1 Corinthians 1:1

1 Corinthians 1:1-9. Salutation and Introduction

1. called to be an apostle of Jesus Christ through the will of God St Paul here as elsewhere asserts his Divine commission. This was necessary because a party had arisen which was inclined to dispute it. We read in the Epistle to the Galatians of the -false brethren unawares brought in" whose doctrine he was compelled to withstand and to assert the Divine origin of his own; and in the second Epistle to the Corinthians we find many allusions to those who rejected his authority, as in ch. 1 Corinthians 3:1; 1 Corinthians 5:12 1 Corinthians 10:2; 1 Corinthians 10:7; 1 Corinthians 10:10, and the whole of Chapter s 11 and 12. They no doubt laid much stress on the fact that St Paul had not received the call of Christ as the Twelve had (see notes on ch. 9), and also on the different complexion his doctrine, though the same, necessarily bore, from the fact that it was mainly addressed to Gentiles and not to Jews. It is worthy of remark that in the two Epistles to the Thessalonians, written before the controversy arose, no such clause is found, while after the commencement of the dispute the words or some equivalent to them are only absent from one epistle addressed to a church.

Sosthenes our brother Literally, the brother. He was probably not the Sosthenes mentioned in Acts 18:17, who was an opponent of the faith, but some one well known to the churches in the Apostolic age.