This article re-thinks the development of Paul’s thought between 1 and 2 Corinthians. Instead of the traditional developmental interpretation of Paul that emphasizes the differences between 1 Cor 15:35–57 and 2 Cor 5:1–5, I argue that a discernable development is to be found between 1 Cor 12:13 and 2 Cor 4:7–12. I demonstrate significant parallels between the two latter texts in terms of topic, argumentation, and the conceptual structure on which Paul’s argumentation is built. Based on the parallels, I argue that 1 Cor 12:13 conceptually allows for the innovative idea of “ongoing transformation,” which is formulated in 2 Cor 3:18, and provides the conceptual structure of “double body-containers” in 2 Cor 4:7–12 to expound this new idea. In the context of 2 Corinthians, responding to opponents’ challenge against the apostle’s physical weakness in sufferings, Paul goes on to develop the idea of ongoing transformation further by transforming mortality. Mortality becomes a form of human participation in God’s cosmic war and is considered constructive to the ongoing transformation of the inner person and the complete transformation in the future.

Paul's epistemology was famously mapped onto his eschatology by J. Louis Martyn, but it must be mapped also onto his ecclesiology. For Paul, knowing is bound always and indissolubly to living with others. To understand how Paul would have us know things, then, we must focus not on knowledge as such, but on epistemic practices in ecclesial communities. Whereas the Corinthians’ use of wisdom and knowledge made for fragmentation and dissolution in the body of Christ (1 Cor 1–4; 8–10), Paul would have practices with knowledge instantiate communion and care for one another, as is proper for Christ's body. Integral to theological knowing is a sense of what and whom theology is for, a sense being critically explored in recent evaluations of theological education.

This article defends the salience of situating Christ worship in the context of urban neighbourhoods and identifies some historical problems in conceptualising belonging at that level of society, akin to similar work on other levels of society such as the household and polis. An ekklēsia or collegium is, like all neighbourhood structures, capable of fostering or delimiting social interactions among neighbours who identify differently. A case study of 1 Cor 14.22–5 illustrates how Paul's model ekklēsia functioned in the context of the neighbourhood, and considers the impact of adding the ekklēsia to the street on which it was located.

During the first and second centuries of the Common Era the Christ cult spread from rural Palestine to the large cities of the Empire. This article draws insights from social network theory and from epidemiology, arguing that the Christ cult was not a simple contagion, spread by simple contact, but a ‘complex contagion’ that required persuasion, especially because adherence to the Christ cult entailed potential social costs and demanded high signalling costs.

1 Cor 15.28 is often regarded as problematic for ‘divine Christology’ in Paul, because the Son's final submission to the Father is held to tell against his ontological equality with the Father. The current article argues that this conclusion involves a category mistake. The ‘grammar’ of Paul's Christology requires that we distinguish between what Paul says of and on the basis of Christ's divinity, and what Paul says of and on the basis of Christ's humanity, a strategy sometimes called ‘partitive exegesis’. The article evaluates recent solutions to this problem, warrants partitive exegesis from within 1 Corinthians, and offers a partitive reading of 1 Cor 15.28: the Son submits to the Father as the final act of an office he holds as a human, in order to perfect the human vocation of vicegerency over creation.

In 1 Cor 11.17–34, Paul attempts to correct the practice of a communal meal in Corinth. He notes that consumption of this meal without discernment of ‘the body’ has had disastrous consequences within the community of Christ-followers: ‘For this reason, many among you are weak and sick, and quite a few are dying’ (11.30). This essay offers a physical interpretation of 1 Cor 11.30, contending that Paul presents the bodies of both the ‘have-nots’ and those who shame them as suffering because of the practice of the Lord's Supper, the former from dietary deprivation and the latter from overconsumption.

This article explores the origins of the conjectural emendation on 1 Cor 14.33b–35, first made in 1863 by Jan Willem Straatman. It shows that Straatman attributes the instruction on women's silence to Jewish influence and bases his view on a reconstruction of early Christianity in which Paul and his Gentile message were opposed by Jewish adversaries. This anti-Jewish tendency persisted in subsequent scholarship and has continued to characterise the understanding of this passage into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

This article examines Paul's use of scriptural allusion in 1 Cor 11.7–12, highlighting underappreciated echoes of Zerubbabel's discourse in 1 Esdras 4.13–41. Paul puts Genesis 1, Genesis 2 and 1 Esdras 4 into conversation to support what may strike many today as a tension-fraught position. He assumes a patriarchal gender hierarchy (1 Cor 11.7–9) but also affirms woman's ‘authority’ over her head, albeit tendentiously (11.10). Rather than resolving the resulting tension, Paul uses additional, counterbalancing allusions to redirect attention away from the question of status, towards recognition of interdependence ‘in the Lord’ and shared origin in God (11.11–12).

This article asks how the New Comedy of Menander might have influenced Paul's theological rhetoric in 1 Cor 5–15. An intertextual reading of Paul's letter against the backdrop of Menander's Samia reveals a number of shared topics, ethical concerns and dramatic characteristics. Paul's citation of Menander's Thais in 1 Cor 15.33 is part of this larger strategy to frame the struggles in Corinth within the ambit of Greek household ‘situation comedy’. Like Menander, Paul hybridises tragic and comic motifs throughout his epistle, inflecting the comedy of the Christ narrative with tragic examples of human misapprehension in this plea for ecclesial reconciliation.

While the locus classicus for early Christian arguments concerning resurrection of the flesh is Paul's first Corinthian letter, the statement in 15.50 that ‘flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God’ complicates early Christian understandings of resurrection and its form. Such explicit denial of fleshly inheritance and resurrection within Paul's writings leads to widely conflicting interpretations of this Corinthian passage. Consequently, early Christian writers such as Irenaeus, Tertullian and Augustine engaged other New Testament texts such as John 11 in order to subvert the claim of 1 Cor 15.50 and develop their argument for fleshly resurrection.

Distinctive Lutheran and Reformed theologies of the relationship between Word and Spirit influenced the history of Protestant exegesis of 1 Corinthians 2:13, which states, ‘we speak not in words taught by human wisdom, but in those taught by the Spirit’. The interpretation of the time of the Spirit's teaching (past or present) and the identity of the words taught (scripture or preaching/teaching) are seen to depend upon and develop these respective Lutheran and Reformed theologies. The essay concludes with a brief evaluation of the adequacy of these interpretations in light of the divine economy and some ecumenical considerations.

The article reopens the dossier of the sources, parallels and rewritings of 1 Cor 2.9, a saying that Paul attributes to a written source, when other sources put it into Jesus' mouth (e.g. GosThom 17). The state of research shows that the hypothesis of an oral source is generally preferred but an accurate study of 1 Clem 34.8, a parallel too often neglected, supports the presence of a written source that existed before 1 Cor 2.9. GosJud 47.10–13 will help to understand the attribution of the saying to Jesus. Finally, the article takes into account the well-known parallel in Islamic tradition, a ḥadīth qudsī.

In 1 Cor 1.12 Paul summarises a report he has received about divisions in the Corinthian congregation and attributes four so-called slogans to the Corinthians: ‘I am of Paul; I am of Apollos; I am of Cephas; I am of Christ’. Exegetes have puzzled especially over the final slogan, ‘I am of Christ’. This paper argues that this phrase was written as Paul's own claim against the divided Corinthians and belongs to no sectarian ‘Christ-group’. I attempt to demonstrate that this reading is grammatically possible, contextually consistent and therefore exegetically preferable.