Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible: First Corinthians

By Stephen C. Barton

This extract from the Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible provides Barton’s introduction to and concise commentary on First Corinthians. The Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible presents, in nontechnical language, the best of modern scholarship on each book of the Bible, including the Apocrypha. Reader-friendly commentary complements succinct summaries of each section of the text and will be valuable to scholars, students, and general readers.
 
Rather than attempt a verse-by-verse analysis, these volumes work from larger sense units, highlighting the place of each passage within the overarching biblical story. Commentators focus on the genre of each text—parable, prophetic oracle, legal code, and so on—interpreting within the historical and literary context.
 
The volumes also address major issues within each biblical book—including the range of possible interpretations—and refer readers to the best resources for further discussions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Apr 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9781467454414

Book preview

1 Corinthians

Stephen C. Barton

INTRODUCTION

Reading 1 Corinthians

It has been well said that reading 1 Corinthians is like reading someone else’s mail. Here we have a letter from the earliest days of the Christian movement written, not for a modern readership, but for a fledgling group of house churches in the ancient Mediterranean city of Corinth. As we read it, we are given access to one side of a correspondence between Paul, the apostle and church founder, and members of the Corinthian church. Part of its fascination is that, as we read between the lines, the letter allows us to lift the lid on the life, loves, and hates of a particular church at the inception of Christianity. It also allows us to see firsthand how the great apostle exercised authority by giving guidance and responding to problems.

But the letter’s fascination goes further than that. For, to a greater or lesser extent, we who read 1 Corinthians are liable to find that the life, loves, and hates to which the text bears witness are ours as well (Ford 1989; Craddock 1990). This is partly what we mean when we say that the biblical text is inspired. But it is also related to the fact that 1 Corinthians has had a very significant afterlife. By its incorporation into the canon of Christian Scripture as a work of apostolic authority, 1 Corinthians has shaped who we are as readers. Seen in this light, the text can be understood as addressed not just to the house churches of first-century Corinth but to all who share their inheritance. This embraces all members of the Christian church down the ages and all who stand in those historical traditions and cultures which have been shaped by the canon of Christian Scripture. Indeed, according to Christian belief in the inspiration of Scripture, the truth to which 1 Corinthians testifies touches all humankind. What Paul says about Christ crucified in ch. 1, or about the true nature of love in ch. 13, or about the resurrection of the dead in ch. 15 is testimony of universal and eternal significance. That is why it is important that our engagement with the text be a dialectical one: that we engage in a two-way process whereby it is both we who read the text and the text which reads us.

The implications of this for our interpretation are wide-ranging. First, we have to take with full seriousness the historical contingency of the text. We can understand Paul’s letter only if we enter, imaginatively and with the aid of historical criticism in its various modes, into the world of the text itself. This involves finding out as much as possible about the values and structures of first-century city life, the thought world and common practices (Jewish, Greco-Roman and Christian) of Paul and his contemporaries, the practice of rhetoric and letter writing in the first century, the geography and archeology of Corinth, and so on. Such historical information allows us to understand the setting and content of 1 Corinthians more clearly. It also serves as a check on interpretation, on the dual assumption that the number of possible meanings is not indeterminate and that weight has to be given to what the text meant in its original context as far as that can be determined.

Second, we have to take with equal seriousness the text’s continuing significance in the life of the church. The significance of 1 Corinthians cannot be restricted to what it originally meant, for that is itself a matter of ongoing interpretation. Its significance is also ongoing, as people both within and outside the church read their stories in the light of the truth of God to which 1 Corinthians bears witness (cf. Webster 1998). Our task is not just an archeological one, therefore. To do justice to the ecclesiological aspect of the text, in its content, its place in the canon, and its contribution to Christian worship, we have to read it as the word of God for the church in its mission to the world. But to do justice to its spatial and temporal horizons, we also have to read it eschatologically, as the word of God for the present with a view to the future consummation of all things. Reading 1 Corinthians asks of us no less than that. It is a task which invites repeated return to the text in every generation.

Author and Date

There can be no doubt that 1 Corinthians was written by the apostle Paul. What the text itself makes explicit at its beginning and end (1:1; 16:21) and what is explicit also in 2 Corinthians (1:1) is confirmed by the testimony of 1 Clement: Take up the epistle of the blessed Paul the apostle.… With true inspiration he charged you concerning himself and Cephas and Apollos, because even then you had made yourself partisans (1 Clem. 47:1–3). Additional corroboration is provided by the evidence of the Acts of the Apostles, which correlates well with 1 Corinthians. For example, Acts confirms that Paul was the founder of the church at Corinth (Acts 18:1–11), that Apollos made a significant contribution to the life of the church there after Paul had moved on (Acts 18:27–19:1), and that Paul numbered people like Timothy (Acts 18:5) and Aquila and Priscilla (Acts 18:2, 18) among his fellow workers there. So we can be very confident that 1 Corinthians comes from Paul. This is important not just for reasons of historical authenticity but also for how we receive the text and respond to it in the life of the Christian church, what authority we give it. As a letter from one called to be an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God (1 Cor 1:1), it has special, canonical status, for it bears decisive witness to Christ and the truth of the gospel.

The likely date of the letter can also be established with confidence as sometime in the years AD 54–55. From Acts 18:2 we learn of Paul’s partnership at Corinth in the tentmaking trade with Aquila and Priscilla, the latter having come from Italy as a result of Claudius’s decree ordering the expulsion of Jews from Rome. Since the decree can be dated to 49, it is likely that Paul arrived in Corinth in about AD 50. Acts also refers to the fact that Gallio was proconsul in Achaia and had oversight of judicial proceedings which involved Paul (and Sosthenes) and which led to his departure (Acts 18:12–17). Gallio’s proconsulship has been confirmed by epigraphic evidence which allows a dating of his term of office to 51–52. According to Acts 18:11, Paul stayed in Corinth for eighteen months, so we can be reasonably certain that the years of his stay were AD 50–52 (on the evidence relating to Claudius and Gallio, see Murphy-O’Connor 1983: