Isaiah 1:12-17 Acts 2:42-47 1 Corinthians 3:1-9
The Difficulty of Rightly Understanding 1 Corinthians
Imagine walking into a room and overhearing someone speaking urgently on the telephone:
“No! No, that’s not what I meant.”
“Well you mustn’t treat them that way.”
“Yes, I know what you wrote, but did you read what I wrote?”
“If you keep going on like this, people are going to get hurt…in fact, some of them are already badly hurt.”
How much of what you heard helps you understand what the speaker is talking about? Not much, right? You’re only hearing one side of the conversation. What you don’t know is what is being said by the person on the other end…. you don’t know what has happened and you don’t know what is being done that has caused people to get hurt nor do you know who was being hurt. And you also don’t know what had been written previously by both sides. You just don’t know. All you hear is a one-sided conversation.
That is what reading 1 Corinthians is like.
We are overhearing one side of a deeply charged conversation between the apostle Paul and the church in Corinth.
From what we read in the letter we know that Paul was responding to some things reported to him by Chloe’s household (1:11), as well as questions raised in a letter from the Corinthians (7:1). We also know that Paul had previously written an earlier letter to the Corinthians (5:9), but we do not have access to the contents of either of these earlier communications. The absence of both letters means that our understanding of the ongoing dialogue between Paul and the church in Corinth is incomplete, because we are missing some of the context and the issues both the Corinthians and Paul may have addressed previously. And then finally, although we know more about the sociological situations and cultural norms of that period today thanks to the flood of recent discoveries in the fields of study like archaeology and epigraphy, Paul writes about things he simply assumes his readers will fully understand without any explanation of what he means.
All we have is this one-sided conversation. We do not have the original reports, we don’t know the original questions asked, we don’t have the other letters to and from Corinth, and, quite frankly, we simply cannot fully understand the situations and cultural norms as they would have.
And yet this letter has shaped Christian doctrine, ethics, worship, and ecclesiology for two thousand years.
So, how, then, do we interpret this letter responsibly? Well, I think we must begin by humbly admitting that while there is much we can understand and therefore can apply to our own lives without too much difficulty, we just don’t have an absolutely clear picture of everything Paul wrote about.
Firstly, we have the difficulty of distance.
Gordon D. Fee, in his commentary, reminds us that 1 Corinthians is an “occasional letter”, in other words it was written to address specific problems that arose in a specific living and growing congregation. He warns us that we are not reading a systematic theology but “a pastoral response to concrete situations.”
And that matters.
We are separated from Paul and his hearers not only by language, but by Roman patronage structures, banquet customs, temple dining practices, honour-shame dynamics, and First Century socio-economic inequalities.
We are also heirs of centuries of interpretation and tradition, that was often shaped by later ecclesiastical debates rather than first-century realities. And, unfortunately, some folks are like cows that regurgitate what they have been fed and chew on it over and over again without thinking critically about what they think or about what they believe or about what they do.
For instance, some readers of Paul’s injunction for men not to have something on their heads during prayer in the services, have been confused because of the Jewish practice of men covering their head with a garment during prayer.
But what they often don’t know is that this particular Jewish practice of men covering their heads during prayer only became common during the Talmudic Times (AD 200–600). And this was more than likely due to the fact that as Jews moved out of the Middle East and adopted local clothing, the four-cornered garment became less common, so it became necessary to create a specialized, separate garment for prayer, the tallit gadol, or the prayer shawl.
But on this topic of so-called “head coverings” the difficulty doesn’t end there. In the original Greek text there is no mention of “coverings” or “veils” at all. It merely says, “comes down from the head”. So what is that? A veil? Hair? And if it is hair, what style was appropriate for gender distinctions between men and women, or what style was appropriate for husbands and wives? We can read a few statements made by writers of the same period or look at a few statues of the time and make some educated guesses, but that’s all that they are. Educated guesses. And yet this ambiguity has not stopped some interpreters from developing dogmatic views on hairstyles for men and on head coverings for women!
And then how do we reconcile Paul’s statements on women praying and prophesying in the church in Chapter 11 and his statement on women keeping silent in the church in Chapter 15?
Another doozy is the issue of tongues. What exactly was this gift and why was it given? Are they human languages or angelic languages? And if they are angelic languages, does that mean that angels speak as many different languages as humans?
And then Paul says tongues must be interpreted so that others in the congregation may understand what is being said, and yet in Acts 2 the tongues spoken by the disciples were known languages that were understood by a wide variety of foreign speakers.
Paul says that tongues are essentially prayers to God and yet in Acts 2 the hearers heard the disciples telling of the mighty acts of God. Paul says tongues are an inferior gift to prophecy as prophecy builds up everyone in the community rather than just the speaker and yet some folks in the church have dared to make tongues a marker for true spirituality.
So, it is essential that we read and interpret this letter with great humility, remaining cautious about drawing definitive or dogmatic assertions before fully considering the complexities involved. We must always remember that we are listening to only one side of a conversation.
Secondly, there is the problem that some of the things mentioned in this letter are unknown to us. So, let’s have a quick look at some things that we do not know.
We do not know the contents of the Corinthians’ letter written to Paul (7:1). Nor do we know the full substance of Paul’s earlier letter that he mentions in 5:9. We also do not know exactly what Chloe’s household reported (1:11). And as we’ve already seen, we don’t know the precise social practice behind things like “appropriate hairstyles” in chapter 11 nor do we understand the exact phenomenon described as “tongues” in chapter 14. And we also don’t know the detailed shape of the rival teaching undermining Paul’s authority.
Richard Horsley in his book Paul and Empire: Religion and Power in Roman Imperial Society, reminds us that Corinth was a Roman colony saturated with imperial ideology and social competition. That context no doubt shaped this letter, but Paul did not stop to explain it. He simply assumed a shared knowledge.
So, in other words, we are reading mail that, in one sense, (and please do not misunderstand what I’m saying here) was not addressed to us.
But thirdly, there are several things that we can know. Thankfully, we are not left in total darkness. So, let’s have a look at what we can know.
Archaeology and inscriptional evidence have revealed that a man named Tiberius Claudius Dinippus served at least three times as curator annonae, grain commissioner, in Corinth. Once before AD 51, then again during Paul’s first stay in Corinth (AD 51–52), and then again sometime between AD 54–58.
Barry Danylak, in his article in the Tyndale Bulletin (59.2, 2008), argues that such repeated appointments strongly suggest recurring instability in Corinth’s grain supply. Why appoint a grain commissioner at least three times unless there was some form of food shortage in Corinth?
And the wider Mediterranean context supports this.
Tacitus (Annals 12.43; 13.43; 15.39) records multiple grain shortages under Claudius and Nero. Suetonius describes Claudius personally intervening during food crises. Josephus speaks of famine in Judea during Claudius’ reign (Ant. 20.51–53).
Peter Garnsey, in his book Famine and Food Supply in the Graeco-Roman World, says this: “For the great majority of the population, subsistence was precarious. A shortfall in supply, however temporary, could have devastating consequences.” He notes that in acute shortages the destitute resorted to spoiled or discarded food, often resulting in preventable diseases and death. And this is important to keep in mind when we get to examine the passage on the Lord’s Supper where there was no sharing of food with the poor, who were starving and malnourished, even to the point of dying.
David Downs, in his article Physical Weakness, Illness and Death in 1 Corinthians 11:30, while cautioning against tying Paul’s words to a specific famine, writes the following: “Given what is known about income distribution and inequality in the Roman imperial period, it is sufficient to affirm that poverty was a way of life, and death (by malnutrition was a reality) for the vast majority of the population, even in a relatively prosperous urban centre such as Corinth.”
That is a striking statement. Even in prosperous Corinth, abject poverty was a reality.
So, fourthly, when we read 1 Corinthians, we should at least have this socio-economic inequality in mind. For example, let’s consider 1 Corinthians 11.
Paul wrote: “When you come together, it is not the Lord’s Supper that you eat… For in eating, each one goes ahead with his own meal. One goes hungry, another gets drunk.”
Now, this is not symbolic language. Bruce Winter, in his book After Paul Left Corinth, emphasizes the role of the patronage culture in shaping Christian gatherings. Wealthy believers hosted assemblies in homes (known as house churches) that were large enough to accommodate sizeable groups…and yet Roman dining customs reinforced status distinctions.
The elite reclined in the triclinium. The less prominent, crowded into the atrium. If food was scarce or simply distributed according to status (which was common in this period), the humiliation would have been visible. And so the Lord’s Supper became a mirror, not of Christian unity, but of Roman inequality.
Therefore Paul said: “Do you despise the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing?” The language is severe because the situation was severe. They were not taking care of the needy, which seems to have been the common practice in the First Century Church as we see in Acts 2:42-47.
Then let’s look at what Paul said in 1 Corinthians 7:26 about avoiding marriage because of their “present distress.” Yes, scholars debate the meaning of this distress. Where some see persecution, others see eschatological urgency, and still others see some localized crisis.
However, if Corinth faced recurring economic instability, even short-term supply shocks, as seems to be the case with the repeated appointment of a grain commissioner, Paul’s counsel concerning marriage and social obligations takes on a practical force.
Weddings were expensive. In that culture, the wedding celebration could last for days, and someone had to pay for all the food and drink. And then having children meant more mouths to feed, and if you were already struggling to get enough food for yourself, sexual intimacy would have been risky.
So contrary to some traditional interpretations, Paul was not advocating celibacy or elevating singleness, nor was he forbidding marriage but rather advising restraint during a season of economic instability.
And even though we cannot prove a specific famine, we know that for the lower classes of Corinth, daily bread was never guaranteed…and Paul specifically said that some who gathered around the Lord’s Table were hungry because they had no food.
David Gill, in his study of the Corinthian elite (Tyndale Bulletin 44.2), argues that socially prominent believers were present in the church and likely exercised disproportionate influence. Gerd Theissen demonstrates how patronage structures shaped early Christian communities. If elite Christians imported Roman status competition into the assembly, well then factional slogans make sense:
“I follow Paul.”
“I follow Apollos.”
“I follow Cephas.”
And add to that a triumphalist spirituality, claims of superior “wisdom,” ecstatic experiences, rhetorical eloquence, and we see a church divided both socio-economically and spiritually.
And Paul responded not with flattery, but with the cross.
This is what makes 1 Corinthians so powerful. It is theology shaped under pressure…it is theology applied under pressure.
When Paul spoke of the body of Christ in chapter 12, when he spoke of love as the greatest gift or virtue in chapter 13, when he addressed the divisions during the Lord’s Supper in chapter 11, or when he spoke about the resurrection of the body in chapter 15…he was not writing abstract doctrine…he was redirecting a community fractured by inequality, spiritual pride, and possibly economic instability. Which makes this letter very, very practical.
So in conclusion let’s return to the illustration of the overheard phone call.
At first, we hear only fragments:
“It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.”
“The unbelieving husband is made holy because of his wife, and the unbelieving wife is made holy because of her husband.”
“The Cup of Blessing that we bless, is it not the participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many, are one body, for we all partake of one bread.”
“The one who prophesies is greater than the one who speaks in tongues, unless someone interprets, so that the church may be built up.”
“…what do people mean by being baptised on behalf of the dead? If the dead are not raised at all, why are people baptised on their behalf?”
These fragments, and there are many others, if taken out of context, can lead to some pretty unhelpful conclusions.
But as we study the world of Corinth, as archaeology, inscriptions, and social history fill in the background, the other voice becomes faintly audible.
We begin to hear about hunger, about status anxiety, and spiritual pride. We hear about economic disparity, the fear of losing honour.
And then, rising above it all, we hear Paul calling them back to the cross, back to love, back to unity.
1 Corinthians is not a treatise on appropriate hairstyles, or on the gift of tongues, or about celibacy. It is about what happens when the Gospel confronts a competitive, socially and economically unequal, anxious society. It is about whether the church will mirror Corinth or embody a new creation.
So, yes, we may be listening to one side of a conversation, but if we listen carefully enough, we will hear something more.
We will hear the steady heartbeat of pastoral love calling a divided people to become what they already are: One body with one Lord who meets them at one table.
And perhaps, in a world still marked by inequality, scarcity, pride, and division, we may discover that Corinth is not nearly as far away as we imagine.
Shall we pray?
© Johannes W H van der Bijl 2026