves.³ It sat on the narrow neck of land between two seas, with a port on each side, and it was rich, busy, mixed and proud.

Paul spent about eighteen months there, according to Acts, working as a tentmaker. The church he left behind was made up mostly of ordinary people. He reminded them of it: not many are wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, and not many noble; but God chose the foolish things of the world that he might put to shame those who are wise (1 Corinthians 1:26–27).

Not many. A few were rich, and those few owned the houses.

Go deeperTwo stones from Paul’s Corinth

Acts says that while Paul was in Corinth, his opponents brought him before the judgment seat when Gallio was proconsul of Achaia (Acts 18:12). A proconsul was the Roman governor of a province, and Achaia was the province that held Corinth.

That one detail gives us the best fixed date in Paul’s life. French excavators at Delphi, across the gulf from Corinth, found pieces of a stone inscription: a letter from the emperor Claudius to the city of Delphi. It names Lucius Junius Gallio as proconsul of Achaia. The emperor’s titles date the letter to the year 52. Gallio’s year in office was probably 51 to 52. Acts says Paul stayed in Corinth a year and six months (Acts 18:11), so most scholars place his stay between about 50 and 52.⁴

The second stone is in Corinth itself. In 1929 excavators found a paving stone in a square just east of the theater, with a Latin inscription once set into it in bronze letters. It says that a man named Erastus laid the pavement at his own expense, in return for being made aedile. An aedile was a city official who looked after streets, public buildings and markets.⁵

Paul wrote Romans from Corinth, and in it he sends greetings from Erastus, the treasurer of the city (Romans 16:23). Is he the same man? Some scholars think so, because both held city office in Corinth at about the same time. Others point out that Paul’s word for treasurer may name a lower post than aedile, and that scholars disagree about how common the name Erastus was. The evidence allows neither a sure yes nor a sure no.⁵ If it is the same man, one of my followers in Corinth held real public office.

Not the first letter

The letter you call First Corinthians was not Paul’s first letter to Corinth. In chapter 5 he says, I wrote to you in my letter to have no company with sexual sinners (1 Corinthians 5:9). That earlier letter is lost. Another, which he mentions in his next letter, may be lost too.

What you have is part of a long, messy correspondence between Paul and a church that argued with him. He was answering reports he had heard, from Chloe’s household (1 Corinthians 1:11), and questions they had written to him.

Whose side are you on?

The first problem was factions. Each one of you says, “I follow Paul,” “I follow Apollos,” “I follow Cephas,” and, “I follow Christ” (1 Corinthians 1:12).

Paul’s answer includes a lovely moment of forgetfulness that made it into your Bible. He thanks God he baptized almost none of them, so nobody could claim to belong to him: I thank God that I baptized none of you, except Crispus and Gaius … (I also baptized the household of Stephanas; besides them, I don’t know whether I baptized any other) (1 Corinthians 1:14–16).

He corrects himself in the middle of the sentence, and then admits he cannot remember. That is a man dictating a letter, not a man writing scripture. It became scripture anyway.

Then he gives them the heart of what he believed: For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are dying (1 Corinthians 1:18). We preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews, and foolishness to Greeks (1 Corinthians 1:23). A crucified man was the lowest thing in the Roman world. Paul said God had chosen exactly that.

Go deeperWhat the cross meant in Paul’s world

Today the cross hangs on walls and around necks. In Paul’s world it was an instrument of torture and public shame. Rome used it mostly on slaves, rebels and foreigners, and it was meant to be seen.

Cicero, the famous Roman lawyer, told a court in 63 BC that the very word cross should be kept far from a Roman citizen. It should be kept away, he said, not only from his body but from his thoughts, his eyes and his ears. In another speech he called crucifixion the cruelest and most horrible of punishments.⁶

Outsiders mocked the idea that anyone could worship a man who had died that way. On a plaster wall near the Palatine Hill in Rome, someone scratched a drawing of a figure with a donkey’s head, fixed to a cross. Beside it stands a man with a raised hand. The Greek scratched below is usually read as “Alexamenos worships his god.” Its date is debated, but the late second or early third century is widely accepted. It was a joke at a Christian’s expense.⁷

Paul knew how his message sounded. He told the Corinthians that he had decided to know nothing among them except Jesus Christ and him crucified (1 Corinthians 2:2). He chose, on purpose, the one thing every educated person in the city would have been ashamed to say.

Sex, marriage and the end of the world

Much of the letter answers questions about sex and marriage, and it is easy to misread.

Chapter 7 opens with a line that sounds like Paul’s own opinion: it is good for a man not to touch a woman (1 Corinthians 7:1). But it follows the words the things about which you wrote to me, and many scholars think it is a slogan from Corinth that Paul is quoting before he answers it. He does the same thing elsewhere with All things are lawful for me.⁸

His answer is surprisingly equal for his time. Let the husband give his wife the affection owed her, and likewise also the wife her husband. The wife doesn’t have authority over her own body, but the husband. Likewise also the husband doesn’t have authority over his own body, but the wife (1 Corinthians 7:3–4). In a world where a husband was assumed to have rights over his wife’s body, Paul said each had rights over the other’s.

On divorce he quotes me, and makes a point of it: But to the married I command—not I, but the Lord—that the wife not leave her husband (1 Corinthians 7:10). It is one of only a handful of times in all his letters that Paul says he is passing on something I said.

And then the reason behind much of his advice. Because of the distress that is on us … the time is short … For the mode of this world passes away (1 Corinthians 7:26, 29, 31). Paul expected the world to end soon, perhaps within his own lifetime. Stay as you are, he said. Do not bother changing your situation. There is no time.

Even his advice to slaves is caught in that urgency, and in a Greek phrase nobody can settle. Were you called being a bondservant? Don’t let that bother you, but if you get an opportunity to become free, use it (1 Corinthians 7:21). The Greek for the last part can mean take the freedom, or it can mean make the most of your slavery instead. Translators have gone both ways for centuries.⁹ Either way, nowhere in this letter does Paul say that holding a person as property is wrong.

My brothers had wives

Here is a small fact from this letter that most people never notice. Defending his right to be supported by the churches, Paul asks, Have we no right to take along a wife who is a believer, even as the rest of the apostles, and the brothers of the Lord, and Cephas? (1 Corinthians 9:5).

Peter was married. Mark says so too, because I healed his mother-in-law. My brothers were married, and they traveled with their wives as they spread the word. The first leaders of my movement were family men, with wives at their side.

Love builds up

The Corinthians were proud of their knowledge and their spiritual gifts, especially speaking in tongues. Paul kept bringing them back to the people in the room who had neither.

On meat sacrificed to idols: Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up (1 Corinthians 8:1). You may know the idols are nothing. But if your eating causes a weaker believer to stumble, you have failed him.

On the church as a body: The eye can’t tell the hand, “I have no need for you” … those members of the body which seem to be weaker are necessary … God composed the body together, giving more abundant honor to the inferior part (1 Corinthians 12:21–24). When one member suffers, all the members suffer with it (1 Corinthians 12:26).

Read that against the dinner in chapter 11. The parts of the body Corinth treated as least important were the ones arriving late and hungry. Paul says God gives them more honor.

The love chapter

And then chapter 13, which is probably read at more weddings than any other passage in the Bible.

If I speak with the languages of men and of angels, but don’t have love, I have become sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal (1 Corinthians 13:1).

Love is patient and is kind. Love doesn’t envy. Love doesn’t brag, is not proud, doesn’t behave itself inappropriately, doesn’t seek its own way, is not provoked, takes no account of evil (1 Corinthians 13:4–5).

For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face (1 Corinthians 13:12).

But now faith, hope, and love remain—these three. The greatest of these is love (1 Corinthians 13:13).

It is beautiful at a wedding. But it was not written for a couple. It was written to a quarreling congregation where the rich ate first, the gifted showed off, and everyone had a favorite apostle. Love doesn’t seek its own way was a rebuke, aimed at people who were eating their own supper first.

Women speaking

The letter has two passages about women in worship that do not sit easily together.

In chapter 11, Paul takes for granted that women pray and prophesy aloud in the assembly. He only argues about what they wear on their heads while they do it: every woman praying or prophesying with her head uncovered dishonors her head (1 Corinthians 11:5).

In chapter 14 he says, Let the wives be quiet in the assemblies, for it has not been permitted for them to be talking … for it is shameful for a wife to be talking in the assembly (1 Corinthians 14:34–35).

Women may prophesy aloud in chapter 11, and must be silent in chapter 14. Some scholars think the second passage refers only to a particular kind of disruptive talk. Others notice that in one family of old manuscripts these two verses are found in a different place, after verse 40, and argue that they began as a note in the margin and were later copied into the text. Others do not go that far.¹⁰ But the conflict is in the letter, and you are allowed to see it.

Notice also how Paul describes a normal meeting just before that passage: When you come together, each one of you has a psalm, has a teaching, has a revelation, has another language, or has an interpretation (1 Corinthians 14:26). Each one. There is no priest, no pastor and no pulpit in that picture. Everyone brought something.

What I received

Chapter 15 contains the oldest account of what my followers said happened after my death. Paul says he is handing on what was handed to him.

For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: 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, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to over five hundred brothers at once, most of whom remain until now, but some have also fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all, as to the child born at the wrong time, he appeared to me also (1 Corinthians 15:3–8).

This is a formula Paul had learned, probably within a few years of my death. Most historians agree that it is very old.¹¹ It is the earliest evidence you have.

I promised I would not settle what happened. So I will only tell you what this passage says, and what it does not.

It lists Peter, the twelve, more than five hundred people at once, my brother James, all the apostles, and Paul himself, who counts his own vision on the same list as the others. It does not mention the women. In every one of the four gospels, women are the first to find the tomb empty. In Paul’s list, there are none.

Paul also never mentions an empty tomb, though he says I was buried and was raised. And when the Corinthians ask what kind of body the dead will have, he answers, It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body, and flesh and blood can’t inherit God’s Kingdom (1 Corinthians 15:44, 50). Scholars have argued for a long time about what Paul meant by a spiritual body. The gospels written later describe me eating fish and being touched. Paul describes something harder to picture.

Some in Corinth were already saying there was no resurrection at all (1 Corinthians 15:12). Paul answered them plainly: If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain, and your faith also is in vain (1 Corinthians 15:14). He staked everything on it.

Go deeperHow old is the list in chapter 15?

Paul did not make this list up as he dictated. He says that he delivered to them what he had received. Those are the words a teacher used for handing on something fixed.

Look at its shape. It runs as four short statements, each beginning with that: I died, I was buried, I was raised, I appeared. Two of them end with the same phrase, according to the Scriptures (1 Corinthians 15:3–4). It reads like something people learned by heart. Paul also says the twelve here, and nowhere else in his letters.¹²

When did he learn it? Three years after his call, he went up to Jerusalem, stayed fifteen days with Peter, and saw my brother James (Galatians 1:18–19). If he learned the list then, or earlier, it was already in use within about a decade of my death, long before any gospel was written.¹¹

Scholars are less sure where the old formula stops and Paul’s own words begin. Some end it with the appearance to Peter and the twelve. Others carry it through James and all the apostles. Paul’s own vision, the last item, is plainly his own addition.¹²

The collection

The letter ends with money. Now concerning the collection for the saints … On the first day of every week, let each one of you save, as he may prosper (1 Corinthians 16:1–2).

This is the earliest mention in your Bible of setting money aside on the first day of the week. It was not for a building or a salary. It was for the poor among my followers in Jerusalem, a city most of the Corinthians had never seen.

And Paul signs off with two words of Aramaic that he did not bother to translate, marana tha. Your Bible renders it Come, Lord! (1 Corinthians 16:22).¹³ It is a prayer from the very first generation of my followers, in my own language, still sitting in a Greek letter to a Roman city.

Check It Yourself

Look up: 1 Corinthians 11:17–34, and read it as one passage.

You will find: the words said at every communion, set inside a complaint that the rich were eating before the poor arrived.

Then compare 1 Corinthians 11:5 with 1 Corinthians 14:34–35.

The Short Version

• 1 Corinthians is part of a longer, messy correspondence with a quarreling church. At least one earlier letter is lost.
• The oldest account of my last supper is quoted to rebuke the rich for eating before the poor arrived.
• Paul expected the world to end soon, and much of his advice on marriage and slavery says stay as you are.
• The love chapter was written to a church that was not loving, and the letter is in tension with itself over women speaking.
• Chapter 15 holds the oldest list of those who said they saw me after my death. It names no women.