The wealthy, fractious port that produced two of Paul's most personal letters
Corinth sat on the narrow isthmus connecting mainland Greece to the Peloponnese, with one harbor on each sea. Cargo from Italy unloaded at Lechaeum on the west and was hauled four miles overland to Cenchreae on the east — saving ships the dangerous trip around Cape Malea. The result was a city stupidly rich in trade, full of sailors and merchants from every Mediterranean port, and famous in the Greek world for moral chaos. The verb *korinthiazomai* — "to act like a Corinthian" — was Athenian slang for sexual debauchery.
Rome destroyed the old Greek Corinth in 146 BC. Julius Caesar refounded it as a Roman colony in 44 BC and settled it with freedmen — former slaves now legally Roman citizens, hustling for status in a city without inherited aristocracy. By Paul's day Corinth had perhaps 100,000 residents, a famous temple of Aphrodite up on the Acrocorinth, the biennial Isthmian Games (rival to the Olympics), and a churning mix of Jewish synagogues, mystery cults, philosophical schools, and the imperial cult. It was loud, ambitious, and spiritually promiscuous — exactly the kind of place where the gospel either takes root or gets ground up.
Paul's eighteen months and the church that nearly tore itself apart
Paul reached Corinth on his second missionary journey (Acts 18), discouraged from a difficult run in Athens. He found Aquila and Priscilla, tentmakers like himself, recently expelled from Rome by Claudius. He preached in the synagogue every Sabbath until the Jewish community pushed back; then he moved next door to the house of Titius Justus, taking the synagogue ruler Crispus with him. The Lord told Paul in a vision, "Do not be afraid… for I have many in this city who are my people" (Acts 18:9-10) — and Paul stayed eighteen months. That's longer than he spent in any other city he founded.
The church that resulted was a mess. The Corinthian letters preserve it: divisions over which apostle people followed, lawsuits between believers, a man living with his stepmother, fights over whether to eat meat sacrificed to idols, chaotic worship in which everyone spoke at once, an arrogance about spiritual gifts that turned services into competitions, and a slow-motion revolt against Paul himself by a group of "super-apostles" who arrived later promising a more impressive Christianity. 1 Corinthians is Paul's attempt to fix it; 2 Corinthians is what he wrote after the first letter only half-worked.
Why the Corinthian letters became foundational
The letters are unembarrassed. Paul has to teach the most basic things — that the Lord's Supper is not a private meal, that prophecy is for the building up of the body, that resurrection is not optional. And precisely because the Corinthians were so theologically scrambled, Paul writes some of the clearest pages in the New Testament: the resurrection chapter (1 Corinthians 15), the body-of-Christ metaphor (1 Corinthians 12), the marriage and singleness teaching (1 Corinthians 7), and the chapter on love (1 Corinthians 13) — which is not a wedding poem but a rebuke of a church that had gifts without love.
2 Corinthians is more personal. Paul defends his ministry against detractors, writes about a thorn in the flesh, about the treasure in jars of clay, about being struck down but not destroyed. It is the most autobiographical letter he wrote, and it is what we have because the Corinthians made him fight for them.
The city itself faded over the centuries. The ruins of the Greek and Roman city are still visible — the temple of Apollo's columns, the bema where Paul stood before Gallio, the road to the harbor — but it is the letters that kept Corinth alive in the Christian memory.
*Related entries: Paul, Priscilla and Aquila, Antioch, Philippi, Damascus Road, Athens, The Council of Jerusalem.*