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. |