Open English Translation 1COR Introduction

Introduction

This is Paul’s first letter to the believers in Corinth that we have in our Bibles, but could easily have been his second letter to them. We deduce this from his reference to other letters, e.g., see https://www.GotQuestions.org/how-many-letters-Corinthians.html, but we don’t have copies of them.

In this letter from Paul to the believers in Corinth, he wrote about his time preaching in Ephesus. He wrote this in order to help with problems experienced by various groups of believers that he founded there in Corinth. Corinth was the mother city of province of Achaia and Achaia was a province of Rome. At that time, Corinth was a large city that Greeks, Romans, and Jews all lived in, and because it was at the edge of the ocean, many buyers and sellers travelled there to board ships. So the city became famous because of its wealth, and many religions thrived there. There was also a lot of sexual immorality there as well as other ancient traditions. Paul lived there for almost two years in order to preach, and many people believed (Acts 18).

After around three years had passed while Paul was there in Ephesus preaching, he received a letter from the believers in Corinth (1 Cor. 7:1). Again he heard about the persecution of the believers and of other problems that faced the assembly of believers. In this letter, he advised them about those, and stressed to need to removal sexual offenders from their assembly. Then he answered questions concerning marriage, widows, spiritual gifts, and the dead coming back to life.

In chapter 13, it tells how love is an amazing gift from God to his people, in fact that’s the overall theme of this document.

It’s helpful to understand that this letter (and most Biblical documents) were dictated to scribes (who didn’t have word processors) so in terms of sentence structure, the discourses are often not edited or placed in their time sequences more correctly as we would do with modern documents, but rather we notice a lot of long, rambling, run-on sentences (like this one) which we sometimes break into shorter sentences to help our readers, but try not to do it too often as it tends to remove the connections between the thoughts and can even lead to the bad habit of people quoting verses out of the context in which they were written.

This is still a very early look into the unfinished text of the Open English Translation of the Bible. Please double-check the text in advance before using in public.