Introduction

A Wealthy City, and a Church in Disorder

Theophylact’s Argument to First Corinthians opens not with Paul but with the city itself: Corinth, he writes, “abounded in wealth, and in wisdom, and in the other advantages,” and it was there, by his account, that Christ appeared to Paul and told him not to be silent, “for I have much people in this city.” Where a city thrives the devil works differently than where it suffers, and Theophylact traces the disorders of the young church to exactly that success: factions gathering around rival teachers who could afford to patronize them, a case of gross immorality tolerated and even admired for its display of sophistication, believers suing one another before pagan judges, some despising the weak in the matter of food offered to idols, and “others thought great things of themselves over the spiritual gifts.” The letter Paul writes to answer all of this is, on Theophylact’s reading, the most varied and the most occasional of the Pauline epistles—a running response to a genuine mess, handled one problem at a time.

The Method of a Lemma Commentary

Because the letter itself moves from topic to topic, Theophylact’s exposition follows suit rather than imposing an outline of its own. He proceeds by lemma: a short run of Paul’s own words is set down, and Theophylact unfolds it—a sentence, sometimes only a clause—before moving to the next. Where Chrysostom had given the Corinthians forty-four homilies, several of them ranging widely before returning to the text, Theophylact keeps to the verse in front of him, drawing on Chrysostom’s substance while giving it a much tighter compass. The result reads less like a treatise than like a patient teacher looking over a student’s shoulder, answering each difficulty as it arises rather than building toward one.

This close-quarters method suits a letter that is itself close-quarters. Paul does not develop a single argument across sixteen chapters, as he does in Romans; he answers a letter he had received from the Corinthians and reports he had heard from the household of Chloe, taking up marriage, food offered to idols, order in worship, the resurrection, and much else in turn. Theophylact’s commentary, following him topic by topic, gives the reader the same experience Paul’s first audience had: a series of concrete answers to concrete troubles, each one bearing on the life of a particular congregation rather than on doctrine considered in the abstract.

Two Passages Above the Rest: The Supper and the Resurrection

Two moments in the letter draw from Theophylact his most careful attention. The first is Paul’s correction of the disorders at the Lord’s Supper in chapter eleven. Theophylact reads the warning against eating and drinking “unworthily” as bearing directly on what is received: the one who approaches carelessly is guilty “not because of the nature of the mysteries—for these are life-giving—but because of the unworthiness of the one approaching,” and to fail to discern “the body of the Lord” is to fail to consider the greatness of what is actually set before the communicant. The sicknesses and untimely deaths among the Corinthians that Paul mentions are read as the real, present consequence of that carelessness—a passage taken with full seriousness about what is on the table, not as figure or memorial only.

The second is the long argument for the resurrection of the dead in chapter fifteen, which Theophylact calls “the chief point of our faith,” since if there is no resurrection Christ himself was not raised, and the whole of the Gospel collapses with it. He notes that the Corinthians’ difficulty here was a Greek difficulty—“the Greek-minded sages would have accepted anything rather than the resurrection”—and follows Paul as he grounds the hope not in speculation but in what the Corinthians “already believed,” the resurrection of Christ himself, before turning to the nature of the body that is to be raised. Together these two chapters give the commentary its theological center of gravity, set within a letter that otherwise moves briskly from one practical matter to the next.

How to Read This Commentary

A reader coming to First Corinthians for the first time will find it easiest to read a topic of Paul’s letter through in full before turning to Theophylact’s comment on it, since the commentary’s strength is in the particular rather than the panoramic. Because Theophylact so often explains a puzzling turn of phrase by supplying the situation behind it—who exactly is being addressed, what custom or complaint lies behind a given verse—the commentary rewards a reader willing to slow down at exactly the points where the letter itself seems most occasional and least like formal doctrine. It is there, more than anywhere else in Paul’s correspondence, that Theophylact’s patient, verse-by-verse method earns its keep.