1 Corinthians

First Corinthians was written by the apostle Paul around A.D. 55, addressed to the congregation he had founded in Corinth, a bustling and morally complex port city in ancient Greece. Paul wrote from Ephesus in response to troubling reports and specific questions from the Corinthian believers, making this one of the most practically engaged letters in the entire New Testament. Its setting in a diverse, cosmopolitan city helps explain the wide range of struggles the young church was experiencing.

The letter's central purpose is to call a divided, spiritually immature church back to unity, holiness, and clarity about the gospel. Paul tackles an remarkable breadth of issues: factions forming around different leaders, sexual immorality, lawsuits among believers, questions about marriage and singleness, the proper use of spiritual gifts, and the conduct of worship gatherings. Woven through all of these concerns is Paul's profound teaching on love in chapter 13 and his masterful defense of the resurrection in chapter 15. Together, these themes invite believers in every generation to build their lives not on human wisdom or cultural norms, but on the crucified and risen Christ.