First Letter to the Corinthians 15

¹ Brothers, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, the gospel that you received and in which you are firmly established;

² because the gospel will save you only if you keep believing exactly what I preached to you – believing anything else will not lead to anything.

³ Well then, in the first place, I taught you what I had been taught myself, namely that Christ died for our sins, in accordance with the scriptures;

⁴ that he was buried; and that he was raised to life on the third day, in accordance with the scriptures;

⁵ that he appeared first to Cephas and secondly to the Twelve.

⁶ Next he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died;

⁷ then he appeared to James, and then to all the apostles;

⁸ and last of all he appeared to me too; it was as though I was born when no one expected it.

⁹ I am the least of the apostles; in fact, since I persecuted the Church of God, I hardly deserve the name apostle;

¹⁰ but by God’s grace that is what I am, and the grace that he gave me has not been fruitless. On the contrary, I, or rather the grace of God that is with me, have worked harder than any of the others;

¹¹ but what matters is that I preach what they preach, and this is what you all believed.

¹² Now if Christ raised from the dead is what has been preached, how can some of you be saying that there is no resurrection of the dead?

¹³ If there is no resurrection of the dead, Christ himself cannot have been raised,

¹⁴ and if Christ has not been raised then our preaching is useless and your believing it is useless;

¹⁵ indeed, we are shown up as witnesses who have committed perjury before God, because we swore in evidence before God that he had raised Christ to life.

¹⁶ For if the dead are not raised, Christ has not been raised,

¹⁷ and if Christ has not been raised, you are still in your sins.

¹⁸ And what is more serious, all who have died in Christ have perished.

¹⁹ If our hope in Christ has been for this life only, we are the most unfortunate of all people.

²⁰ But Christ has in fact been raised from the dead, the first-fruits of all who have fallen asleep.

²¹ Death came through one man and in the same way the resurrection of the dead has come through one man.

²² Just as all men die in Adam, so all men will be brought to life in Christ;

²³ but all of them in their proper order: Christ as the first-fruits and then, after the coming of Christ, those who belong to him.

²⁴ After that will come the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father, having done away with every sovereignty, authority and power.

²⁵ For he must be king until he has put all his enemies under his feet[*a]

²⁶ and the last of the enemies to be destroyed is death, for everything is to be put under his feet.

²⁷ – Though when it is said that everything is subjected, this clearly cannot include the One who subjected everything to him.

²⁸ And when everything is subjected to him, then the Son himself will be subject in his turn to the One who subjected all things to him, so that God may be all in all.

²⁹ If this were not true, what do people hope to gain by being baptised for the dead? If the dead are not ever going to be raised, why be baptised on their behalf?

³⁰ What about ourselves? Why are we living under a constant threat?

³¹ I face death every day, brothers, and I can swear it by the pride that I take in you in Christ Jesus our Lord.

³² If my motives were only human ones, what good would it do me to fight the wild animals at Ephesus?

³³ You say: Let us eat and drink today; tomorrow we shall be dead.[*b] You must stop being led astray: ‘Bad friends ruin the noblest people’.[*c]

³⁴ Come to your senses, behave properly, and leave sin alone; there are some of you who seem not to know God at all; you should be ashamed.

³⁵ Someone may ask, ‘How are dead people raised, and what sort of body do they have when they come back?’

³⁶ They are stupid questions. Whatever you sow in the ground has to die before it is given new life

³⁷ and the thing that you sow is not what is going to come; you sow a bare grain, say of wheat or something like that,

³⁸ and then God gives it the sort of body that he has chosen: each sort of seed gets its own sort of body.

³⁹ Everything that is flesh is not the same flesh: there is human flesh, animals’ flesh, the flesh of birds and the flesh of fish.

⁴⁰ Then there are heavenly bodies and there are earthly bodies; but the heavenly bodies have a beauty of their own and the earthly bodies a different one.

⁴¹ The sun has its brightness, the moon a different brightness, and the stars a different brightness, and the stars differ from each other in brightness.

⁴² It is the same with the resurrection of the dead: the thing that is sown is perishable but what is raised is imperishable;

⁴³ the thing that is sown is contemptible but what is raised is glorious; the thing that is sown is weak but what is raised is powerful;

⁴⁴ when it is sown it embodies the soul, when it is raised it embodies the spirit. If the soul has its own embodiment, so does the spirit have its own embodiment.

⁴⁵ The first man, Adam, as scripture says, became a living soul; but the last Adam has become a life-giving spirit.

⁴⁶ That is, first the one with the soul, not the spirit, and after that, the one with the spirit.

⁴⁷ The first man, being from the earth, is earthly by nature; the second man is from heaven.

⁴⁸ As this earthly man was, so are we on earth; and as the heavenly man is, so are we in heaven.

⁴⁹ And we, who have been modelled on the earthly man, will be modelled on the heavenly man.

⁵⁰ Or else, brothers, put it this way: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God: and the perishable cannot inherit what lasts for ever.

⁵¹ I will tell you something that has been secret: that we are not all going to die, but we shall all be changed.

⁵² This will be instantaneous, in the twinkling of an eye, when the last trumpet sounds. It will sound, and the dead will be raised, imperishable, and we shall be changed as well,

⁵³ because our present perishable nature must put on imperishability and this mortal nature must put on immortality.

⁵⁴ When this perishable nature has put on imperishability, and when this mortal nature has put on immortality, then the words of scripture will come true: Death is swallowed up in victory.

⁵⁵ Death, where is your victory? Death, where is your sting?[*d] .

⁵⁶ Now the sting of death is sin, and sin gets its power from the Law.

⁵⁷ So let us thank God for giving us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

⁵⁸ Never give in then, my dear brothers, never admit defeat; keep on working at the Lord’s work always, knowing that, in the Lord, you cannot be labouring in vain.