Scripture Portions
1 Corinthians
Also Known As First Epistle to the Corinthians
New Testament
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Written to a divided and gifted congregation in the port city of Corinth, the letter answers concrete disputes over factions, lawsuits, marriage, food offered to idols and conduct in worship. It contains the hymn to love of chapter 13, the earliest written account of the institution of the Lord's Supper, and in chapter 15 the earliest written testimony to the resurrection appearances.
Facts
Meaning
ThemePaul twice tells the Corinthian church that their bodies, individually and collectively, are a temple: "Do you not know that you are God's temple, and that God's Spirit dwells in you?" (3:16, addressed to the whole community) and "your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you" (6:19, addressed to the individual believer, in an argument against sexual immorality). This is a genuine and direct claim in Paul's own text, not a later reading imposed on it, and it has a close parallel in John 2:21, where the Gospel of John glosses Jesus's remark about the temple being rebuilt in three days as referring to "the temple of his body." The body-as-temple language in all three passages is real and textual; it should be distinguished from the specific claim, examined elsewhere on this atlas, that the two unrelated Latin words behind the English word "temple," templum (a place of worship) and tempora (the side of the head, from tempus), amount to a deliberate first century pun. They do not: the two words are etymologically unconnected, and Paul was writing in Greek in any case. 2 Identity
Position in the CanonBook 7 of 27 in the New Testament 1 Origins
Era of Compositionc. 53 to 54 CE, written from Ephesus during Paul's third missionary journey 1 Attributed Author / CompilerPaul the Apostle, responding to a letter from the Corinthian church and to reports carried by "Chloe's people" (1:11); authenticity is undisputed 1 Status
Canonical StatusCanonical in every Christian tradition and never seriously disputed; one of the seven Pauline letters accepted as authentic by virtually all critical scholars 1 Transmission
Manuscript TraditionP46 (c. 200 CE) preserves most of the letter; P15 and P16, both 3rd century, are among the earliest fragmentary witnesses specific to 1 Corinthians 1 Learn More
A Church in Trouble, Answered Point by Point
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.
The Earliest Written Witness to the Resurrection
1 Corinthians matters to historians of early Christianity out of proportion to its length because it is dated with unusual confidence, written within about twenty five years of the events it discusses, well before any of the Gospels. Chapter 15's creedal formula, "that Christ died for our sins... was buried... was raised on the third day... and appeared," is widely judged by critical scholars, including many skeptical of the resurrection itself, to predate Paul's own letter by some years, making it the earliest surviving statement of core Christian belief in any form.
The letter's eleventh chapter also preserves the earliest written account of the Lord's Supper's institution, "this is my body, which is for you," older than any of the parallel Gospel accounts, since Paul says he received it "from the Lord" and is passing it on to a church he founded around the year 50. Because it addresses a real congregation's real disputes rather than laying out doctrine in the abstract, 1 Corinthians has become the primary New Testament text cited in debates across many later centuries about church order, spiritual gifts, and the roles of women in worship, chapters 11 and 14 in particular, positions on which sincere readers within the same tradition continue to disagree.
Cross-Tradition Connections
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Related To
John 2:21 glosses Jesus's remark about the temple's destruction and rebuilding as referring to "the temple of his body," the same body-as-temple language 1 Corinthians 3:16 and 6:19 use.
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