The preaching of Christ crucified to both Jews and Gentiles in 1 Corinthians 1-3

Abstract

The aim of this dissertation is to help the reader acquire a better understanding of the first three chapters of Paul's first letter to the church of Corinth and to throw light on Saint Paul's evangelizing mission in Corinth. This dissertation will also focus on the fact that this epistle is Paul's response to information about disorders in the Corinthian church communicated to him at Ephesus by messengers from Chloe. Paul established a Christian community in Corinth about the year 51 on his second missionary journey. Corinth during Paul's lifetime was one of the most important cities in the Roman Empire. It served as a commercial bridge between East and West, attracting immigrants, merchants, traders, and visitors from all areas around the Mediterranean Sea. The inhabitants, coming from diverse cultural backgrounds, retained many social customs and religious beliefs and practices peculiar to their places of origin. Corinthians were also notorious for their love of pleasure and lax morals. Thus, the church at Corinth was exposed to a bewildering variety of customs and beliefs and to a corrosive atmosphere of public immorality, all of which encouraged moral laxity and divisiveness in the predominantly Gentile Christian community. Corinth, in fact, was the largest, most cosmopolitan and decadent sin-city in Greece. Two thirds of its 700,000 inhabitants were slaves. It was a major port and hub of commerce. Much of the commerce was in human flesh. ‘To act like a Corinthian’ was an ancient saying meaning debauchery, especially prostitution. The city was also full of idolatry, which centred around Aphrodite Pandemos, the goddess of love. Her temple, atop a 1,800 foot promontory, had 1,000 temple prostitutes to satisfy the 'religious needs' of the community. Paul wrote 1 Corinthians partly to answer questions raised at Corinth concerning certain social and religious practices, and partly because of reports that the Christians were splitting into factions and tolerating immorality, and partly to expound his views on the resurrection. In this letter Paul takes up a series of issues confronting the congregation. Factions in the congregation exhibited arrogance and misplaced confidence, but Paul declares that the message of the cross makes foolish the wisdom of the world (1:20). He calls the cross a "stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles" (1 :23), yet through it God's power is revealed. Thus, the first letter to the Corinthians contains many noteworthy passages. In fact, Paul's beliefs concerning Christ crucified (1:18-2:2) has, from the beginning, profoundly influenced Christian thought. The first epistle to the Corinthians permits us to gaze intimately on the exuberant life of one of the earliest urban communities. Without this letter our knowledge of the spiritual movements within primitive Christianity and of the problems that tried the apostle would be vague. It presents a vivid and detailed picture of Christian life in a pagan city of the first century. The parallels between this first century Corinth and the great cities of the modem world give Paul's letter to the Corinthians an exceptional relevance for modern Christians. [...]