A real letter answering real questions from a real congregation. Because it deals with specific problems rather than general doctrine, 1 Corinthians tells us more about how first-century Christians actually behaved than almost anything else in the New Testament.
What the book is
Sixteen chapters from Paul, writing in Ephesus, to a small assembly he had founded in the Roman colony of Corinth some years earlier. It is an occasional letter in the technical sense: it exists because something happened. Reports had reached him about the congregation, and the congregation had written with questions.
That occasional character is the whole value of the book as a historical source. Paul is not describing an ideal church; he is arguing with an actual one, about matters the members already understood and he therefore does not explain. Rival factions attached to different teachers. A lawsuit before the civil courts. A sexual scandal the congregation was tolerating. Disagreement over eating meat sacrificed in a temple. A common meal at which the wealthy ate first and the poor went hungry. The incidental detail that comes with such complaints is worth more than any deliberate description.
A letter of complaint is not a survey, though: what we learn is what went wrong in one congregation, as one man saw it.
How it is put together
The letter divides into two halves, and the seam is marked in the text. Chapters 1 to 6 respond to things Paul has heard, and he names his source at the outset: people from Chloe’s household have told him the congregation has split into parties. From there he turns to the man living with his father’s wife, the failure to act on it, and the spectacle of believers suing one another in public court.
From chapter 7 the rhythm changes. A recurring phrase, usually rendered “now concerning”, introduces each new topic: marriage, food offered to idols, spiritual gifts, the collection for Jerusalem, Apollos. It is generally read as Paul working down a list of questions the Corinthians had sent, in the order they asked them. If that is right, the shape of the letter’s second half is dictated by a document we do not have.
Two set pieces interrupt the sequence and have outlived their occasions. Chapter 13, on love, sits inside the discussion of spiritual gifts and reads as a deliberate composition. Chapter 15 opens with what is widely taken to be a formula Paul inherited rather than wrote: a short list of what he says he received and passed on, naming those to whom the risen Jesus appeared. If it is inherited, it is older than the letter carrying it — one of the few places where a source can be seen embedded in a datable text.
The authorship and dating question
Pauline authorship is about as close to settled as anything in New Testament studies gets: the letter belongs to the small group accepted as Paul’s own across the whole range of opinion, conservative and critical alike. The interesting question is not whether he wrote it but what else he wrote.
At chapter 5 the letter refers back to an earlier letter Paul had already sent the same congregation, correcting a misreading of it. It does not survive. At chapter 7 he refers to a letter they had sent him, which does not survive either, and 2 Corinthians refers to a further painful letter written between the two. What we have is at least the third item in an exchange of five or more. What came down to us is what was copied, and what was copied is not everything that was written.
Dates conventionally fall in the mid-50s CE, and like all such ranges they are contested. The reasoning runs through Acts, which places Paul in Corinth during the term of a proconsul named Gallio, and a fragmentary inscription from Delphi that mentions Gallio and can be tied to a point in Claudius’s reign. It is an indirect anchor: the inscription dates the official, Acts links Paul to him, and Acts is a separate document with its own reliability questions. See how we date a text.
One passage is disputed on its own account. At chapter 14 two verses instruct women to keep silent in the assemblies. Many scholars treat them as an interpolation — added by a copyist rather than written by Paul — for three reasons. They contradict chapter 11, where Paul regulates how women pray and prophesy in the assembly rather than forbidding it. They appeal to “the law” in a manner unlike Paul’s usual argument. And part of the manuscript tradition places them after the end of the chapter instead of where they now stand, a recognised symptom of material that entered from a margin. The counter-position is that no witness omits them altogether, and a displaced passage is still an attested one. Both are positions; the question is open.
Where the external record touches it
Corinth is among the most thoroughly excavated cities in the Greek world, and what has been found is context for the letter rather than confirmation of it — a distinction set out in what external attestation means. The Corinth Paul wrote to was new. Rome destroyed the old Greek city in 146 BCE, and the site lay largely derelict until Julius Caesar refounded it as a colony a century later, settling it substantially with freedmen. The Corinth of the letter was therefore a Roman town roughly a century old, Latin in its official life, sitting on the isthmus with a harbour on each side and rich on the traffic between them. A place founded by former slaves and made rich by trade is one where rank is unstable and worth displaying, which is the background against which the letter’s quarrels about status and precedence at table read most naturally.
Excavation has laid bare the forum with its platform for public judgements, the shops, the temples, and sanctuaries with dining rooms where meals could be eaten on the premises. That bears on chapter 8, where Paul discusses a believer seen eating in an idol’s temple: the arrangement he argues about has been dug up. The word he uses for the meat market in chapter 10 is a Latin term carried into Greek, which is what a Roman colony would produce.
None of this shows that the events in the letter happened. It shows that the letter is set in a city that existed as described, among people whose habits excavation makes intelligible. That is worth something, and it is not the same.
Where to start
Read chapters 8 to 11 as a block. It is the least familiar part of the letter and the most informative, because Paul is working through a practical problem about food, temples and consciences with no template to follow, and the reasoning is visible.
Then read 2 Corinthians. The relationship between the two — a further letter, a visit that went badly, a reconciliation — turns a document into a sequence of events. Errors on this page are recorded in the corrections log.