Unlike Romans, 1 Corinthians is entirely occasional, a direct response to a fractious, gifted, and troubled congregation in a cosmopolitan port city. Paul works through problem after problem in sequence: factionalism around rival leaders ("I follow Paul," "I follow Apollos"), a case of sexual immorality the church has tolerated rather than addressed, believers suing one another in pagan courts, disputes over eating meat that had been sacrificed to idols, disorder at the shared communal meal that accompanied the Lord's Supper, and confusion and rivalry over spiritual gifts such as prophecy and speaking in tongues. Chapter 13, the celebrated meditation on love, "love is patient, love is kind," sits inside this practical argument rather than apart from it, offered as the corrective to a congregation using its spiritual gifts competitively rather than for one another's good.
Chapter 15 mounts the New Testament's most sustained argument for the resurrection of the body, responding to Corinthians who apparently denied any bodily resurrection at all, and includes what many scholars regard as the earliest written creed in Christian history, a short formula Paul says he "received" and is "passing on," naming resurrection appearances to Peter, the Twelve, and over five hundred people at once.