6. The date and place of origin
6. The date and place of origin
The place of origin is indicated by Paul’s statement, ‘I will stay on at Ephesus until Pentecost’ (16:8). But just when he wrote it is not immediately obvious.
Paul paid a brief visit to Ephesus immediately after he had established the church at Corinth (Acts 18:18–21), but it seems impossible to hold that our Epistle was written during this stay. There is no indication that anything was seriously amiss in the church when Paul left it, but by the time 1 Corinthians was penned much had happened. We must allow time for this. Even when trouble began it was the ‘previous’ letter that was sent off, not 1 Corinthians. Our letter must date from Paul’s later stay in Ephesus, a period of three years (Acts 19; 20:31). If the apostle’s determination to stay till Pentecost means that he left Ephesus then, we must place 1 Corinthians during the last of the three years in that city. It will be towards the beginning rather than at the end of that year, for we must allow time for the events leading up to the writing of 2 Corinthians before the year was up.
One of the important points for the chronology of the New Testament is afforded by the statement in Acts 18:12 that Gallio was proconsul of Achaia while Paul was in Corinth. The meaning appears to be that Gallio came to Corinth during Paul’s time there. An inscription at Delphi gives the decision of the Emperor on a question referred to him by Gallio, and from the date of the inscription it seems that Gallio entered on his office during the early summer of AD 51.37 The impression left by the story in Acts is that Paul left Corinth not long after Gallio’s arrival, though not immediately after it (cf. ‘for some time’, Acts 18:18).
There does not seem to be anything that enables us to date the Epistle with precision. The Gallio date is the last fixed point before its composition. When we allow time for the events in Acts 18:18–19:1 between Paul’s departure from Corinth and his arrival at Ephesus on his third missionary journey, we see that 1 Corinthians would have been written somewhere about the mid fifties.38