INTRODUCTION
TO FIRST CORINTHIANS
The Epistles of Paul, like the prophecies of Jeremiah or
Amos, were often called out by the mistakes, errors, and sins of the churches
which he had planted, and were intended to correct them. The newly planted
churches were in the midst of heathens and were composed in great part of those
who had early heathen training. It is not wonderful that converts from such
populations, unused to Christian morality, knowing little of the Old Testament
Scriptures, and without the New Testament, should sometimes go astray, or
become the victims of false teachers. Yet the church of all ages has reason to
be thankful for the circumstances which called out the collection of Inspired
Letters on practical Christian life so essential to its instructions as we find
in the Epistles of Paul. In order to gain the greatest profit from these it is
necessary that the reader be informed concerning the conditions which called out
each letter, what were the circumstances of each church, what were the wants
the Apostle sought to supply and the sins he sought to correct.
I will endeavor to explain in the case of the church at
Corinth, what were these conditions. Though letters were written to other
churches planted by Paul earlier than the one we are now considering, the First
Epistle to the church of Corinth is the first of the letters of this class that
we reach in the present arrangement of the New Testament. In the eighteenth chapter
of Acts the account is found of the planting of this church. At that time,
about a.d. 54, the Apostle
sojourned in that great city for the space of a year and six months, preaching
at first in the synagogue and afterwards in the house of Justus. A large
congregation was gathered as the result of his labors, composed in part of
Jews, but with a much larger number of Gentiles. After Paul departed to other
fields of labor Apollos, an eloquent and learned Alexandrian Jew who has been
instructed in the gospel by Priscilla and Aquila, the companions of Paul,
visited Corinth and continued the work. Paul “planted, Apollos watered” (1
Cor. 3:6).
The congregation which had begun its career so auspiciously
was in a great commercial center, with a mixed and dissolute population, and
could not but meet with many temptations. The city, situated on the Isthmus
which connected southern Greece with the mainland of Europe, with the advantage
of two harbors on either sea, and of a citadel as impregnable as Gibraltar on
the lofty Acrocorinthus, had for centuries been influential in Grecian history
but had in b.c. 146 been taken by
the Romans and reduced to ruins. One hundred years later Julius Cæsar had
founded it a second time, planting a Roman military colony on the old site, and
the commanding situation soon restored its ancient prosperity and splendor. It
was about a century after its second founding that it was visited by Paul. It
was then the great commercial city in Europe with the exception of Rome, and no
cities of the East surpassed it save Antioch and Alexandria. It is estimated to
have had a population of about four hundred thousand people, as cosmopolitan as
is usually found in a great commercial center; Romans, Greeks, Jews, Syrians,
Egyptians, sailors, traders and slaves.
It would be strange if there was a high standard of morals
in the mixed population of a commercial metropolis, nor were morals held in
high regard anywhere in the heathen world. One fact will illustrate the
shameless condition of the city. At the date of this Epistle there was standing
there a vast and renowned temple of Venus, called the temple of Aphrodite
Pandemos, “the Venus of all the people,” which had a thousand consecrated
priestesses, every priestess dedicated to the service of Aphrodite, or in other
words to harlotry. The temple of worship, consecrated to religion, was a
gigantic brothel! Indeed, even in that dissolute age when immorality was the
rule in all the heathen world, Corinth had so bad an eminence that the word
“to Corinthianize” had become a synonym for an impure life. It is not
wonderful that amid such influences some of the Gentiles who had become members
of the Corinthian Church showed the influence of their old habits, nor that the
apostle found it necessary to rebuke licentiousness again and again. See the
Chapter V. and other passages here and there.
But what especially called out this Epistle were the tidings
of divisions in the church which had been brought to him at Ephesus by members
of the household of Chloe, one of the principal members. Paul had confined
himself while at Corinth to the simple principles of the gospel and
scrupulously abstained from the philosophical discussions so dear to the Greek
mind (1 Cor. 1:17–22; 2:1–5). Apollos, schooled in the philosophy of
Alexandria, and not yet so thoroughly grounded in the gospel as Paul, evidently
engaged in some philosophical speculations. It is also manifest that some of
the Judaizing teachers who constantly followed in the footsteps of the great
Apostle and sought to Judaize the churches, had come to Corinth, and by
exalting Peter, in order to depreciate Paul, had formed another party. Hence
there were various factions whose discords rent the body of Christ; one party
claiming to be Pauline; another making Apollos its leader; still another
claiming to be of Cephas, and still a fourth, whatever it may have been,
claiming to be of Christ. The four chapters of the Epistle, the first in
order, are a vigorous and indignant arraignment of these schisms.
Other questions discussed were suggested to him by a letter
brought to him at Ephesus by Corinthian brethren begging a solution of various
difficulties; on marriage, the veiling of women in assemblies, on sacrificial
feasts, and perhaps on the nature of the resurrection from the dead. See Chap.
VII. 1. These questions and various irregularities which are rebuked will be
duly considered in the Notes.
This Epistle was written at Ephesus while Paul was engaged
in his ministry of three years in that city (Acts 19:1–41; Acts 20:31; 1 Cor.
16:8). The time when it was written can be determined with no little certainty
to have been the spring of a.d.
57. That this Epistle is genuine has been conceded by all respectable critics,
both ancient and modern.
Excerpt from:
The People's New Testament
by Barton
Warren Johnson
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