1 Corinthians

18 Episodes

1 Corinthians is an occasional Pauline letter addressed to a fractured urban assembly and structured around disputes Paul is trying to manage from a distance. More than a systematic treatise, it preserves Paul's attempts to regulate sex, worship, authority, status, and communal order in a community whose conflicts expose just how unstable early Christian practice still was.

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Why this book matters

1 Corinthians returns on the show because it is one of the clearest places to watch Paul trying to impose order on an unruly early Christian community. The hosts keep coming back to it for disputes over sex, celibacy, worship, prophecy, tongues, communal discipline, and the body’s place in moral reasoning. It is a letter where Paul’s rhetoric is often vivid, improvised, and situational, which makes it especially useful for showing how far early Christianity still was from a settled doctrinal system.

It also matters because 1 Corinthians sits at the center of recurring arguments about interpolation, patriarchy, and later Christian ethics. The show repeatedly uses it to discuss whether 14:34-35 is a later insertion, how chapter 7 has been used to rationalize coercive sexual ethics, and how Paul’s handling of cases like 1 Corinthians 5 reveals a world of competing afterlife ideas and community boundaries. The letter keeps coming up whenever the hosts want a compact case study in how contested, unstable, and negotiable New Testament discourse really is.

Where to start

Start here for the strongest listening on 1 Corinthians.

Quotes from the Data

“We see this in 1 Corinthians 7, where Paul's like, yeah, it's better to be celibate. But if you can't hang, if you can't hack celibacy, you know, go ahead and get married. And, you know, it's better to marry than to burn with passion. And that way you can have your occasional, as I like to call it— I have some friends who get annoyed with my characterization of Paul's sexual ethic this way. I don't think it's inaccurate, though. Go ahead and have your occasional prophylactic passionless sex to keep down the urges, right?”

Dan McClellan Episode 148

“So we're looking at First Corinthians 14, and there are a couple passages in here that are infamous or, or famous or infamous. Not just famous, it's infamous, depending on. On your outlook that have to do with. With women speaking in church. ... To begin, we just got done a few chapters earlier with Paul explaining that, hey, when women are prophesying in church, they just need to have their hair covered.”

Dan McClellan Episode 60

“There are manuscripts where this, this interjection, these two verses don't appear right here. They appear down after verse 40 at the very end of the chapter. So we have what, what I like to call textual instability. ... Which means it's not clear where exactly this was intended to go, which is frequently a sign that it is a late addition.”

Dan McClellan Episode 60

“Where it says the husband's body is not his own, the wife's body is not her own. They should render unto each other due benevolence, which is basically a way to say you owe your spouse their conjugal rights. And so this person commented, people have no right to arbitrarily refuse intimacy in marriage. Parentheses, 1 Corinthians 7:1-5, close parentheses. ... This is apologetics for marital rape, right? This is insisting that there's no such thing as marital rape because a wife's body is not her own in marriage and that her husband has a right to her body. And that is so abominable.”

Dan McClellan Episode 133

All episodes

Every episode currently tagged with 1 Corinthians.