The First Letter to the Corinthians

Communities Making Their Way in the Great Cities

Once again, the Church is born in a large city. In the first century A.D., Corinth was the capital of central and southern Greece. In this important commercial center at the heart of the Mediterranean world, all possible ideas commingled, creating a cultural and religious ferment.

The city was known for its sporting life, but also for the moral corruption that gave it its reputation. “Live like a Corinthian” was a slogan suggesting an environment teeming with criminality and libertinism. Seamen coming ashore in this cosmopolitan port were certainly not the only ones to take advantage of that life. Sacred prostitution flourished in the temple of Aphrodite, the favorite goddess of the city.

“There are many in this city who are my people,” the Lord had told Paul in a vision (Acts 18:10). From the winter of A.D. 50–51 to the summer of A.D. 52, the Apostle laid the foundations of a vital community, whose members he recruited chiefly from among pagans of modest circumstances (Acts 18:1-18).

Two years later, while preaching the Gospel in Ephesus, Paul was informed of the divisions that were agitating his young Greek Church. In addition, two Christians came from Corinth to lay their problems before him. He then wrote the present Letter, which we know as the First Letter to the Corinthians; it had been preceded, however, by another that has been lost (see 1 Cor 5:9).

The outline is a simple one. Serious incidents have been brought to the Apostle’s knowledge; these have also raised some concrete questions, of varying degrees of importance; Paul simply deals with the several points one after another. As a result, this Letter is in no sense a systematic doctrinal treatise. The author follows the list of the situations experienced at Corinth, and this enables him to see the dynamic growth of a young Church, but also its crises.

Nonetheless, this Letter gives us a rather alarming portrait of the community. It shows that the Gospel does not transform a pagan mentality in one day. The newly baptized must review their behavior in the light of the message of Jesus and rectify their judgment, which is permeated by the thinking and morals of their environment. These Greeks are characteristically prompt to embrace new ideas and can easily regard the Church as simply a philosophical group. Their love of freedom threatens to lead them back to libertinism and turn them into a cause of scandal for those who are weaker or more demanding. In order to exalt the life of the spirit, they look down on what comes from the body and they more easily become its slaves. Like all Christians, they are tempted to choose in the Gospel that which corresponds with their own likes and to neglect the rest.

This Letter is an exceptional document in the history of the early Church. In addition to the internal problems of a community, it also brings before us important issues that are debated: confronting a civilization’s currents of ideas and ways of life; dissension in thought and disparity in fortune; discipline within the community; questions of sexuality in the face of an environment wherein eroticism seems to be the rage (Corinth is the capital of dissoluteness); and the problem of marriage and celibacy.

Other issues that it lays bare concern the social relations of Christians with pagans; the attitude toward other religious practices; the types of behavior in the Liturgy; and the demands of the spiritual initiative. Most of all, because of its birth in the midst of a culture, Christianity must question itself, in fact as well as in theory, about its originality and its differences with respect to the life of an age and an environment.

In this context, we are more interested in what inspires the reaction of Paul. Obviously, as a Jew, he would be mistrustful of the cultural and religious agitation of Corinth; if he does not like the rigorist legalism of the scrupulous, he is also without pity for those who confuse freedom with disorder. Nonetheless, he does not respond simply according to his own religious tastes; in the face of questions posed and dangers encountered, he meditates on the essential points of faith: salvation in the Death and Resurrection of Christ, the mystery of the Church, the presence of the Spirit, the meaning of the Eucharist, the requirements of a faith that wishes to grow and its influence on the behavior of the baptized, and the hope that guides the Christians’ existence and colors their view of the world in the light of Easter.

Paul reminds his correspondents that the Gospel is not a philosophical theory to be discussed. He brings them personally into the presence of the dead and risen Christ who gathers together and transforms human beings in the Church—which is his Body—and calls them to a radical renewal of life. Despite the dangers he must point out and the sufferings they cause him (2 Cor), Paul will always be proud of this community that he has founded in such a pervasive pagan environment. He praises its sincere and active faith, as well as its generosity, which is not without some illusions and a dangerous feverishness; he admires the rich gifts that the Spirit is pouring out on this handful of men and women who live the Gospel and challenge all the cultural pressures brought to bear on them by their environment.

The First Letter to the Corinthians may be divided as follows:

I: Greetings and Thanksgiving (1:1-9)

II: Divisions in the Church of Corinth (1:10—4:21)

III: Deviant Behavior (5:1—6:20)

IV: Marriage and Celibacy among Christians (7:1-40)

V: Christians and Pagan Customs (8:1—11:1)

VI: Liturgical Assemblies and Their Problems (11:2—14:40)

VII: The Resurrection (15:1-58)

VIII: Final Recommendations and Greetings (16:1-24)