The Church in Corinth and Paul’s Letters

            Paul arrived in Corinth in the winter of 49/50 AD[4] and lived there for a year and a half. While there he supported himself by working in tentmaking — or perhaps leatherworking[5] (Acts 18:2), the trade he had learned as a boy — in the workshop of Aquila and Priscilla (see 1 Corinthians 4:12). He lays out his reasons for following this course in 1 Corinthians 9 (see below), even though he could have taken advantage of full-time support as a missionary from the start, as indeed he later does (Acts 18:4 and 2 Corinthians 11:9).

            In any case, his Sabbath-day preaching in the synagogue soon bore fruit, and the church in Corinth was born. The church seems to have been made up of not more than a hundred people when Paul wrote 1 Corinthians. Some were Jews, while most were Gentiles. They met in the houses of two or three wealthier members, but most belonged to the large underclass that populated all urban centers.[6]

            Paul continued to be keenly interested in the development of the church even after he left Corinth. Paul had written the congregation at least one letter prior to 1 Corinthians (1 Cor.5:9) in order to address a problem that had come up after his departure. Members of the house of Chloe, who may have had business interests to attend to in Ephesus, visited Paul there and reported that the church in Corinth was in danger of coming apart at the seams over various divisions of opinion (1:11). In the entrepreneurial Corinthian style, competing groups were creating parties around their favorite apostles in order to gain status for themselves (chs. 1-4). Many were up in arms due to serious differences over the sexual behavior and business ethics of some of their members (chs. 5-6). Then another group of representatives from the church arrived with a letter in hand (7:1, 16:17) querying Paul on a number of important issues, such as sex and marriage (ch. 7), the propriety of eating meat that had been previously offered to idols (chs. 8-10) and worship (chs. 11-14). Finally, Paul had also learned from one of these sources, or perhaps Apollos (see 16:12), that some in the Corinthian church were denying the future resurrection of believers (ch. 15).

            These questions hardly grew out of academic discussions. The Corinthians wanted to know how as followers of Christ they should act in matters of daily life and work. Paul gives answers throughout 1 Corinthians, making it one of the most practical books of the New Testament.