1 Corinthians 15:11

Paul founded the church in Corinth himself (Acts 18), and the resurrection was part of what he preached there from the beginning. Corinth was a Roman provincial capital in Achaia, a busy port known for its wealth, its schools of philosophy and its loose morals. Greek thought, and Platonism in particular, often treated the body as a lesser thing and a prison for the soul, so the raising of a body sounded absurd or unwelcome to many. That thinking had reached the church, where some were saying that there is no resurrection of the dead (1 Corinthians 15:12).

Paul has just finished teaching on worship and spiritual gifts in chapters 11 to 14, and he now turns to this. Before he argues anything, he makes known again the gospel he first brought them. “Declare” is gnōrízō, to make known. The word for gospel, euangélion, means a good message or glad tidings, and the verb behind “preached”, euangelízō, means to bring that good news. He calls his readers “brethren” (adelphós), and the “Moreover” (dé) that opens the verse carries the letter on to its next subject. By starting here Paul stands on ground that he and they share. The resurrection belongs to the gospel they have already accepted, so those who question it are questioning the message that saved them.

This is how Paul works throughout the letter. He answers the church’s troubles by bringing it back to the message of Christ crucified and risen, as he did with its divisions (1 Corinthians 1:17–18). The gospel he preaches is one he received from Christ himself (Galatians 1:11–12), and he warns the Galatians against turning to any other (Galatians 1:6–9).

The rest of the chapter builds on these opening verses. Having set down the facts, Paul shows that if Christ is risen then the dead in Christ must rise, and he goes on to Christ’s victory over death itself (1 Corinthians 15:12–28) and to what this means for the way we live.

“By which also ye are saved.” The gospel is the means God uses to save. The verb sṓzō means to deliver, preserve or heal, and here it is rescue from the penalty and power of sin into eternal life. Paul says the same in Romans, where the gospel is the power of God unto salvation (Romans 1:16), and where the one who confesses the Lord Jesus and believes that God raised him from the dead shall be saved (Romans 10:9–10).

Two conditions follow. “If ye keep in memory” translates katéchō, a word built from katá and échō that means to hold down, to hold fast or to keep firm possession of something. Paul is speaking of a firm grip on the gospel that lasts through doubt and temptation, and recalling the words is only the beginning of it. Hebrews speaks the same way of holding fast our confidence to the end (Hebrews 3:6).

“Unless ye have believed in vain” uses eikē, which means without cause, idly or to no purpose. A faith is in vain when it comes to nothing, either because it lets go or because it is cut loose from the full truth of the gospel. The second danger is where Paul is heading. If Christ is still in the grave, then the Corinthians’ faith is empty and they are still in their sins (1 Corinthians 15:14–19). James says something close when he calls faith without works dead (James 2:17).

Holding fast to the gospel means holding fast to a person. Jesus is “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6), he calls us to abide in him (John 15:4), and he is “the author and finisher of our faith” (Hebrews 12:2), so our perseverance rests on his finished work and his risen life.

“For” (gár) introduces the reason for what Paul has just said, and what follows is the content of the gospel itself. He describes his part with two verbs that belong together. “Delivered” is paradídōmi, to hand over, entrust or transmit, and “received” is paralambánō, to receive from another. Among the Jews of that day this pair of words was used for passing on sacred teaching, and Paul uses the same pair when he hands on the Lord’s Supper (1 Corinthians 11:23). Paul presents himself as a steward of the message. He received it from the Lord, and it agrees with what the other apostles preach, as verse 11 will say. The Corinthians “received” it from Paul in verse 1 with this same verb, so the gospel passed from Christ to his apostle and from the apostle to the church.

“First of all” is en prōtois, “among the first things”, and it marks what follows as of first importance. Everything else Paul taught in Corinth rests on these few statements: Christ died for our sins, he was buried, he rose again the third day, and he was seen.

Christós is the Greek word for the Messiah, the Anointed One whom God promised. “Died” is apothnḗskō, the plain word for dying, and Paul means a real, bodily death. “For our sins” joins hypér (“on behalf of”, “for the sake of”), hēmōn (“our”) and hamartía (“sin”), here in the plural, which takes in the whole number of our offences. Christ’s death had a purpose. He died on our behalf and bore the penalty our sins deserved, as Isaiah foretold when he wrote of the servant wounded for our transgressions (Isaiah 53:5–6), and as Paul writes when he says that God made him to be sin for us (2 Corinthians 5:21).

The Bible’s teaching on the atonement meets in this one clause. All have sinned, and God set forth Christ as a propitiation through faith in his blood, so that God is both just and the justifier of the one who believes in Jesus (Romans 3:23–26). The death of Christ is how God shows his love toward us, because Christ died for us while we were still sinners (Romans 5:8). It had to be a death, since remission of sins comes only through the shedding of blood (Hebrews 9:22). The sacrifices of the Old Testament pointed forward to him. Salvation is therefore a gift, received through faith in what Christ finished on the cross.

The burial is part of the gospel because it settles that Jesus truly died. Tháptō means to bury with funeral rites. A burial was the public act that confirmed a death, and Jesus was laid in a tomb before witnesses, which answers any idea that he only fainted or was taken down from the cross alive. A real resurrection requires a real death. The burial also prepares for the empty tomb, and it fulfils Isaiah’s word that the servant would be “with the rich in his death” (Isaiah 53:9).

“He rose again” is the centre of the gospel. The verb egeírō means to waken or rouse, from sleep, from sickness or from death, and it is the word used of Christ being raised by God. He came out of death into glorified life, and he remains risen. The resurrection is the Father’s seal on the cross: Christ was raised for our justification (Romans 4:25). God’s mighty power raised him and set him at his own right hand, far above every other power (Ephesians 1:19–21), and the risen Lord says that all power in heaven and in earth is given to him (Matthew 28:18). Through his resurrection God has given us new birth into a lively hope (1 Peter 1:3).

Paul now names those who saw the risen Christ. Among the Jews, the Greeks and the Romans alike, a matter was established by the testimony of eyewitnesses, and the law of Moses asked for two or three (Deuteronomy 19:15). Paul, trained as a Pharisee, brings hundreds. The verb in each of verses 5 to 8 is optánomai, the ordinary word for appearing or being seen. Jesus showed himself alive to people who could say so, as Luke also records when he writes of “many infallible proofs” (Acts 1:3).

The list answered both of the outlooks around the church. To Greek minds a risen body was a foreign idea, and Jewish hope looked for a general resurrection at the end of time. Paul sets before both an event that had already happened to one man and was seen by people who could be named.

Verse 9 gives the reason for that hard word. “Least” is eláchistos, a superlative that means the smallest of all. “Meet” is hikanós, sufficient or fit, so Paul is saying that he is unfit to carry the name of apostle. He gives one reason: “I persecuted the church of God.” Diṓkō means to pursue or chase, and so to persecute. Paul had hunted believers, and he had a part in the stoning of Stephen (Acts 7:58). He calls the people he attacked “the church of God”, which shows that he knows he had set himself against God.

Paul speaks this way in other letters. He says that the ministry was given to him by grace, though he is less than the least of all saints (Ephesians 3:7–8), and he calls himself the chief of sinners, who obtained mercy so that Christ might show in him a pattern of his longsuffering (1 Timothy 1:12–16). His past shows the size of the mercy, for where sin abounded, grace did much more abound (Romans 5:20–21).

The “But” that opens verse 10 sets what Paul is now against what he was. Cháris, grace, is God’s undeserved favour and his working in a heart and a life, and the word “grace” stands three times in verse 10. Grace forgave the persecutor, made him an apostle, and went on strengthening him for the work. “I am” is eimí, the plain verb “to be”, and the sentence is a humble statement of fact: all that Paul now is, he is by God’s gift.

“Not in vain” uses kenós, empty or without effect. This is a different Greek word from the “in vain” of verse 2, eikē, though the English phrase is the same in both verses. God’s grace to Paul produced something. He “laboured more abundantly than they all”, and the journeys, hardships and sufferings he lists elsewhere bear that out (2 Corinthians 11:23–28). Greeks and Romans prized achievement, eloquence and standing, and Paul immediately hands the credit back to God: “yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me.”

Scripture holds these two truths together everywhere. We are saved by grace through faith as God’s gift, and we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works (Ephesians 2:8–10). We work out our salvation because God works in us to will and to do (Philippians 2:12–13). Our sufficiency is of God (2 Corinthians 3:5), our gifts differ according to the grace given to us (Romans 12:6), and Paul labours by Christ’s working in him (Colossians 1:29). This grace comes through Jesus Christ, of whose fulness we have all received (John 1:16–17). By him we have access by faith into the grace in which we stand (Romans 5:2), and of him Paul says, “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me” (Philippians 4:13).

Verse 11 draws the conclusion. “I” is egṓ, a pronoun that Greek writes out when it is stressed, and Paul sets himself beside “they”, the apostles who were before him. Whether the Corinthians heard it from the least of the apostles or from Peter, James and the twelve, they heard one message. “Preach” is kērýssō, to proclaim publicly as a herald does. It is a different verb from the “preached” of verse 1, which spoke of bringing good news. “Believed” is pisteúō, to hold something as true and to entrust oneself to it. The little word “so” (houtō, “in this way”) comes back in the second half of the verse and points to the gospel of verses 3 and 4. What the apostles proclaim and what the Corinthians believed are the same thing.

The gospel therefore stands above every preacher. Jude calls it the faith once delivered to the saints (Jude 1:3), and Paul reminds the Ephesians that there is one Lord, one faith, one baptism (Ephesians 4:4–6). Salvation is found in this Christ alone, for his is the only name under heaven by which we must be saved (Acts 4:12). The Corinthians’ first faith was sound, and Paul is calling them to stay with it.

Because these things happened, a great deal follows. By the resurrection Jesus was declared to be the Son of God with power (Romans 1:3–4). He is at the right hand of God, where he makes intercession for us (Romans 8:34), and he is able to save to the uttermost those who come to God by him, because he ever lives (Hebrews 7:25). The Spirit of him who raised Jesus dwells in believers and will give life to our mortal bodies (Romans 8:11). We were buried with Christ, we walk in newness of life, and we shall share the likeness of his resurrection (Romans 6:4–5). He will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body (Philippians 3:20–21).

Jesus said that he is the resurrection and the life (John 11:25–26), and Isaiah’s promise that death will be swallowed up in victory is his to keep (Isaiah 25:8). He is the firstfruits, and those who are his will follow at his coming (1 Corinthians 15:20–23).

This passage gives us a gospel made of events. Christ died, was buried, rose and was seen, and people who could be named and questioned said that they had seen him. Our faith rests on that, which is steadier ground than our feelings on any given day. When doubt comes, the passage sends us back to what was delivered first of all.

It also shows the Lord’s way with people who have failed him. He came to Peter after the denial, to James after years of unbelief, and to Paul in the middle of his persecution, and he made each of them a witness. Grace reached a past like Paul’s, and the same grace that forgave him set him to work.

“By the grace of God I am what I am” is a sentence any believer can say. It leaves room for honest sorrow over what we were and honest labour in what we are given to do, and it gives the credit to God. For those who grieve, there is a quiet word in verse 6. The believers who have died are “fallen asleep”, and the one who rose on the third day is the firstfruits of their waking.