The First Letter to the Corinthians — The Oldest Words in the New Testament and Its Road Into the Canon

Part of the series: The New Testament Canon—How 27 Books Survived the Ancient Gauntlet

Consider the church that produced it. In the space of sixteen chapters Paul has to tell the Corinthians to stop splitting into fan clubs over their favorite preachers, to expel a man sleeping with his stepmother, to stop dragging one another before pagan judges, to stop visiting prostitutes, to sort out who may marry and who should not, to stop humiliating the poor at the Lord’s Supper by getting drunk while others go hungry, to bring their tongues-speaking under control, and — most astonishing of all — to stop denying the resurrection of the dead. No community in the New Testament is a bigger mess than Corinth. If you wanted to find the least likely place for the Church’s most precious deposits to be kept, you could hardly do better.

And yet it is precisely this letter — to this church — that carries the two oldest fixed words we possess. When Paul comes to the resurrection, he does not argue from first principles; he quotes something already old, a formula he says he “received” and “handed on”: Christ died for our sins … was buried … was raised on the third day … appeared to Cephas. When he comes to the Eucharist, he does the same: I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus, on the night he was handed over, took bread. Both are traditions older than the letter that carries them, older than any Gospel, reaching back to within a few years of the crucifixion. The most disorderly congregation in the New Testament is the vault in which its earliest treasures were stored.

That is the paradox this essay is about. Not a verse-by-verse tour of a famous letter, but the letter itself: who wrote it and when, out of what quarrels it was born, why it preserves the oldest creed and the earliest account of the Mass in all of Scripture, how the text was transmitted, how the Church received it — and why a book that no ancient list ever doubted turns out to be, from the very first generation, the best-attested writing in the New Testament. I came into the Catholic Church from the evangelical world, where 1 Corinthians 13 was read at every wedding and 1 Corinthians 15 at every funeral. Learning where those chapters actually sit — inside a furious pastoral letter, guarding a tradition the apostle himself had only inherited — did not shrink the letter for me. It made it older, and larger, than I had known.

A letter to a church Paul built

Romans, the letter this series treated just before, was written to strangers — a congregation Paul had never seen. First Corinthians is the opposite. Paul had founded this church with his own hands, lived in the city for eighteen months, and knew its members by name. The letter opens by naming its author and a companion: “Paul, called to be an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and Sosthenes our brother, to the church of God that is in Corinth.”⁠¹ He writes not as a visitor introducing himself but as a father who has heard bad news about his children.

The circumstances can be reconstructed with some precision. Paul had come to Corinth on his second missionary journey and stayed a year and a half, as the Acts of the Apostles records; the community was founded around A.D. 51.⁠² The letter itself was written later, from Ephesus, during the long stay of the third journey: “I shall stay in Ephesus until Pentecost,” Paul writes near the end, and the note in the New American Bible takes this as telling us “the place from which he wrote the letter.”⁠³ The date falls in the mid-fifties. The American bishops’ introduction places the writing “about the year 56”; most scholars set it a little earlier, around 53 to 55, a range anchored by the famous inscription at Delphi that fixes the proconsulship of Gallio — before whom Paul was tried at Corinth — to around A.D. 51 to 52.⁠⁴ Either way, the letter belongs to the middle of Paul’s career, a quarter-century after the crucifixion.

What called it forth was a stream of disturbing reports. The Corinthian correspondence was larger than the two letters we now have. Paul mentions, in passing, an earlier letter that has not survived: “I wrote you in my letter not to associate with immoral people.”⁠⁵ First Corinthians is thus at least the second letter Paul sent to this church, not the first — a reminder that the New Testament preserves a selection, not the whole of the apostolic correspondence. Into this ongoing exchange came news from two directions. Some of it was oral: “It has been reported to me about you, my brothers, by Chloe’s people, that there are rivalries among you.”⁠⁶ And some of it was written: the Corinthians had sent Paul a letter of their own, with a list of questions, which he begins to answer at chapter seven — “Now in regard to the matters about which you wrote.”⁠⁷

That little phrase is the key to the letter’s structure, and it is the single most important thing most readers never notice. From chapter seven onward Paul works through the Corinthians’ questions one by one, each marked by the same Greek formula, peri de, “now concerning”: now concerning marriage, now concerning virgins, now concerning food sacrificed to idols, now concerning spiritual gifts, now concerning the collection.⁠⁸ First Corinthians is not a treatise descending in orderly fashion from the general to the particular. It is a reply — a pastor answering a mail-bag, taking the problems in the order they were put to him. Three men from Corinth, Stephanas, Fortunatus, and Achaicus, had come to Paul in Ephesus, and it was very likely they who carried the questions and would carry the answer home.⁠⁹ To read the letter as occasional correspondence rather than as a system is not to diminish it. It is to hear it the way Corinth heard it.

The most disorderly church in the New Testament

The catalogue of troubles is staggering, and Paul does not soften it. The first and largest problem was factionalism. The Corinthians had split into parties around the personalities who had preached to them, and Paul reports it with something close to disbelief:

I urge you, brothers, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree in what you say, and that there be no divisions among you… . I mean that each of you is saying, “I belong to Paul,” or “I belong to Apollos,” or “I belong to Cephas,” or “I belong to Christ.” Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you?⁠¹⁰

Against this cult of personality Paul sets the “message of the cross,” which is “foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” — the crucified Christ who shames the wisdom of the wise.⁠¹¹ The factions occupy the first four chapters. What follows reads like a bill of particulars. A man is living with his father’s wife, and the community is proud of its broad-mindedness; Paul orders him expelled.⁠¹² Christians are suing one another in pagan courts. Some are still frequenting prostitutes and defending it as Christian freedom, prompting Paul’s reminder that “your body is a temple of the holy Spirit within you.”⁠¹³ Then come the answers to their questions: marriage and celibacy, meat sacrificed to idols, the veiling of women at worship, and the grievous abuse at the common meal, where the rich ate their fill and got drunk while the poor went without.⁠¹⁴ After that, the disorderly exercise of spiritual gifts, tongues drowning out prophecy, everyone speaking at once — to which Paul’s summary rule is simply that “everything must be done properly and in order.”⁠¹⁵ And finally, at the root of it all, the denial by “some” of the resurrection of the dead.⁠¹⁶

It is worth pausing on how thoroughly this undoes the popular image of the primitive Church as a golden age of unanimous piety. Corinth was a boomtown — a Roman colony refounded a century before, a port swollen with sailors, merchants, and freedmen, proverbial for its vice. The church Paul planted there carried the city’s disorders inside its own walls. If the earliest Christians were saints, they were saints of an unmistakably human kind. And that is exactly what makes the letter’s other contents so remarkable.

The oldest words in the New Testament

Twice in this turbulent letter Paul stops arguing and starts quoting. Both times he uses the same technical language — I received … I handed on — the vocabulary of a rabbi transmitting a fixed tradition he did not himself compose.⁠¹⁷ And both times what he transmits turns out to be older than anything else in the New Testament.

The creed of the resurrection

When the Corinthians’ denial of the resurrection forces Paul’s hand, he answers not with philosophy but with a formula:

For I handed on to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures; that he was buried; that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures; that he appeared to Cephas, then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at once, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep.⁠¹⁸

The New American Bible’s own note is unambiguous about what this is: “The language by which Paul expresses the essence of the ‘gospel’ is not his own but is drawn from older credal formulas.”⁠¹⁹ Paul is quoting a creed. He did not invent it; he received it — most likely in the years just after his conversion, from those who were Christians before him. The Catechism of the Catholic Church draws the chronological conclusion directly: “In about A.D. 56 St. Paul could already write to the Corinthians: ‘I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins … and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the Twelve.’”⁠²⁰

This is the single most important datum in the historical study of the resurrection, and it deserves to be stated precisely — because it is also the point most often overstated. The letter was written in the mid-fifties. But the formula it quotes is older, and scholars across the spectrum, including skeptics with no theological stake in the matter, date the tradition itself to within a few years of the crucifixion, to roughly A.D. 30 to 35. Some popular apologetics press this into a suspiciously exact “within eighteen months,” and critics rightly push back on the false precision. The honest and still-astonishing claim is the modest one: 1 Corinthians 15 preserves a confession of the death, burial, resurrection, and appearances of Jesus that was already formulated, already being recited, within a few years of the events — the earliest datable witness to the resurrection in existence, older than any Gospel by a generation.⁠²¹ It names the witnesses, most of them still alive and, by implication, available to be questioned: Cephas, the Twelve, the five hundred, James, all the apostles, and last of all Paul himself.

The words of institution

Paul does exactly the same thing with the Eucharist. Rebuking the Corinthians for the way their common meal has degenerated into a spectacle of class contempt — “one goes hungry while another gets drunk” — he recalls them to the tradition of the meal’s origin:

For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus, on the night he was handed over, took bread, and, after he had given thanks, broke it and said, “This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way also the cup, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood.”⁠²²

Again the New American Bible states the significance flatly, and it is a striking thing to find in an official Catholic annotation: “This is the earliest written account of the institution of the Lord’s Supper in the New Testament.”⁠²³ First Corinthians was written before any of the four Gospels reached the form we have them in. When you read the words of institution at Mass, the oldest written version of them you can point to is not in Matthew, Mark, or Luke. It is here, in a letter scolding a congregation for getting drunk in church. Paul had already “handed on” this tradition to them when he founded the church years before; he is not composing it now but reminding them of what they had received — the same paradosis, the same handing-down, he invokes at the start of the chapter: “hold fast to the traditions, just as I handed them on to you.”⁠²⁴

For a Catholic this chapter is bedrock. Paul draws from the tradition the gravest possible conclusion about what is received in the meal: “Whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord unworthily will have to answer for the body and blood of the Lord. A person should examine himself … For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body, eats and drinks judgment on himself.”⁠²⁵ One cannot be guilty of the body and blood of a mere symbol. The Council of Trent, defining the Real Presence in 1551, grounded its teaching in these very words, noting that the institution was recorded by the Evangelists “and afterwards repeated by Saint Paul”; and it built the discipline of examining one’s conscience — of sacramental confession before receiving in a state of grave sin — directly on Paul’s “let a man prove himself.”⁠²⁶ A few chapters earlier Paul had already given the Church one of its foundational Eucharistic texts: “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? Because the loaf of bread is one, we, though many, are one body, for we all partake of the one loaf.”⁠²⁷ From that verse the Catechism draws the principle that “the Eucharist makes the Church,” and John Chrysostom, preaching on it in the fourth century, said the same in his own way: the bread is the body of Christ, and those who partake become “not many bodies, but one body.”⁠²⁸

There is a lesson in the placement. The two oldest fixed traditions of the faith — the creed and the Eucharist — are preserved not in a serene doctrinal treatise but in a letter written to stop a quarrel. The Church of the fifties already had a deposit it “received” and “handed on,” a rule older than the apostle himself, to which it appealed when a congregation went astray. The principle by which Catholicism would later define itself — that revelation comes as a tradition received and transmitted, not invented — is not a later accretion. It is visible in the oldest stratum of the New Testament, in the very grammar of Paul’s two great quotations.

The letter no critic could take from Paul

Turn from the contents to the question this series always asks — how secure is the book itself? — and 1 Corinthians proves to be one of the most secure in the entire New Testament. Its authenticity has never been in serious doubt, ancient or modern. The New American Bible’s introduction puts it plainly: “Paul’s authorship of 1 Corinthians, apart from a few verses that some regard as later interpolations, has never been seriously questioned.”⁠²⁹

The strength of that position shows best where one would least expect it. Ferdinand Christian Baur, the founder of the Tübingen School and the most corrosive New Testament critic of the nineteenth century, doubted nearly everything; he pushed most of the New Testament deep into the second century. Yet even Baur conceded that four letters were beyond dispute — the Hauptbriefe, the “chief letters”: Romans, First and Second Corinthians, and Galatians.⁠³⁰ First Corinthians sits inside that innermost core. Later criticism only strengthened its hand: where Baur allowed four authentic letters, the modern consensus recognizes seven, and 1 Corinthians is on everyone’s list. It is one of the fixed points by which the authenticity of the rest of the Pauline corpus is measured.

The one genuine scholarly question about the letter’s makeup is not authorship but integrity — whether the sixteen chapters are a single letter or an editor’s splicing-together of several. A few critics, notably Johannes Weiss and, later, Walter Schmithals, proposed that 1 Corinthians is a compilation of fragments from more than one Pauline letter.⁠³¹ But this is a minority report, and a weak one: the partitionists have never been able to agree on where the seams fall, and the letter reads as a coherent whole. Here the difference from Second Corinthians is instructive. For the second letter, partition theories are genuinely mainstream; for the first, they are a fringe position. As the New American Bible observes, “most commentators find 1 Corinthians quite understandable as a single coherent work.”⁠³²

The text that (mostly) stood still

If Romans is the letter whose text refuses to sit still — a wandering doxology, a heretic’s knife, an abridged edition — 1 Corinthians is by comparison a model of stability. Its earliest witness is very early indeed. Papyrus 46, the Chester Beatty codex of the Pauline letters, was copied around the year 200, and it is the oldest substantial manuscript of Paul we possess; 1 Corinthians survives across its leaves nearly complete.⁠³³ The great fourth- and fifth-century codices all contain the letter intact: Sinaiticus, complete; Vaticanus, whose Pauline text breaks off only later, at Hebrews; Alexandrinus, whose one Pauline gap falls in Second Corinthians, not the First.⁠³⁴

Two textual cruxes are worth naming, because both are famous and both are routinely mishandled. The first is 11:24, and it is a small jewel of a case for anyone curious about how the New Testament reached us. The King James Version reads “this is my body, which is broken for you” — but the word “broken” is a later scribal addition. The earliest and best manuscripts, including Papyrus 46, read simply “this is my body that is for you,” which is why modern translations, the New American Bible among them, drop the participle. Bruce Metzger’s textual commentary rates the shorter reading with its highest grade of certainty; a well-meaning copyist, remembering that Jesus “broke” the bread a line earlier, supplied the word.⁠³⁵ The verse the whole Church prays was subtly refined by the manuscript tradition, and we can watch it happen.

The second crux is graver. First Corinthians 14:34–35 — “women should keep silent in the churches” — is one of the most contested passages in the Pauline corpus, and the contest is partly text-critical. In a whole family of Western manuscripts these two verses appear not here but transposed to the end of the chapter, after verse 40. Because the verses seem to sit awkwardly against chapter 11, where Paul takes it for granted that women do pray and prophesy aloud in the assembly, many scholars — Gordon Fee foremost among them — argue that they are a later interpolation, a marginal note that worked its way into the text and then into different places in different copies. Others hold that they are authentic but displaced, or that Paul is quoting a Corinthian slogan in order to refute it. The New American Bible’s own note registers the tension and the transposition without resolving it.⁠³⁶ A careful reader should present this as what it is — a live text-critical and interpretive debate — and not as a settled verdict in either direction.

A word, too, about 15:29, the verse where Paul mentions people being “baptized for the dead.” It is one of the genuinely obscure lines of the New Testament; the exact practice Paul alludes to is simply lost to us, and interpreters have catalogued dozens of guesses. The New American Bible’s note is exactly right in its restraint: the practice “is not further explained here, nor is it necessarily mentioned with approval,” but Paul cites it, whatever it was, as one more sign of his opponents’ inconsistency in denying the resurrection.⁠³⁷ The verse is a favorite proof-text for the Latter-day Saint practice of proxy baptism, but Paul neither commands nor endorses the custom, and its obscurity means no doctrine can safely be built on it. It is a rhetorical ad hominem, not a rite the apostle is instituting.

None of this touches the substance of the letter. The Church receives 1 Corinthians, in the words of the Council of Trent, “entire with all their parts.” The point of the manuscript story is the opposite of alarming: the text is early, abundant, and remarkably stable, and the few places where it moved can be traced and understood.

1 Corinthians in the early Church

If the text stood mostly still, the reception did not stir at all: from the first moment after the apostolic age, 1 Corinthians is everywhere, and it is never questioned. Better still, its earliest external witness is unusually explicit — the best, in fact, that any book of the New Testament can claim.

The witness writes from Rome, and he writes to Corinth. Around A.D. 96, Clement — writing on behalf of the Roman church to the Corinthians, who had fallen once again into faction — does something no other early Father does for any other New Testament book. He tells them, in so many words, to go back and re-read Paul’s letter to them:

Take up the epistle of the blessed Apostle Paul. What did he write to you at the time when the gospel first began to be preached? Truly, under the inspiration of the Spirit, he wrote to you concerning himself, and Cephas, and Apollos, because even then parties had been formed among you.⁠³⁸

Weigh what this contains. Clement (a) names Paul’s epistle; (b) identifies its recipients — the Corinthians themselves, to whom he is writing; (c) correctly summarizes its opening subject, the parties of “Paul, and Cephas, and Apollos,” which is precisely the factionalism of 1 Corinthians 1:12; and (d) treats it as authoritative Scripture to be consulted. All of this within a generation of Paul’s death, and from the church of Rome to the church of Corinth — the same two cities, the same quarrel, the letter used to heal the identical disease it had first been written to cure.⁠³⁹ There is no comparable early attestation for any other New Testament book. First Corinthians is, by this measure, the best-externally-attested writing in the New Testament.

The echoes continue and multiply. Ignatius of Antioch, around A.D. 107, weaves Pauline language from the letter into his own — the wisdom of the cross, the warning that the immoral “shall not inherit the kingdom of God.”⁠⁴⁰ Polycarp of Smyrna goes further and cites Paul by name: “Do we not know that the saints shall judge the world? as Paul teaches” — a direct use of 1 Corinthians 6:2, attributed to the apostle.⁠⁴¹ Then, around 144, comes the first collection to include the letter, and it belongs — as with so much in canon history — to a heretic. Marcion of Sinope assembled the earliest known edition of Paul’s letters, and 1 and 2 Corinthians stood in it, right after Galatians. The point is easy to miss and vital to grasp: Marcion did not create the Pauline collection. He pruned and edited one that already existed. First Corinthians was in the corpus before the first heretic ever got to it.⁠⁴²

By the end of the second century the orthodox lists arrive, and 1 Corinthians heads them. The Muratorian Fragment — the oldest surviving catalogue of New Testament books — introduces Paul’s letters by placing Corinthians first: “First of all, to the Corinthians, prohibiting their heretical schisms.” It then lists the seven churches Paul wrote to, “to the Corinthians first, to the Ephesians second,” and so on.⁠⁴³ It is tempting, and wrong, to read this as a ranking by importance. The fragment explains its own logic: Paul, “following the example of his predecessor John” — who wrote to seven churches in Revelation — “writes by name to only seven churches,” so that “there is one Church spread throughout the whole extent of the earth.” The order is a symbolic, seven-churches schema, most likely reflecting the sequence in which the letters were thought to have been written, not a hierarchy of value.⁠⁴⁴ What matters for our purpose is simpler: Corinthians is there, and it heads the list, exactly where an uncontested letter would.

From there the witnesses become a chorus. Irenaeus in Gaul, Tertullian in North Africa — who expounds 1 Corinthians clause by clause against Marcion — and Clement of Alexandria in Egypt all quote the letter constantly, by name, as Pauline Scripture. It never appears among the antilegomena, the “disputed” books; it belongs, with the four Gospels and Romans, to the innermost uncontested core.⁠⁴⁵ When Eusebius of Caesarea, around 325, sorts the books into the acknowledged and the disputed, he files all of Paul’s letters among the acknowledged, and states elsewhere that “Paul’s fourteen epistles are well known and undisputed” — the only doubt in his day touching whether Hebrews belonged among them, never the Corinthian letters.⁠⁴⁶ And when Athanasius of Alexandria, in his Thirty-Ninth Festal Letter of A.D. 367 — the first document to list exactly our twenty-seven-book New Testament — comes to Paul, he writes: “there are fourteen epistles of Paul … the first, to the Romans; then two to the Corinthians.”⁠⁴⁷ Second in the corpus, after Romans, uncontested from the beginning.

The Catholic canon: Florence and Trent

The canon the early Church received, the Catholic Church defined, and in both of its great conciliar enumerations 1 Corinthians stands second among Paul’s letters. The earlier act was the Council of Florence. In its Bull of Union with the Copts, Cantate Domino, promulgated on 4 February 1442, the council professed that “one and the same God is the author of the old and the new Testament” and listed the sacred books it received, “fourteen letters of Paul, to the Romans, two to the Corinthians,” heading the enumeration.⁠⁴⁸ This was the first time an ecumenical council reckoned by the Latin Church enumerated the full canon. A century later, against the challenges of the Reformation, the Council of Trent made the definition solemn and binding. In its Fourth Session, on 8 April 1546, the council decreed the list “lest a doubt may arise in any one’s mind, which are the books that are received by this Synod,” naming for the New Testament “fourteen epistles of Paul the apostle, (one) to the Romans, two to the Corinthians.” To this it attached its anathema against anyone who “receive not, as sacred and canonical, the said books entire with all their parts.”⁠⁴⁹

Definition on paper is one thing; use is another, and here 1 Corinthians is among the most load-bearing books in the entire Catholic tradition. Its Eucharistic chapters underwrote Trent’s own decree on the Real Presence. Its resurrection chapter grounds the Catechism’s treatment of the last things. Its twelfth chapter — “you are Christ’s body, and individually parts of it” — gave the Church the image of the Mystical Body developed across the centuries and taken as the very title of a modern encyclical.⁠⁵⁰ Its seventh chapter, on marriage and the unmarried state “anxious about the things of the Lord,” anchors the Church’s theology of consecrated virginity.⁠⁵¹ And its thirteenth chapter — “Love is patient, love is kind … So faith, hope, love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love” — is quoted in the Catechism’s treatise on the theological virtues and read aloud at more weddings than any other passage of Scripture.⁠⁵²

It is worth correcting a small and common misreading of that famous chapter. First Corinthians 13 was not written for weddings. It sits deliberately between chapters 12 and 14, in the middle of Paul’s argument about spiritual gifts, as the “more excellent way” that relativizes tongues and prophecy and knowledge — the love without which the most spectacular charism “is nothing.” Its liturgical migration to the marriage rite is a later and beautiful appropriation, but the chapter’s home is a dispute in a quarrelsome church about whose gifts mattered most, and its point is that none of them matters at all without charity.⁠⁵³

Why 1 Corinthians endures

Return, at the end, to the paradox we began with. The most disorderly church in the New Testament produced the letter that carries its oldest and most orderly deposits. The congregation that could not stop quarreling about its preachers gave the Church the creed it still confesses and the words it still prays at every Mass. And it did so because, even in the fifties, even in the middle of a mess, the Church already knew that it lived by something received — a tradition older than any of its members, handed down and to be handed on, against which every faction and every abuse could be measured.

That, in the end, is why this letter belongs so securely in the canon, and why it was never once in doubt. The books the early Church argued over — Hebrews, James, Second Peter, Revelation — were argued over because their apostolic pedigree was uncertain. First Corinthians had no such problem. It came from Paul’s own hand, to a church he had founded, and it was being read back to that same church, by name, within a generation. But there is a deeper fittingness. A letter whose whole burden is that the Church lives by a tradition it did not invent is exactly the kind of letter that a Church which believes the same thing would receive without hesitation. The Corinthians could not keep order at their own supper table. But the tradition they had been given held — the creed and the cup, “received” and “handed on” — and the Church has never for a moment been able to do without the letter that preserved them.

For readers who want to go further, the natural Catholic starting points are Joseph A. Fitzmyer’s First Corinthians in the Anchor Yale Bible and Raymond F. Collins’s volume in the Sacra Pagina series; for exhaustive exegetical detail, Anthony Thiselton’s commentary on the Greek text and Gordon Fee’s in the New International Commentary remain standard.⁠⁵⁴

Frequently Asked Questions

Who wrote 1 Corinthians, and when?

The Apostle Paul wrote 1 Corinthians, together with a co-sender named Sosthenes (1:1). He composed it from Ephesus during his third missionary journey, addressing a church he had founded around A.D. 51. The American bishops’ introduction dates the writing “about the year 56”; most scholars place it slightly earlier, around 53 to 55. It is one of the seven “undisputed” letters accepted as authentically Pauline across the whole scholarly spectrum — even the radical nineteenth-century Tübingen School granted it, listing it among the four “chief letters” (Romans, 1–2 Corinthians, Galatians) it could not deny.

Why is 1 Corinthians so important for the history of the New Testament?

Because it preserves the two oldest fixed traditions in the New Testament. The resurrection creed of 15:3–8 and the words of institution of the Eucharist in 11:23–26 are both formulas Paul says he “received” and “handed on” — older than the letter itself, older than any Gospel. The New American Bible calls 11:23–25 “the earliest written account of the institution of the Lord’s Supper in the New Testament,” and the creed of chapter 15 is the earliest datable witness to the resurrection, reaching back to within a few years of the crucifixion.

Is 1 Corinthians really the earliest account of the Last Supper?

Yes, in written form. First Corinthians was written in the mid-50s, before the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John reached the forms we now have. So Paul’s narration of the institution — “the Lord Jesus, on the night he was handed over, took bread” — is the earliest written account of the Eucharist’s institution in the New Testament. The Synoptic Gospels may preserve independently ancient tradition, but as texts they are later than 1 Corinthians. Paul himself had already “handed on” the tradition to the Corinthians years earlier, so the underlying tradition is older still.

Was 1 Corinthians ever doubted or disputed in the early Church?

No. Unlike Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, and Revelation, 1 Corinthians was never among the “disputed” books. It has the strongest early external attestation of any New Testament writing: around A.D. 96, Clement of Rome told the Corinthians to “take up the epistle of the blessed Apostle Paul” and summarized its subject — the factions of chapter 1. It appears in Marcion’s collection (c. 144), the Muratorian Fragment (c. 170–200) — which lists it first — and every subsequent canon list through Athanasius (367), Florence (1442), and Trent (1546), where it stands second among Paul’s letters, after Romans.

What does 1 Corinthians teach about the Eucharist?

A great deal, and the Catholic Church has leaned on it heavily. Paul calls the cup and bread “a participation in the blood of Christ” and “a participation in the body of Christ” (10:16), gives the words of institution (11:23–26), and warns that whoever eats and drinks “unworthily” will “have to answer for the body and blood of the Lord” and must “examine himself” first (11:27–29). The Council of Trent grounded its definition of the Real Presence in these words, and the Catechism draws from them the teaching that “the Eucharist makes the Church” and the discipline of sacramental confession before receiving Communion in a state of grave sin.

Why is 1 Corinthians 13, the “love chapter,” in a letter about church problems?

Because it was written for exactly that context, not for weddings. Chapter 13 sits between chapters 12 and 14, in the middle of Paul’s argument about spiritual gifts. The Corinthians were competing over whose gifts — tongues, prophecy, knowledge — were most impressive, and Paul answers that all of them are worthless without love: “If I speak in human and angelic tongues but do not have love, I am a resounding gong.” The chapter’s use in the marriage liturgy is a later and fitting appropriation, but its original home is a quarrel about charisms, and its point is that love is the “more excellent way” that outranks and outlasts every gift.

Footnotes

1. 1. 1 Corinthians 1:1–2 (New American Bible, Revised Edition). All Scripture quotations follow the NABRE unless otherwise noted; bible.usccb.org/bible/1corinthians/1. On Sosthenes, compare Acts 18:17, where a synagogue official of that name appears at Corinth.

2. 2. Acts 18:1–11 records Paul's eighteen-month founding stay at Corinth on the second journey. Introduction to 1 Corinthians, NABRE: the community was founded "about the year 51"; bible.usccb.org/bible/1corinthians/0.

3. 3. 1 Corinthians 16:8 (NABRE); note on 16:8: "In Ephesus until Pentecost: this tells us the place from which he wrote the letter and suggests he may have composed it about Easter time (cf. 1 Cor 5:7–8)." See also Acts 19:1–20 on the Ephesian ministry of the third journey.

4. 4. Introduction to 1 Corinthians, NABRE: "Paul wrote this letter from Ephesus about the year 56." Most scholars narrow the composition to c. A.D. 53–55; the anchor is the Delphi (Gallio) inscription, a rescript of the emperor Claudius dated to 52 that fixes the proconsulship of L. Junius Gallio (before whom Paul was tried, Acts 18:12–17) to c. A.D. 51–52. See Joseph A. Fitzmyer, First Corinthians, Anchor Yale Bible 32 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), on the date and chronology.

5. 5. 1 Corinthians 5:9 (NABRE): "I wrote you in my letter not to associate with immoral people." Introduction to 1 Corinthians, NABRE: "We know that Paul wrote at least two other letters to Corinth (see 1 Cor 5:9; 2 Cor 2:3–4) in addition to the two that we now have."

6. 6. 1 Corinthians 1:11 (NABRE). Chloe was evidently a woman known to both Paul and the Corinthians; "Chloe's people" were probably members of her household or business who had traveled to Ephesus.

7. 7. 1 Corinthians 7:1 (NABRE): "Now in regard to the matters about which you wrote." Note on 7:1–40: "Paul now begins to answer questions addressed to him by the Corinthians."

8. 8. The recurring Greek formula peri de ("now concerning") marks the topics the Corinthians had raised: marriage (7:1), the unmarried (7:25), food sacrificed to idols (8:1), spiritual gifts (12:1), the collection (16:1), and Apollos (16:12).

9. 9. 1 Corinthians 16:17 (NABRE): "I rejoice in the arrival of Stephanas, Fortunatus, and Achaicus, because they made up for your absence." The household of Stephanas is called "the firstfruits of Achaia" (16:15); Paul had baptized it (1:16). These three most likely carried the Corinthians' letter and Paul's reply.

10. 10. 1 Corinthians 1:10–13 (NABRE). The note on 1:12 observes that "the activities of Paul and Apollos in Corinth are described in Acts 18," and that Cephas "may well have passed through Corinth."

11. 11. 1 Corinthians 1:18 (NABRE); cf. 1:23, "we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles," and 1:27, "God chose the foolish of the world to shame the wise."

12. 12. 1 Corinthians 5:1–5 (NABRE): "a man living with his father's wife." Paul is scandalized that "you are inflated with pride" rather than grieving (5:2).

13. 13. 1 Corinthians 6:1–8 (lawsuits before pagan courts) and 6:12–20 (sexual immorality); the quotation is 6:19, "your body is a temple of the holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God, and . . . you are not your own."

14. 14. Marriage and celibacy (ch. 7), food offered to idols (chs. 8–10), women's head-coverings (11:2–16), and the abuse of the community meal (11:17–22): "in eating, each one goes ahead with his own supper, and one goes hungry while another gets drunk" (11:21).

15. 15. 1 Corinthians 14:40 (NABRE): "everything must be done properly and in order." Chapters 12–14 regulate the exercise of charisms, ranking prophecy above tongues for the building up of the community (14:1–5); Paul does not forbid tongues (14:39).

16. 16. 1 Corinthians 15:12 (NABRE): "how can some among you say there is no resurrection of the dead?" The NABRE note attributes the denial plausibly to a Greek anthropology "which looks with contempt upon matter."

17. 17. The verbs are paredōka ("I handed on / delivered") and parelabon ("I received"), the standard vocabulary for the transmission of fixed tradition; they open both the resurrection creed (15:3) and the Eucharistic tradition (11:23).

18. 18. 1 Corinthians 15:3–6 (NABRE). The formula continues: "After that he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one born abnormally, he appeared to me" (15:7–8).

19. 19. Note on 1 Corinthians 15:3–7, NABRE: "The language by which Paul expresses the essence of the 'gospel' (1 Cor 15:1) is not his own but is drawn from older credal formulas. This credo highlights Jesus' death for our sins (confirmed by his burial) and Jesus' resurrection (confirmed by his appearances)."

20. 20. Catechism of the Catholic Church (2nd ed.), §639; vatican.va. The Catechism quotes the creed in an RSV-based rendering ("I delivered to you . . . what I also received").

21. 21. The distinction matters: the letter dates to the mid-50s, but the formula it quotes is older, and is widely dated to within a few years of the crucifixion (c. A.D. 30–35) — even by critics such as Gerd Lüdemann, who share none of Paul's convictions. Some popular apologetics assert a precise "within eighteen months," which Bart Ehrman and others reasonably dispute — Ehrman grants that the material is pre-Pauline tradition Paul quotes but cautions that no precise date within a few years can be demonstrated; the defensible and still-remarkable claim is the general one, that the confession was already formulated within the movement's earliest years.

22. 22. 1 Corinthians 11:23–25 (NABRE). The narration concludes: "For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes" (11:26).

23. 23. Note on 1 Corinthians 11:23–25, NABRE: "This is the earliest written account of the institution of the Lord's Supper in the New Testament. The narrative emphasizes Jesus' action of self-giving . . . and his double command to repeat his own action."

24. 24. 1 Corinthians 11:2 (NABRE): "I praise you because you remember me in everything and hold fast to the traditions, just as I handed them on to you." The Greek is again paradosis ("tradition," lit. "what is handed over").

25. 25. 1 Corinthians 11:27–29 (NABRE). The note on 11:27 explains that to eat unworthily is to fail to grasp "the meaning of his death," so that one "will be guilty of a sin against the Lord himself."

26. 26. Council of Trent, Session XIII (11 October 1551), Decree Concerning the Most Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist, chs. 1 and 7 (trans. J. Waterworth, London, 1848). Chapter 1 defines that Christ "is truly, really, and substantially contained" under the species; chapter 7 cites Paul directly — "He that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh judgment to himself" and "Let a man prove himself" — as the ground for confession before receiving in mortal sin.

27. 27. 1 Corinthians 10:16–17 (NABRE). The Catechism quotes these verses at §1396 and draws from them the teaching that "the Eucharist makes the Church."

28. 28. Catechism of the Catholic Church, §1396; John Chrysostom, Homilies on First Corinthians, Homily 24.4 (on 1 Cor 10:16–17), in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 12, trans. Talbot W. Chambers: "For what is the bread? The Body of Christ . . . not many bodies, but one body."

29. 29. Introduction to 1 Corinthians, NABRE: "Paul's authorship of 1 Corinthians, apart from a few verses that some regard as later interpolations, has never been seriously questioned."

30. 30. On F. C. Baur and the Tübingen School's four Hauptbriefe (Romans, 1–2 Corinthians, Galatians), see Baur, Paul, the Apostle of Jesus Christ (1845). The later expansion of the authentic core from four letters to seven (adding Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, Philemon) is the work of subsequent critics, not of Baur himself.

31. 31. The chief partition proposals are those of Johannes Weiss, Der erste Korintherbrief (1910), and Walter Schmithals, Gnosticism in Corinth (Eng. trans. 1971), the latter repeatedly revising his reconstruction. Their inability to agree on the seams is a standard objection to the theory.

32. 32. Introduction to 1 Corinthians, NABRE: after noting the partition theory, the introduction concludes that "most commentators . . . find 1 Corinthians quite understandable as a single coherent work." Partition theories are genuinely mainstream only for 2 Corinthians.

33. 33. Papyrus 46 (𝔓46, the Chester Beatty codex of the Pauline letters), copied c. A.D. 200, is the earliest substantial witness to the Pauline corpus; it preserves 1 Corinthians nearly complete. See Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament, 4th ed. (Oxford University Press, 2005).

34. 34. Codex Sinaiticus (4th c.) contains the whole New Testament; Codex Vaticanus (4th c.) preserves the Pauline letters through Hebrews 9:14, so 1 Corinthians is complete in it; Codex Alexandrinus (5th c.) has a lacuna only in 2 Corinthians (4:13–12:6), not in the First. All three contain 1 Corinthians intact.

35. 35. Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: German Bible Society, 1994), on 1 Cor 11:24, rating the shorter reading "this is my body that is for you" with an {A} (highest certainty). The Textus Receptus, followed by the KJV, added klōmenon ("broken"), assimilating the words to the "broke it" of the same verse. The best witnesses, including 𝔓46, א*, A, B, and C*, lack it.

36. 36. On the transposition of 1 Cor 14:34–35 in the Western manuscripts (D, F, G, 88*, and Old Latin witnesses) to follow verse 40, see Metzger, Textual Commentary, 2nd ed., ad loc. (rating the verses' inclusion in the traditional place {B}). The interpolation case is argued most fully by Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, rev. ed., NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014). The NABRE note observes that the verses are "often considered an interpolation," noting that "some [manuscripts] transpose them to the very end of the chapter."

37. 37. Note on 1 Corinthians 15:29, NABRE: "Baptized for the dead: this practice is not further explained here, nor is it necessarily mentioned with approval, but Paul cites it as something in their experience that attests in one more way to belief in the resurrection." The verse figures in Latter-day Saint proxy baptism; Paul neither commands nor endorses the practice, and its obscurity forbids building doctrine on it.

38. 38. Clement of Rome, First Epistle to the Corinthians 47, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1, trans. Roberts and Donaldson; newadvent.org/fathers/1010.htm. The letter is conventionally dated c. A.D. 96.

39. 39. The immediately preceding chapter, 1 Clement 46, already echoes the letter: "Why are there strifes, and tumults, and divisions, and schisms, and wars among you?" The reference in ch. 47 to "himself, and Cephas, and Apollos" corresponds exactly to the parties named at 1 Corinthians 1:12. These are the strongest and earliest external attestations of any New Testament book by name and recipient.

40. 40. Ignatius of Antioch, To the Ephesians 16 (echoing 1 Cor 6:9–10, "shall not inherit the kingdom of God") and 18 (echoing 1 Cor 1:18–20, the wisdom of the cross), in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1. These are unattributed echoes rather than formal citations.

41. 41. Polycarp of Smyrna, To the Philippians 11 (quoting 1 Cor 6:2, "the saints shall judge the world") and 5 (echoing 1 Cor 6:9–10), in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1. Polycarp attaches the citation formula "as Paul teaches," attributing it to the apostle by name.

42. 42. On Marcion's Apostolikon (c. 144), which placed Galatians first and the two Corinthian letters immediately after, see Tertullian, Against Marcion, Book V, which treats the letters in Marcion's order. Tertullian's whole charge is that Marcion mutilated an existing collection — "the epistles also mutilated by him . . . even as respects their number."

43. 43. The Muratorian Fragment, lines 42–54, in Bruce M. Metzger's translation, The Canon of the New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), Appendix IV; bible-researcher.com/muratorian.html. Usual date c. 170–200.

44. 44. Muratorian Fragment, lines 47–59: Paul "writes by name to only seven churches," so that "there is one Church spread throughout the whole extent of the earth," on the model of the seven churches of Revelation. The ordering is best read as a symbolic seven-churches schema (probably reflecting the presumed order of writing), not a ranking by importance — a point stressed by, e.g., Eckhard J. Schnabel, "The Muratorian Fragment: The State of Research," Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 57.2 (2014).

45. 45. Irenaeus (Against Heresies, e.g. 5.6–13, on the resurrection from 1 Cor 15), Tertullian (Against Marcion, Book V), and Clement of Alexandria cite 1 Corinthians constantly and by name. It never appears among the antilegomena (the disputed books) in any ancient list.

46. 46. Eusebius of Caesarea, Ecclesiastical History 3.3.5 (NPNF, 2nd Series, vol. 1, trans. A. C. McGiffert): "Paul's fourteen epistles are well known and undisputed. It is not indeed right to overlook the fact that some have rejected the Epistle to the Hebrews." At 3.25 he files "the epistles of Paul" among the acknowledged books (homologoumena); newadvent.org/fathers/250103.htm.

47. 47. Athanasius of Alexandria, Thirty-Ninth Festal Letter (A.D. 367), §5 (NPNF, 2nd Series, vol. 4): "there are fourteen Epistles of Paul . . . The first, to the Romans; then two to the Corinthians." This is the first surviving document to list exactly the twenty-seven books of our New Testament.

48. 48. Council of Florence, Bull Cantate Domino (4 February 1442), in Norman P. Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990): "fourteen letters of Paul, to the Romans, two to the Corinthians." This was the first enumeration of the full canon by an ecumenical council reckoned in the Latin Church.

49. 49. Council of Trent, Session IV (8 April 1546), Decree Concerning the Canonical Scriptures (trans. J. Waterworth): "fourteen epistles of Paul the apostle, (one) to the Romans, two to the Corinthians"; and "if any one receive not, as sacred and canonical, the said books entire with all their parts . . . let him be anathema"; bible-researcher.com/trent1.html.

50. 50. 1 Corinthians 12:12–27 (NABRE), esp. 12:27, "you are Christ's body, and individually parts of it." The Catechism develops the Body of Christ at §§787–790; the image gives its title to Pius XII's encyclical Mystici Corporis Christi (1943).

51. 51. 1 Corinthians 7:32–35 (NABRE): "An unmarried man is anxious about the things of the Lord . . . adherence to the Lord without distraction." The Catechism draws on this in its treatment of virginity for the kingdom, §§1618–1620.

52. 52. 1 Corinthians 13:4–13 (NABRE). The Catechism quotes chapter 13 in its treatise on the theological virtues, §1826 (in an RSV-based rendering, "faith, hope, charity abide").

53. 53. 1 Corinthians 12:31–13:3 (NABRE): love as "a still more excellent way," without which tongues, prophecy, and knowledge profit "nothing." The chapter's setting is the dispute over spiritual gifts (chs. 12–14), not marriage.

54. 54. Joseph A. Fitzmyer, First Corinthians, Anchor Yale Bible 32 (Yale University Press, 2008); Raymond F. Collins, First Corinthians, Sacra Pagina 7 (Liturgical Press, 1999); Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, NIGTC (Eerdmans, 2000); Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, rev. ed., NICNT (Eerdmans, 2014).