Corinthians, First Epistle to the

The First Epistle to the Corinthians was written by Paul from Ephesus near the end of his approximately three-year ministry there (Acts 19:10; 1 Corinthians 16:8), probably around AD 54–55. It responds to both a written inquiry from the Corinthian church and to troubling oral reports brought by members of Chloe's household (1 Corinthians 1:11). The letter addresses a remarkable breadth of pastoral and doctrinal issues: party divisions, a case of incest, lawsuits among believers, questions about marriage and celibacy, food offered to idols, proper conduct in worship, the Lord's Supper, spiritual gifts and their proper ordering, and the resurrection of the dead.

The letter's theological heights include the hymn to love in chapter 13, universally regarded as one of the supreme literary and moral passages of the New Testament, and the sustained argument for bodily resurrection in chapter 15 — the earliest extended Christian treatment of the resurrection, grounding it in the eyewitness testimony of Christ's appearances and its cosmic significance for all humanity. Paul's practical pastoral instincts and his high Christology appear throughout in combination, demonstrating that the letter is simultaneously situational and profoundly theological. It was written prior to what is now known as 2 Corinthians, though Paul had written an earlier now-lost letter to the Corinthians.