First Epistle to the Corinthians

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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 is among 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 — which makes it one of the earliest surviving Christian documents of any kind, older than the Gospels in their written form.

Its occasion is concrete and unglamorous: a young congregation was coming apart. News had reached Paul of factions forming around rival teachers, of a lawsuit between members, of disorder at the common meal, of a sexual scandal, and of open disagreement over marriage, over meat that had been offered to idols, and over which spiritual gifts ranked highest. Much of the letter is Paul answering these disputes point by point, and that practical pressure is part of why it has mattered: the famous passages are not set pieces but interventions in an argument. The hymn to love in the thirteenth chapter — patient, kind, enduring, greater than faith and hope — sits in the middle of a quarrel about whose gifts were more impressive, and reads as a rebuke to it.

Three of its themes have carried far beyond their original setting. The letter develops the image of the assembly as a single body with many members, no part able to say to another that it has no need of it. It treats the ecstatic gifts — prophecy, healing, and above all speaking in tongues — and ranks them below intelligible, upbuilding speech, a passage that later movements claiming those same gifts return to repeatedly. And in its long fifteenth chapter it mounts the earliest extended Christian argument for resurrection, distinguishing the perishable, “natural” body from a sōma pneumatikon, a spiritual body raised imperishable — a phrase whose exact meaning has been contested ever since.

That last distinction gave the letter a particular afterlife in mystical and esoteric reading. Paul’s line that the present knowing is partial — seeing now “through a glass, darkly,” and only later face to face — was taken up by writers in the apophatic tradition as a scriptural warrant for the limits of knowledge before God. The contrast between the outer and the inner, the bodily and the spiritual, supplied vocabulary that currents far from Paul’s own concerns would later put to their own uses, sometimes against his evident intent. Paul himself was arguing for a definite future event, not for an inward ascent; the borrowings run in directions he would likely not have recognized.

Modern study reads the letter as a window onto the earliest church before its doctrines had hardened — a community improvising, and an apostle improvising with it. 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