Chapter 1

  Paul, called to be an Apostle of Christ Jesus through the will of God--and our brother Sosthenes:

  To the Church of God in Corinth, men and women consecrated in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, with all in every place who call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ-- their Lord as well as ours.

  May grace and peace be granted to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

  I thank my God continually on your behalf for the grace of God bestowed on you in Christ Jesus--

  that you have been so richly blessed in Him, with readiness of speech and fulness of knowledge.

  Thus my testimony as to the Christ has been confirmed in your experience,

  so that there is no gift of God in which you consciously come short while patiently waiting for the reappearing of our Lord Jesus Christ,

  who will also keep you stedfast to the very End, so that you will be free from reproach on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.

  God is ever true to His promises, and it was by Him that you were, one and all, called into fellowship with his Son Jesus Christ, our Lord.

  Now I entreat you, brethren, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, to cultivate a spirit of harmony--all of you--and that there be no divisions among you, but rather a perfect union through your having one mind and one judgement.

  For I have been distinctly informed, my brethren, about you by Chloe's people, that there are dissensions among you.

  What I mean is that each of you is a partisan. One man says 'I belong to Paul;' another 'I belong to Apollos;' a third 'I belong to Peter;' a fourth 'I belong to Christ.'

  Is the Christ in fragments? Is it Paul who was crucified on your behalf? Or were you baptized to be Paul's adherents?

  I thank God that I did not baptize any of you except Crispus and Gaius--

  for fear people should say that you were baptized to be my adherents.

  I did, however, baptize Stephanas' household also: but I do not think that I baptized any one else.

  Christ did not send me to baptize, but to proclaim the Good News; and not in merely wise words--lest the Cross of Christ should be deprived of its power.

  For the Message of the Cross is foolishness to those who are on the way to perdition, but it is the power of God to those whom He is saving.

  For so it stands written, 'I will exhibit the nothingness of the wisdom of the wise, and the intelligence of the intelligent I will bring to nought.'

  Where is your wise man? Where your expounder of the Law? Where your investigator of the questions of this present age? Has not God shown the world's wisdom to be utter foolishness?

  For after the world by its wisdom--as God in His wisdom had ordained--had failed to gain the knowledge of God, God was pleased, by the apparent foolishness of the Message which we preach, to save those who accepted it.

  Seeing that Jews demand miracles, and Greeks go in search of wisdom,

  while we proclaim a Christ who has been crucified--to the Jews a stumbling-block, to Gentiles foolishness,

  but to those who have received the Call, whether Jews or Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.

  Because that which the world deems foolish in God is wiser than men's wisdom, and that which it deems feeble in God is mightier than men's might.

  For consider, brethren, God's call to you. Not many who are wise with merely human wisdom, not many of position and influence, not many of noble birth have been called.

  But God has chosen the things which the world regards as foolish, in order to put its wise men to shame; and God has chosen the things which the world regards as destitute of influence, in order to put its powerful things to shame;

  and the things which the world regards as base, and those which it sets utterly at nought--things that have no existence--God has chosen in order to reduce to nothing things that do exist;

  to prevent any mortal man from boasting in the presence of God.

  But you--and it is all God's doing--are in Christ Jesus: He has become for us a wisdom which is from God, consisting of righteousness and sanctification and deliverance;

  in order that it may be as Scripture says, 'He who boasts--let his boast be in the Lord.'