This Epistle discloses the interior life of an apostolic Church ; hence its surpassing historical interest. We must not, indeed, apply its data without qualification to contemporary Christian societies, even those of Gentile origin. The Corinthian Church presented material of uncommon richness, but intractable to the founder’s hand. Its turbulence and party heat are unparalleled in the N.T. records. But while the Church life here portrayed was exceptional in some features, and Paul’s Church policy at Corinth may have differed from that pursued elsewhere, this Epistle is peculiarly full in its teaching on the nature and rights of the Church, and in the light it throws upon the conditions under which the first Gentile- Christian communities were moulded. Chaps. xii. and xiii. are the true centre of the Epistle. The very formlessness of this Church, its rudimentary and protoplasmic state, reveals the essence of the Christian society, its substratum and vital tissue, as these can hardly be seen in a more developed and furnished condition. The Apostle Paul is contending for the bare life of the Church of God in Corinth.
Corinth now became the advanced post and gateway for Chris- tianity in its westward march. The xew Corinth, in which Paul laboured, dates from the year 46 B.c., when the city was refounded by Julius Casar under the name Colonia $ulia Corinthus (or Laus Fulit Corinthus). Just a century earlier the old Corinth had been razed to the ground by Lucius Mummius, upon the defeat of the Achzan league which, with Corinth for its fortress, made a last despairing effort to retrieve the liberties of Greece. Corinth and Carthage fell and rose again simultaneously, marking the epochs at which republican Rome completed the destruction of the old world and imperial Rome began the construction of the new. The fame of ancient Corinth, reaching back to heroic times (see the Iliad, ii., 570 ; Pindar, Olymp., 13)—where “ the sweetly breathing Muse” and ‘“‘death-dealing Ares’’ flourished side by side—and her later prowess as the bulwark of the Peloponnese and the maritime rival of Athens, were traditions with little interest or meaning for Paul and his disciples. The geographical position of Corinth gave to it enduring importance, and explains the fact that on its restoration the city sprang at once into the foremost rank. Corinth occupies one of the finest sites in Europe. With the Acrocorinthus (nearly 2,000 feet high) and the Oneion range shielding it on the south, it commands the narrow plain of the isthmus, and looks down, eastwards and westwards, upon the Saronic and Corinthian gulfs, which furnished the main artery of commerce between the A=gean and the Euxine . seas on the one hand, and the Western Mediterranean upon the