More than any other letter Paul wrote in the New Testament, he focused his letters to the Corinthians on specific pastoral concerns in the church.
Paul was writing pastorally to deal with problems. If you look at the problems listed above, you’ll get a head start in understanding the main messages in these letters. What were the main messages of Paul’s letters to the Corinthians? Worse yet, they were attacking the gospel Paul preached. Apparently, false teachers were attacking Paul’s credibility. Paul devotes much of 2 Corinthians to combatting false teaching that had crept into the church. This philosophy saw resurrection as purely spiritual.
Greek philosophy, particularly Gnosticism, flourished in the area in the first century. While it’s not clear exactly what false teachers were saying about the resurrection, it’s likely that they were denying the reality of a bodily resurrection. The most important was false teaching about the resurrection. The Corinthian church battled several theological problems. Paul was disgusted by the behavior that he said was “not even tolerated among the Gentiles.” While his concern was with the specific immorality, Paul chided the leadership for not addressing the sin in the church’s midst. In 1 Corinthians 5:1–13, Paul says he’d heard reports of a Corinthian church member sleeping with his father’s wife. Corinthian church members were also fighting over whether to eat food that had been sacrificed to idols (1 Cor 8). 1 Cor 6:1–11) to find a resolution.Īnother source of disunity came in how some members of the Corinthian church seemed to elevate certain spiritual gifts (especially speaking in tongues) over other gifts (cf. Allegiance to these factions was causing internal fighting within the church.ĭisputes within the Corinthian church had gotten so out of hand that they had begun to take those disagreements to the pagan courts (cf. In 1 Corinthians, we learn that the Corinthian church was split among various factions, seemingly between Paul, Apollos, Cephas (or Peter), and Jesus (1 Cor 1:10–17 3:1–9). The problems we know about within the Corinthian church we’ve gleaned from the issues Paul addressed in 1 and 2 Corinthians. What were the problems in the church in Corinth? He then turns his evangelistic focus to the non-Jews (or Gentiles), where he found considerably more fruit. He first preaches in the synagogue (as was his custom) but faced strong resistance (Acts 18:6). In Corinth, Paul meets fellow tentmakers Priscilla and Aquilla, and stays with them as he does his missionary work. In fact, The Holman Bible Handbook notes that the Greeks had invented a word to describe living an immoral life- Corinthianize. 32–34).Ĭorinth had a reputation for loose morals. Paul arrived in this booming, rowdy port city upon leaving Athens, where he’d had a somewhat rocky reception by the Greek thinkers at the Areopagus (cf. There were many pagan temples and much immorality in Corinth. It became a center of philosophy, though apparently few citizens were seriously interested in studying philosophy, preferring rather to listen to stirring orations on faddish topics delivered by the city’s numerous itinerant philosophers. The city was stocked with art purchased from around the Roman Empire. In this wealthy young city, excess seemed to be the norm. Notes in the Life Connections Study Bible described Corinth like this: Many of its inhabitants reflected the loose morals and materialistic outlook one might expect from such a city. Sitting in the neck of a narrow isthmus between the Corinthian Gulf and the Aegean Sea, it was an important center for commerce and transportation throughout the Mediterranean region.īecause it was such an important commercial city, Corinth had a cosmopolitan feel. Acts 18 tells the story of Paul starting the church in Corinth-one of the most influential cities in the Roman world.
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