First Letter to the Corinthians 1

¹ I, Paul, appointed by God to be an apostle, together with brother Sosthenes, send greetings

² to the church of God in Corinth, to the holy people of Jesus Christ, who are called to take their place among all the saints everywhere who pray to our Lord Jesus Christ; for he is their Lord no less than ours.

³ May God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ send you grace and peace.

⁴ I never stop thanking God for all the graces you have received through Jesus Christ.

⁵ I thank him that you have been enriched in so many ways, especially in your teachers and preachers;

⁶ the witness to Christ has indeed been strong among you

⁷ so that you will not be without any of the gifts of the Spirit while you are waiting for our Lord Jesus Christ to be revealed;

⁸ and he will keep you steady and without blame until the last day, the day of our Lord Jesus Christ,

⁹ because God by calling you has joined you to his Son, Jesus Christ; and God is faithful.

¹⁰ All the same, I do appeal to you, brothers, for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ, to make up the differences between you, and instead of disagreeing among yourselves, to be united again in your belief and practice.

¹¹ From what Chloe’s people have been telling me, my dear brothers, it is clear that there are serious differences among you.

¹² What I mean are all these slogans that you have, like: ‘I am for Paul’, ‘I am for Apollos’, ‘I am for Cephas'[*a], ‘I am for Christ’.

¹³ Has Christ been parcelled out? Was it Paul that was crucified for you? Were you baptised in the name of Paul?

¹⁴ I am thankful that I never baptised any of you after Crispus and Gaius

¹⁵ so none of you can say he was baptised in my name.

¹⁶ Then there was the family of Stephanas, of course, that I baptised too, but no one else as far as I can remember.

¹⁷ For Christ did not send me to baptise, but to preach the Good News, and not to preach that in the terms of philosophy[*b] in which the crucifixion of Christ cannot be expressed.

¹⁸ The language of the cross may be illogical to those who are not on the way to salvation, but those of us who are on the way see it as God’s power to save.

¹⁹ As scripture says: I shall destroy the wisdom of the wise and bring to nothing all the learning of the learned.

²⁰ Where are the philosophers now? Where are the scribes?[*c] Where are any of our thinkers today? Do you see now how God has shown up the foolishness of human wisdom?

²¹ If it was God’s wisdom that human wisdom should not know God, it was because God wanted to save those who have faith through the foolishness of the message that we preach.

²² And so, while the Jews demand miracles and the Greeks look for wisdom,

²³ here are we preaching a crucified Christ; to the Jews an obstacle that they cannot get over, to the pagans madness,

²⁴ but to those who have been called, whether they are Jews or Greeks, a Christ who is the power and the wisdom of God.

²⁵ For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.

²⁶ Take yourselves for instance, brothers, at the time when you were called: how many of you were wise in the ordinary sense of the word, how many were influential people, or came from noble families?

²⁷ No, it was to shame the wise that God chose what is foolish by human reckoning, and to shame what is strong that he chose what is weak by human reckoning;

²⁸ those whom the world thinks common and contemptible are the ones that God has chosen – those who are nothing at all to show up those who are everything.

²⁹ The human race has nothing to boast about to God,

³⁰ but you, God has made members of Christ Jesus and by God’s doing he has become our wisdom, and our virtue, and our holiness, and our freedom.

³¹ As scripture says: if anyone wants to boast, let him boast about the Lord.[*d]