1 Corinthians setting & dates

The Setting of 1 Corinthians

The letter is addressed to the church in Corinth, one of the great cities of the Roman world. Situated on the narrow isthmus connecting mainland Greece with the Peloponnese, Corinth controlled the traffic between two seas and two harbors, making it a wealthy, cosmopolitan hub of trade, travelers, and cultures. It was famous for its commerce, its athletic games (the Isthmian Games, which lie behind Paul’s imagery of runners and boxers in chapter 9), and its pagan temples — and infamous for its immorality, so that “to Corinthianize” had become a byword for loose living. Into this proud and permissive city Paul had brought the gospel, founding a church drawn from many backgrounds, both Jewish and Gentile, rich and poor, slave and free.

Paul wrote this letter not from Corinth but from Ephesus, the leading city of the province of Asia across the Aegean Sea, where he ministered for some years on his third journey. News of the Corinthians’ troubles reached him there, both by report from “Chloe’s people” and by a letter from the church, and he responded with this careful, wide-ranging reply, intending to visit them again soon. The letter thus travels across the Aegean, from Paul in Ephesus to the struggling congregation in Corinth, addressing the pressures of a worldly city upon the young church — pressures that the church in every commercial, pluralistic society still knows well.

Timeline

• c. AD 50-51 - Paul founds the church in Corinth during his second missionary journey (Acts 18).
• c. AD 52-55 - Paul ministers in Ephesus during his third journey; issues arise in Corinth.
• c. AD 55 - Paul writes 1 Corinthians from Ephesus in response to reports and a letter from the church.
• Shortly after - Further difficulties lead to the writing of 2 Corinthians.
• c. AD 57 - Paul revisits Corinth, from where he writes Romans.