A. The resurrection of Christ (15:1–11)
A. The resurrection of Christ (15:1–11)
1. Despite most recent translations, Paul does not speak of reminding his friends of the gospel he had preached, for his verb (gnōrizō) means ‘make known’ (cf. Moffatt, ‘I would have you know’). The word is itself a gentle rebuke; some Corinthians were evidently far from appreciating what the gospel meant. Yet they had received it (the aorist points to a decisive act), and they took their stand on it (cf. 2 Cor. 1:24). Clearly they recognized that it is fundamental, even if they did not understand it fully.
2. By this gospel is rather ‘through which’ (dia), the preposition drawing attention to the gospel as the means Christ uses to bring about salvation. You are saved is present continuous, ‘you are being saved’. There is a sense in which salvation is once for all (as in ‘received’, v. 1), and another sense in which it is progressive (cf. 1:18; 2 Cor. 2:15). We do not exhaust the meaning of salvation by our experience when we first believe. Salvation goes on from strength to strength and from glory to glory. The word order is unusual: ‘by what word I preached the gospel to you if you hold fast’, and this poses some problems. Two main solutions have been suggested, (a) The construction is conditional, with the ‘if’ clause coming late in order to give emphasis to what precedes. The meaning would then be: ‘if you hold fast with what terms I preached the gospel to you’. This is not a very natural Greek construction (though far from impossible); also against it is the fact that it makes Paul demand that they hold fast, not only to the gospel, but to the actual words in which he presented it (cf. Moffatt, ‘provided you adhere to my statement of it’). (b) We could connect ‘by what word I preached to you’ with ‘I make known’ (v. 1). This would give the sense, ‘I make known to you … in what terms I preached …’ The difficulty with this is the following ‘if you hold (it) fast’, for Paul is not telling them something ‘if they hold it fast’. He is telling them whatever their attitude. Perhaps ‘if you hold fast’ is a kind of parenthesis, or it may attach to ‘you are being saved’ (as Goodspeed, RSV, etc.). Or the conditional may be seen as fulfilled, ‘if you hold fast (as you do)’. The construction is difficult, but the second solution is to be preferred. Otherwise, Paul goes on, you have believed in vain, where the last word, eikē, may be understood as ‘without due consideration, in a haphazard manner’ (BAGD). If people profess to believe the gospel, but have not given due consideration to what that implies and what it demands, they do not really trust Christ. Their belief is groundless and empty. They lack saving faith.
3. The derivative nature of the gospel is stressed. Paul did not originate the message he gave them. He simply passed on what he had received (for these verbs see notes on 11:23). This is the accepted language for the handing on of tradition. What follows is a very early summary of the church’s traditional teaching. Paul is not giving us some views he has worked out for himself; he is passing on what had been told him. This is the kērygma, the proclamation, the gospel preached by the early church. Paul sees it as of first importance. Without this message we do not have the essential Christian position. The first point in it is that Christ died for our sins. That is to say, his death was an atoning death. The cross is at the heart of the gospel. According to the Scriptures shows that this was no afterthought. The saving death of Christ was foretold long before in sacred Scripture. It was not death as such, but Christ’s death as a saving event that the Scripture foretold and the church proclaimed. Paul does not say what scriptural passages he has in mind, but they will be such as Isaiah 53.
4. In such a brief statement it is a little surprising to find this reference to Christ’s burial (cf. the Apostles’ Creed). The early church was in no doubt about the reality of the death of Jesus, and the fact of burial is evidence of this (it is mentioned in all four Gospels). While Paul does not explicitly mention the empty tomb, these words are the necessary prelude to it and seem to imply it. From the burial Paul moves to the resurrection on the third day and the burial has implications for this, too; ‘if he was buried, the resurrection must have been the reanimation of a corpse’ (Barrett). He was raised (egēgertai) is passive, which puts stress (as usually in the New Testament) on the activity of the Father in raising the Son (cf. v. 15). And it is perfect, which points to the permanent state; it ‘sets forth with the utmost possible emphasis the abiding results of the event’ (Prolegomena, p. 137). Christ continues in the character of the risen Lord. The perfect tense is used in this way six more times in this chapter (vv. 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 20), and once only in all the rest of the New Testament. It is likely that according to the Scriptures is to be taken with was raised, rather than with on the third day (so, for example, Metzger, JTS, n.s., viii, 1957, pp. 118–123). There is little Old Testament evidence for a rising on the third day (though some suggest Hos. 6:2, or Jonah 1:17), but Isaiah 53:10–12 may fairly be held to prophesy the resurrection (it speaks of activity after death; cf. the use of Ps. 16:10 in early preaching).
5–7. Paul gives a list of the resurrection appearances. It is not an exhaustive list, and we may speculate, for example, on the reason for the omission of all the appearances to the women. The apostle begins with an appearance to Peter. Actually he says ‘Cephas’, the Aramaic name, but NIV alters this to the Greek name (which Paul uses nowhere except in Gal. 2:7f.). This appearance is mentioned again only in Luke 24:34 (cf. Mark 16:7). We may conjecture that the Lord, in his mercy, was concerned to give assurance of forgiveness to that servant of his who had three times denied him. The Twelve (here only in Paul) is clearly a general term, for Judas was not there, and, if the reference is to the appearance on the evening of Easter Day (Luke 24:36ff.; John 20:19ff.), Thomas was absent also. The appearance to more than five hundred of the brothers is mentioned here only (unless, as is probable, it is that referred to in Matt. 28:16ff.). It is obviously important, for on no other occasion could such a large number of people testify to the fact of the resurrection. Paul’s insistence that most of them were still alive shows the confidence with which he could appeal to their testimony. They could be interrogated and the facts elicited. Notice the beautiful way he refers to those who have died. Death, which is an antagonist no-one can withstand and which was viewed with horror by most people in the ancient world, has become for the Christian nothing more than sleep (see further, TNTC on 1 Thess. 4:13f.).
The second name given in this list is James (linked with Cephas again in Gal. 1:18f.). It is not certain which James is meant, but most agree that it is James the Lord’s brother. It is not unlikely that it was this appearance that led to his conversion and through him to that of the other brothers. They did not believe in Jesus during his ministry (John 7:5), but as early as Acts 1:14 we find them among the believers. What else accounts for the sudden change? All the apostles puts emphasis on all (BDF 275 (5)); not one was missing. This may refer to an appearance like that in John 20:26ff., but more probably points to the appearance at the time of the ascension (Acts 1:1ff.). This muster of witnesses indicates the importance Paul attached to the resurrection of Jesus. He is about to show its consequences for Christian faith, and he lays the foundation by showing how well based is belief in it. He does not give a complete list of witnesses, but he gives enough to show that the fact is extremely well attested. So reliable is the evidence that it must be accepted, and Paul can go on from there.
8. The apostle puts his vision on the road to Damascus on the same level as the other resurrection appearances. He sees himself as the last in the line of those who have seen the Lord. He calls himself one abnormally born (to ektrōmati, ‘the abortion’, ‘the miscarriage’). This strong and unexpected term has been interpreted in more ways than one. Some point to the fact that the Twelve had been with Jesus for years, whereas Paul was born into the apostolic band suddenly, without the period of gestation that might have been expected. The emphasis then would be on the abnormality of the process. Others point out that the word is ‘an offensive word’ (Héring), and see it as a term of abuse (cf. BAGD). Paul was not a handsome man (2 Cor. 10:10), and critics may have combined an insult to his personal appearance with a criticism of his doctrine of free grace, by saying that, ‘so far from being born again, Paul was an abortion’ (Barclay). This is supported by the fact that Paul goes on to refer to his unworthiness. To me also comes last in the Greek with a certain emphasis. Even to Paul, the abortion, Christ appeared.
9. The emphatic personal pronoun I again draws attention to the greatness and the condescension of Christ. The risen Lord appeared even to Paul, the least of the apostles. This is not a reference to gradation within the apostolate, for elsewhere he can say, ‘I do not think I am in the least inferior to those “super-apostles” ’ (2 Cor. 11:5). In this spirit he could resist even Peter (Gal. 2:11). What Paul means is that his character as a persecutor had made him the least of them all; indeed, he was not worthy to be an apostle at all. Paul holds firmly to two things. The one is the high dignity attaching to his position as an apostle, as we see from several passages in his writings (cf. ch. 9). The apostolate is the highest office in the church, and Paul is an apostle in the fullest sense, because Christ called him to it. The other is his profound sense of personal unworthiness. He is the chief of sinners (1 Tim. 1:15). He is not worthy to be an apostle, for he has persecuted that church that is the church of God.
10. Paul freely ascribes all that he has done in Christian work to the grace of God. It was grace alone that transformed him from a persecutor into a zealous preacher. He would not appear before the Corinthians as an apostle were it not for that grace, and what it had done in him. Far from being without effect (kenē, ‘empty’, ‘without content’), it had caused him to work harder than all of them. His word for worked (kopiaō) means ‘labour to the point of weariness’. Deissmann holds that the expression ‘came originally from the joyful pride of the skilled craftsman’ (LAE, p. 313). Paul stresses that he had toiled hard in the discharge of his apostolate. He does not say that he has accomplished more, but that he has worked harder than others. Than all of them could mean ‘more than all of them put together’, or ‘more than any one of them’. As he is magnifying the grace of God it is perhaps more likely that the former is his meaning, and as far as our information goes this was indeed the case. Though his beginnings had been so unpromising, yet the grace of God had enabled him to accomplish a prodigious volume of work. This might be interpreted as reflecting credit on Paul, so he immediately adds, yet not I. It was not the man, but the grace of God that was effective. He speaks of this grace as with him, rather than ‘in’ him or the like. This way of putting it almost makes grace a fellow-labourer, working alongside him, and thus emphasizes that the credit does not belong to Paul.
11. The upshot of all this is that there is but one gospel, whoever might preach it. Paul has stressed that he received the gospel, he did not originate it (v. 3). He has listed some of the more important points in the apostolic message, in particular the strong evidence for the resurrection. Now he is able to say that this is the common message of the preachers (cf. Knox, ‘That is our preaching, mine or theirs as you will’). We preach is the present continuous tense; this is the way both Paul and the other apostles habitually preach. This is the authentic gospel, that which all the apostles make it their habit to proclaim. This is what you believed reminds the Corinthians that this was the basis of their faith. It was this message and not another that they had believed when they became Christians. Anything else is an innovation.