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1 CORINTHIANS

 
 

Name of the seventh book of the New Testament, which was composed by Paul of Tarsus, with the help of Sosthenes, and is fully known as the First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians. It was written from Ephesus, in the third year of the apostle's sojourn there, around the time of the Passover and when he had formed the purpose to visit Macedonia, and then return to Corinth to visit the church that he had founded on his previous missionary journey.

Though news of the abuses and contentions that had arisen among the believers in Corinth, which had reached Paul from the household of Chloe and from Stephanas and his two friends who had visited him, made him change his plan, and as a consequence he wrote his letter, in which he strongly rebukes this congregation on certain depraved practices and sexual immorality involving prostitutes.

In the beginning of the letter Paul repeatedly uses the rhetoric question ‘know you not that?’, which seems to almost sarcastically tell the addressees a reality that they already should know inherent and which should already have been understood, rather than to remind them of something they had been told previously.

Then the Apostle moves on to list different individual sins that are besetting the congregation. However, he uses nouns as labels that indicate a persistent pattern, making it plain that he is not referring to individual acts or temporary lapses of this behavior, but merely wants to catalog the major types of sins that characterize wicked societies, such as the one in which his readers dwelt and to which they once belonged, before they had been justified by faith, arguing that since now they are different, they should act like it.

Paul elucidates the congregation's faulty understanding of Christian liberty and the relationship between body and spirit, attacking not their behavior but rather the theology behind it. He corrects their error and tries to bring it in harmony with the law of love, arguing that the questions should not be if things were permitted, but rather if they were profitable.

1 Corinthians Chapter 1; 2; 3; 4; 5; 6; 7; 8; 9; 10; 11; 12; 13; 14; 15; 16.

 

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