1 and 2 Corinthians

Verlyn Verbrugge, Murray J. Harris, Tremper Longman III, David E. Garland

• Publisher: Zondervan Academic
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9780310532057
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

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1 CORINTHIANS

VERLYN D. VERBRUGGE

Introduction

1. Paul’s Missionary Strategy

2. The Church at Corinth

3. Specific Occasion of the First Letter to the Corinthians

4. Date of 1 Corinthians

5. Authorship and Integrity

6. Literary Characteristics

7. Theological Considerations

8. Bibliography

9. Outline

1. PAUL’S MISSIONARY STRATEGY

Paul’s establishment of the church in the city of Corinth must be seen against the background of his overall missionary strategy. When the apostle moved on to an unreached area to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ (note that, according to Ro 15:20, he always went to an area that had not yet heard the message of salvation), he invariably found a city in which to work. And not just any city, but a city central to the area—politically, socially, or economically. In most of these cities there were Jewish synagogues, where he started his ministry (“first for the Jew, then for the Gentile,” as he puts it in Ro 1:16). The presence of a synagogue, however, was not the key factor in his missionary strategy, as his ministry in Philippi demonstrates (see below).

Both the book of Acts and Paul’s letters give evidence of this strategy. On Paul’s first missionary journey, he began by going to Cyprus. Luke records his preaching in the two main cities of the island—Salamis and Paphos (Ac 13:4, 6). Salamis was on the eastern side of the island and had a good harbor; it was a flourishing city in Greek and Roman times. Paphos, on the western edge, was the capital city of the island, the seat of the Roman proconsul. From there, Paul, Barnabas, and John Mark headed to Asia Minor. They landed in Perga, also a sizable inland port city, but did not stay there; no reason is given for that. Perhaps Paul’s feelings over Mark’s leaving the team would have made ministry difficult for him at that time (13:13). In any case, he and Barnabas traveled inland to Antioch of Pisidia (13:14), the capital of the Roman province of southern Galatia. Another prominent Roman city on that journey was Iconium, through which two trade routes passed. The last two cities on that first missionary trip were Lystra, the most eastern of the fortified cities of Galatia, and Derbe, a border town with Cilicia. Neither of these two cities was particularly prominent, though they were cities nonetheless.

Paul followed the same principle of going to prominent cities during his second missionary journey. After receiving his vision of the man from Macedonia asking him to “come over to Macedonia and help us” (Ac 16:9), Paul, Luke, Timothy, and Silas set sail across the Aegean, landed on the coast of Macedonia, and headed straight for Philippi, “a Roman colony and the leading city of that district of Macedonia” (16:12). Despite its political prominence, Philippi did not have a Jewish synagogue. The most Paul could find there was a group of Jewish women who gathered near the river on the Jewish Sabbath for prayer. Had Paul’s basic missionary strategy required the presence of a synagogue, he would have left there immediately for a city such as Thessalonica. But his main concern was to be in a political and economic center, a place where people came to do business and left to go back to their own towns or villages.

From Philippi Paul went to Thessalonica (Ac 17:1), a city that stood at the crossroads of a major north-south road and the east-west Via Egnatia. It was a prosperous city, with many prominent Gentiles and Jews. After trouble erupted in Thessalonica, instigated by Jewish antagonists who did not appreciate Paul’s proclamation that Jesus was the Messiah (17:2–9), the apostle fled to the smaller city of Berea (17:10), but he had to leave from there soon as well. Next he picked the city of Athens (17:13–15), the cultural hub of the ancient world. Paul made little headway against the intellectual snobs of Athens (17:16–34). Thus he soon left there and headed south to the next large city, Corinth (18:1).

Corinth was on the four-and-one-half mile isthmus that joined the Peloponnesus with the Greek mainland; it was the capital city of the Roman province of Achaia. All north-south traffic had to pass through this city, and it had three harbors nearby—Lechaeum to the west, and Cenchrea and Schoenus to the east. In order to shorten the time for travel and to avoid the dangers of the coast of the Peloponnesus, many ship captains either had their boats hauled up on land and dragged across the narrow isthmus on a special track, or they unloaded their boats and took their cargo to another boat on the other side. Corinth was indeed a crossroad of the ancient world.

Why did Paul usually settle in large cities as part of his missionary strategy? He knew that if he could establish a church in those major cities, then when people from the outlying areas visited these cities, there was a chance they might also hear the gospel and take it back to their villages and start (to use a modern phrase) “daughter churches.” And, of course, during the time of Paul’s stay in these cities he would be able to interact with people from a wide area, telling them about the message of salvation in Jesus. That this was indeed the case is demonstrated by 1 Thessalonians 1:7–9:

And so you [Thessalonian believers] became a model to all the believers in Macedonia and Achaia. The Lord’s message rang out from you not only in Macedonia and Achaia—your faith in God has become known everywhere. Therefore we do not need to say anything about it, for they themselves report what kind of reception you gave to us. They tell how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God.

As a final evidence that Paul used cities for this purpose we need only look at Acts 19:9–10. Most of the time during Paul’s third missionary journey was spent in Ephesus (from two and a half to three years), and Paul “had discussions daily in the lecture hall of Tyrannus . . . , so that all the Jews and Greeks who lived in the province of Asia heard the word of the Lord.” We know from Paul’s letter to the Colossians that many in both Colossae and Laodicea (two cities in Asia Minor) had never met Paul personally but still looked to him as their spiritual leader (Col 2:1). Undoubtedly these churches were started while Paul was at Ephesus by people who had heard him there and went back to evangelize their own neighborhoods.

2. THE CHURCH AT CORINTH

As the brief summary of Paul’s missionary strategy indicated, Corinth was an ideal location for Paul to settle in to do missionary work. It was a prominent political and economic center, so that from it those who heard Paul preach and became believers could go back to the surrounding towns and villages of Achaia with that same message.

When Paul arrived in Corinth, he had just suffered a big disappointment in Athens—the only major city in which he was unable to establish a church, in spite of marvelous opportunities to preach in the synagogue and to address its prominent citizens in a meeting of the Areopagus (Ac 17:17, 22). Also troubling the apostle was the state of the believers he had left in Thessalonica, when he was expelled from the city as a result of a riot blamed on him (17:5–9); that situation made the apostle anxious and fearful (1Th 2:17–3:5). Some scholars think that these experiences are reflected in Paul’s statement that when he arrived in Corinth, he “came . . . in weakness and fear, and with much trembling,” and that, to use his words, “I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1Co 2:2–3; see comments).

When Paul arrived in Corinth he linked up with a Jewish couple (Aquila and Priscilla) living in that city. What brought them together was their common trade as “tentmakers”—perhaps better, leatherworkers. Aquila and Priscilla had recently arrived there from Rome because Claudius had expelled all Jews from Rome. The Roman historian Suetonius (Claud. 25.4) tells us that riots had broken out among the Jews there “at the instigation of Chrestus” (perhaps a reference to Christ [Christos in Greek]). In other words, there may have been strong feelings between those Jews in Rome who accepted Jesus as the Messiah and those who did not.

Most likely Aquila and Priscilla were Christians when they met Paul, for when Paul refers to his first converts in Corinth he mentions “the household of Stephanas” (1Co 16:15; cf. 1:16), and he also indicates that he did not baptize Aquila and Priscilla (1:14–16). Aquila and Priscilla invited Paul to live with them and join them in their business. Paul worked during the week at his trade and, as a visiting rabbi, was allowed to preach in the synagogue every Sabbath, “trying to persuade Jews and Greeks” who attended the service (Ac 18:4).

A short time later, Silas and Timothy arrived from Macedonia with a report on how the churches in Philippi, Thessalonica, and Berea were faring. It was undoubtedly a good report, which led in part to Paul’s writing of his first letter to the Thessalonians. Part of Paul’s purpose in this letter was to address some problems that the Macedonian believers were having with Christian teaching about death and resurrection. Silas and Timothy also probably brought with them a monetary gift from the Philippians, which was not the first time they had given money to Paul (2Co 11:9; Php 4:14–16). This gift enabled Paul, at least temporarily, to put aside his leatherworking and concentrate full time on “preaching, testifying to the Jews that Jesus was the Christ” (Ac 18:5).

Apparently Paul was successful in his preaching, for those Jews who did not accept his preaching on the messiahship of Jesus became “abusive” and told him to leave the synagogue. By this time, Paul had a core of both Jewish and Gentile believers, so he “left the synagogue and went next door to the house of Titius Justus, a worshiper of God” (Ac 18:7). This last phrase is a technical phrase for someone who showed a definite interest in the teachings of Judaism but had not become a full proselyte because he did not wish to undergo circumcision. These “worshipers of God” were some of Paul’s prime candidates for becoming Christians, since they could now believe the God of the Jewish Scriptures and be accepted as part of God’s people but without being circumcised. Before Paul left the synagogue, he “shook out his clothes in protest and said to them, ‘Your blood be on your own heads! I am clear of responsibility. From now on I will go to the Gentiles’” (18:6; cf. Mt 10:14–16; also Ro 1:16, “first for the Jew, then for the Gentile”).

Paul’s ministry in Corinth was becoming successful, for “many of the Corinthians who heard him believed and were baptized” (Ac 18:8). One of the most surprising of his converts was Crispus, who had been the ruler of the synagogue, along with his whole household. His conversion must have had an impact on the other Jews in the synagogue (though, to be sure, he lost his position as its leader!). We do not know whether Paul began to experience other dangers in Corinth at this time and wondered whether he should leave. In any case, the Lord Jesus came to him in a vision one night and told him not to be afraid but to stay in the city and to continue to preach the gospel, because the Lord had many people there whom he wanted to reach through the apostle (18:9–10). Thereupon Paul remained in Corinth for eighteen months, preaching and teaching the word of God (18:11).

As we will see from our study of this letter, the majority of the believers in Corinth were from the lower socioeconomic class in the city, not from what we might call the aristocracy (1Co 1:26). A certain number of them were undoubtedly slaves (7:20–24), though we must never understand slavery in the Greco-Roman world to have been like slavery in the pre-Civil War United States. Many slaves were treated well and even chose to remain in that position when offered their freedom. What unfortunately developed, however, was that some of the wealthier members of the church in Corinth took a superior attitude to these lower-class believers and treated them shamefully (see 11:17–22, esp. v.22).

Moreover, many of the believers in Corinth had come from an idolatrous background (see 1Co 12:2, which states this clearly; cf. also the long section about Christian freedom and eating food sacrificed to idols in chs. 8–10, esp. ch. 8). The very reason eating such food was a problem was that those who had recently come out of idolatry felt in their consciences that by doing so they were still honoring pagan deities. Other members of the church, however (perhaps ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1 Corinthians
• Introduction
• I. INTRODUCTION TO THE LETTER (1:1–9)
• II. BODY OF THE LETTER (1:10–16:4)
• III. CONCLUSION TO THE LETTER (16:5–24)
• 2 Corinthians
• Introduction
• I. PAUL’S EXPLANATION OF HIS CONDUCT AND APOSTOLIC MINISTRY (1:1–7:16)
• II. PAUL’S SUMMONS TO COMPLETE THE COLLECTION FOR THE SAINTS AT JERUSALEM (8:1–9:15)
• III. PAUL’S DEFENSE OF HIS APOSTOLIC AUTHORITY (10:1–13:14)