The First Epistle to the Corinthians

The First Epistle to the Corinthians is one of the seven letters that the overwhelming majority of scholars accept as written by Paul himself, and one of the richest sources both for his own life and for the daily life of an early gentile congregation. It is a long, practical letter to the church Paul had founded at Corinth (Acts 18), written in response to reports of quarrelling and to a set of written questions the community had sent him. Because it is Paul's own composition, it stands as first-order evidence for his thought and character, alongside Galatians and the other undisputed letters, and it is best read in complement to the narrative of the Acts of the Apostles.

What it is

Writing from Ephesus to a congregation in the prosperous Roman colony of Corinth, Paul takes up one issue after another: factionalism among believers who aligned themselves with rival teachers, questions of sexual ethics and marriage, the eating of food that had been offered to idols, the ordering of worship and the shared meal, the exercise of spiritual gifts, and — at length, in the great fifteenth chapter — the resurrection of the dead. (Scripture) The opening chapter already names the divisions: "every one of you saith: I indeed am of Paul; and I am of Apollo; and I am of Cephas; and I of Christ" (1 Corinthians 1:12, Douay-Rheims). (Scripture) The letter is thus less a treatise than a pastor's response to a real and troubled community, which is part of what makes it so valuable to historians of the earliest Church.

Authorship and dating

1 Corinthians belongs to the seven "undisputed" letters — Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians and Philemon — accepted as genuinely Paul's by critical scholars across confessional lines. (Scholarship) The letter's own greeting associates a co-sender, Sosthenes (1 Corinthians 1:1), a common feature of Paul's correspondence, though the letter speaks throughout in Paul's own voice. (Scripture)

It is generally dated to about AD 53-55, written from Ephesus during Paul's third missionary period, on the strength of the letter's own note: "But I will tarry at Ephesus until Pentecost" (1 Corinthians 16:8). (Scripture / Scholarship) On the standard dating this places it among the earliest surviving Christian documents of any kind, written before the Gospels were composed. (Scholarship)

What it tells us about Paul

Unlike Galatians, 1 Corinthians is not primarily autobiographical, but it discloses a good deal about Paul in passing. In the ninth chapter he mounts a spirited defence of his standing as an apostle — "Am not I free? Am not I an apostle? Have not I seen Christ Jesus our Lord?" (1 Corinthians 9:1) — and defends his practice of supporting himself by his own labour rather than being maintained by the community, asking whether he and Barnabas alone lack "power to forbear working" (1 Corinthians 9:6). (Scripture) This coheres with the picture of Paul the tentmaker found in the Apostle Paul and in Acts.

Most strikingly, Paul again names his own past as a persecutor without softening it: "For I am the least of the apostles, who am not worthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God" (1 Corinthians 15:9). (Scripture) Because this admission appears in Paul's own hand and converges with the narrative of Acts, his earlier hostility to the movement is among the best-attested facts of his life. (Scholarship) The letter does not mention Paul's birthplace; Tarsus is named only in Acts, a point worth keeping in view when weighing what any single source can and cannot establish.

The earliest statement of resurrection belief

The fifteenth chapter preserves what is widely regarded as the earliest written statement of Christian belief about the resurrection. Paul introduces it as a tradition he had himself received and passed on: "For I delivered unto you first of all, which I also received: how that Christ died for our sins, according to the scriptures: and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day, according to the scriptures" (1 Corinthians 15:3-4). (Scripture) The formula continues through a list of appearances and ends with Paul's own: "And last of all, he was seen also by me, as by one born out of due time" (1 Corinthians 15:8). (Scripture) Because this creed-like tradition is older than the letter that embeds it — a text of about AD 55 — many scholars treat it as critical evidence for how early resurrection belief was already formulated, within roughly two decades of the events. (Scholarship)

The Lord's Supper and the discourse on charity

Two further passages have shaped Christian worship and devotion for centuries. In the eleventh chapter Paul transmits the words of institution of the Lord's Supper — "For I have received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you, that the Lord Jesus, the same night in which he was betrayed, took bread" (1 Corinthians 11:23) — the earliest such account in any Christian writing. (Scripture) And the thirteenth chapter, the celebrated discourse on love (rendered "charity" in the Douay-Rheims), opens: "If I speak with the tongues of men, and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal" (1 Corinthians 13:1). (Scripture)

Key passages for Paul and the early Church

1 Corinthians 1:1 (apostleship; Sosthenes); 1:10-12 (the factions); 9:1-27 (apostolic self-defence and self-support); 11:23-26 (the tradition of the Lord's Supper); 13:1-13 (the discourse on charity); 15:3-11 (the resurrection creed and Paul's own commissioning); 16:8 (Ephesus, a fixed point for dating). The full text may be read in the public-domain Douay-Rheims edition linked above.

To place this letter within Paul's wider story, see the reference on the Apostle Paul; to understand the birthplace honoured by the 2027 gathering in Tarsus and Mersin, organised by Funny Tourism around the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul on 29 June, see why Tarsus and the programme.