First Epistle to the Corinthians

← Encyclopedia

The First Epistle to the Corinthians is a letter written by the apostle Paul to the Christian community he had founded at Corinth, the Roman colony astride the isthmus of Greece. It opens, like his other letters, by naming itself a letter — Paul and a co-sender, Sosthenes, to the assembly at Corinth — and it does not stay long on pleasantries. Word had come to him, while he was at work elsewhere, that the church he planted was tearing along several seams at once, and most of what follows is the reply of a founder who cannot be present and must govern by post. It belongs to the small group of letters whose Pauline authorship almost no scholar disputes, composed in the mid-50s CE — most place it around 53 or 54, sent from Ephesus across the Aegean — which makes it one of the earliest surviving Christian documents of any kind, set down a generation before the Gospels took written form and roughly contemporary with his earliest extant letter, the First Epistle to the Thessalonians. It is, in the ordering of the New Testament, the seventh book; in the order of composition it stands very near the front.

Paul at his writing-desk, the role in which the Corinthian letters cast him — a founder governing his churches by post — in a 17th-century painting. — Rembrandt (c. 1629–30), Germanisches Nationalmuseum, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

A church coming apart

Its occasion is concrete and unglamorous: a young congregation was coming apart. Members of the household of a woman named Chloe had brought Paul a report, and a letter from the Corinthians themselves had arrived with its own list of questions, so that the epistle works at once as answer and as intervention. The first crisis is faction. The community had divided into parties that took their names from teachers — one for Paul, one for Apollos (the eloquent Alexandrian Jew whose polish had drawn admirers), one for Cephas (the Aramaic name of the apostle Peter), and one that claimed simply to be “of Christ.” Paul meets this not by defending his own party but by dissolving the premise: the cross is not a wisdom one ranks against rival wisdoms, and a community that sorts itself by celebrity teachers has misunderstood what it was joined to. To a city proud of its rhetorical sophistication he sets the deliberately unimpressive figure of a crucified man, the “foolishness” of the message held up against the prestige of Greek eloquence.

The Temple of Apollo at ancient Corinth, the kind of cult site that shaped the temple sacrifice and civic banquets of the Greek port where Paul’s converts lived. — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The other troubles are as practical. There was a lawsuit between members dragged before pagan courts; a sexual scandal — a man living with his father’s wife — that the assembly had met with pride rather than grief; disorder at the common meal, where the wealthy ate and drank their fill while the poor went without, so that the gathering meant to be the Lord’s Supper had become an occasion of division along lines of class. And there were the questions the Corinthians had themselves posed and Paul answers in turn — about marriage and celibacy, about whether one might eat meat that had been offered to idols, about the conduct of worship, and about which of the Spirit’s gifts ranked highest. The idol-meat question, raised by a community living inside the cults and civic banquets of a Greek port — a setting where the mystery religions and temple sacrifice shaped daily life — drew from Paul a careful answer balancing the freedom of the strong against the conscience of the weak. Much of the letter is Paul replying to these disputes point by point, and that pressure is part of why it has mattered: its famous passages are not set pieces composed in calm but interventions struck off inside an argument.

Love as rebuke

Nothing shows this more plainly than the thirteenth chapter, the hymn to love that has been read at countless weddings and funerals as if it were a free-standing poem. In its place it is a weapon turned sideways. The Corinthians had been quarreling about whose endowments were more spectacular — speaking in tongues above all — and Paul interrupts the argument to insist that gifts without love are nothing: a sounding gong, a clanging cymbal. The love he describes is not feeling but conduct under strain — patient, kind, not envious or boastful, not insisting on its own way, bearing and enduring all things — and it is set explicitly above the gifts the factions prized, and above even faith and hope, as the one thing that does not pass away. The Greek word is agapē, the self-giving regard that later Christian writers would distinguish from desire; the chapter became its charter. (See agape.) Read inside the quarrel it answers, the chapter is less a celebration than a reproof: the most gifted assembly in Paul’s care is told that its gifts are worthless to it without the thing it most conspicuously lacked.

One body, many members

Three of the letter’s themes have carried far beyond their first setting, and each grows out of the same dispute over rank. The first is the image of the assembly as a single body with many members. Against a congregation that graded its members by the showiness of their gifts, Paul argues that a body is not one limb but many, that the eye cannot say to the hand it has no need of it, that the parts seeming weaker or less honorable are the ones the body clothes with greater honor. The metaphor was not new — orators had used the body-and-members figure to counsel social classes to keep their stations — but Paul inverts its usual moral. Where the old fable taught the lower orders to accept their place, his version levels the hierarchy from the top, insisting the indispensable members are precisely the ones the proud overlook. The community is “the body of Christ,” a single organism animated by one Spirit, and its diversity of function is meant to bind it, not to rank it.

The second theme is the ordering of the spiritual gifts themselves. Paul does not deny the ecstatic phenomena — prophecy, healing, the working of miracles, and the gift of tongues — but he subordinates them all to intelligible, upbuilding speech. Tongues, he says, edify only the speaker unless interpreted; prophecy, because it can be understood, builds up the whole assembly; five words with the mind are worth more in the gathering than ten thousand in a tongue. The criterion is not intensity of experience but whether the gathered body is built up, and the same chapters insist that the God in question is a God of order, not of confusion. This passage became a permanent point of return for movements that claimed the same charismata in later centuries — Montanists in the second century, and the Pentecostal and charismatic renewals of the modern age — who read it sometimes as warrant and sometimes as restraint.

The risen body

The third and largest theme fills the long fifteenth chapter, the earliest extended Christian argument for resurrection that survives. Some at Corinth were saying there is no resurrection of the dead — perhaps under the influence of a Greek confidence in the soul’s immortality that found a risen body superfluous or repellent. Paul will have none of it. He opens by reciting a formula he says he had himself received and passed on: that Christ died for sins, was buried, was raised on the third day, and appeared to Cephas, to the Twelve, and to many others. Scholars across the spectrum read these verses as a pre-Pauline creed older than the letter — language with non-Pauline turns of phrase, learned and handed on in the technical idiom of received tradition, plausibly within a very few years of the crucifixion. Embedded in a letter of the mid-50s, it is among the oldest datable testimonies to the resurrection faith, earlier than any narrative Gospel.

From this received core Paul mounts his case, and the whole argument turns on a shared end: the raising of the dead is bound to the last things, the trumpet and the final transformation that his eschatology keeps always in view. If Christ is not raised, the preaching is empty and faith is in vain; the dead in Christ have perished and the living are, of all people, most to be pitied. Then he turns to the objection that clearly pressed his hearers — how are the dead raised, with what kind of body? — and answers with the distinction the chapter is remembered for. What is sown is not the body that will be: a bare seed is sown and God gives it a body of his choosing; what is sown perishable is raised imperishable, sown in dishonor raised in glory. He sows a sōma psychikon, a “natural” or soul-animated body, and there is raised a sōma pneumatikon, a spiritual body. The phrase has been contested ever since. The contrast Paul draws is not between matter and spirit — the adjective set against pneumatikos is not “fleshly” but psychikos, “soulish” — so that many readers take the spiritual body to mean not a body made of spirit but a body wholly animated and empowered by the Spirit, the perishable remade rather than discarded. Others have heard in “spiritual body” a deliberate paradox, a near-oxymoron straining to name something the language was not built to hold. The chapter ends not in argument but in trumpet-blast: the dead raised imperishable, the perishable putting on the imperishable, death swallowed up in victory.

The inner, the outer, and the glass

That distinction, and the inner-and-outer vocabulary that runs through the letter, gave it a particular afterlife in mystical and esoteric reading. The line that has traveled farthest is from the love chapter: that the present knowing is partial — now we see, in the wording the Geneva Bible of 1560 fixed and the King James of 1611 carried, “through a glass, darkly,” and only afterward face to face; now we know in part, then we shall know fully. The “glass” is a mirror, the polished bronze esoptron of the ancient world, which gave back a dim and reversed likeness; the “darkly” renders en ainigmati, in a riddle or enigma. Writers in the apophatic tradition — the way of approaching God by negation — took the verse as scriptural warrant for the limits of all knowledge of the divine. Gregory of Nyssa and, after him, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite built from such material a “knowing by unknowing,” a divine darkness in which the soul comes nearest God precisely where vision fails — and the Corinthian mirror, the partial sight that waits on a face-to-face fullness, gave that tradition one of its load-bearing images.

The same inner-and-outer language fed other currents farther from Paul’s concerns. The contrast between the soul-body and the spirit-body, between the present partial sight and the coming fullness, supplied vocabulary that Gnostic teachers and the seekers of inward gnosis could turn toward an ascent of the soul, a knowing that lifts the spirit free of the flesh. Paul himself was arguing for a definite future event — a general raising of the dead, bodies and all, at the end — not for an inward escape from the body or a wisdom available now to the initiated; the borrowings run in directions he would likely not have recognized. He had, after all, written this very letter against a party at Corinth that prized just such secret wisdom and ecstatic flight, and his answer to them was the cross and the common body, not the climb. Yet the words outran the argument, and the imagery of veiled and unveiled sight, of the perishable putting on the imperishable, became common property of traditions that would have unsettled their author.

Text, reception, and scholarship

A leaf of Papyrus 46 (P. Chester Beatty II), an early codex of Paul’s letters and one of the oldest surviving witnesses to the text of 1 Corinthians. — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The letter circulated early and was quoted as authoritative within a few decades: Clement of Rome, writing to the same Corinthian church near the end of the first century, already appeals to “the epistle of the blessed Paul” against a fresh outbreak of the very factionalism Paul had fought, evidence that the letter was known, kept, and read aloud at Corinth a generation after its arrival. Its place in Christianity was never seriously contested; the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, written into the same long and stormy relationship, presupposes it, and together the two letters preserve more of one congregation’s life than survives for any other community of the apostolic age. Among the undisputed letters it stands alongside the Epistle to the Romans as a principal source for Paul’s thought, and its body imagery is taken up and recast — the church as a temple, Christ as its head — in the later Epistle to the Ephesians.

Critical study reads the epistle as a window onto the earliest church before its doctrines had hardened — a community improvising, and an apostle improvising with it. The standard date and Ephesian provenance, and the near-unanimous judgment that the letter is genuinely Paul’s, are set out in reference treatments such as the Encyclopædia Britannica account of the Corinthian letters and the scholarly overview of the epistle and its occasion. The two great critical commentaries of the modern era — Hans Conzelmann’s in the Hermeneia series (German 1969, English 1975) and Anthony Thiselton’s massive New International Greek Testament Commentary (2000) — trace how much of the letter’s difficulty comes from hearing only one side of a conversation: Paul quotes the Corinthians’ own slogans back at them, sometimes endorsing, sometimes turning them, so that the reader must reconstruct the questions from the answers. The exact force of the fifteenth chapter’s sōma pneumatikon remains a live point of exegesis; Brian Schmisek, for instance, has argued that the “spiritual body” reads as a near-oxymoron, a phrase straining against the categories it inherits, while others hold that Paul means the present body remade and animated by the Spirit, not a body of spirit. The matters the letter settles in passing — how a divided congregation should hold a common meal, who may speak and in what order, what the raised body might be — were not abstract problems but the daily friction of a small assembly learning to be a church. What survives is less a treatise than a record of that improvisation: a man writing under pressure, certain of a few things and working out the rest in the open.

→ Related: Gnosis · Apophatic Theology · Paul The Apostle · Second Epistle To The Corinthians · New Testament · Christianity · Holy Spirit · Agape · Eschatology · Pseudo Dionysius The Areopagite · Gnosticism · Mystery Religions · Idolatry · Epistle To The Romans · Epistle To The Ephesians · Epistle To The Philippians · First Epistle To The Thessalonians · Gift Of Tongues · Immortality