1 Corinthians 1:1

“Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by call, through the will of God, and Sosthenes the brother.”

The addresses of Paul's letters are generally drawn on the type of the ancient address: N. to N., greeting! Comp. Acts 23:26. Paul does not confine himself to translating this received form into Christian language; he modifies it each time according to the interests which occupy his heart, and with a view to the state of the Church to which he writes. To his name he adds the title in virtue of which he is now addressing his readers; it is as an apostle that he writes them. The special mark of this office is the call directly received from Christ Himself. Paul puts this mark in relief by the epithet κλητός, called; a qualifying adjective, and not a participle (κληθείς), as if the apostle had meant, called to be an apostle. The meaning is, “an apostle in virtue of a call.” He means that he has not taken this office at his own hand, but that he has received it by a Divine act. I do not think that there is here a polemical intention against parties who might deny his apostleship: what would this assertion prove? He means rather to place the whole contents of the letter which is to follow under the warrant of Him who confided to him his mission. We must read, according to several ancient Mjj.: of Christ Jesus, that is to say, “of the Messiah who is Jesus;” and not of Jesus Christ (Jesus who is the Messiah), according to the received text. The technical form has been mechanically substituted for the less ordinary by the copyists. By this complement, Paul may designate Christ as the Author of the call, or perhaps as the Master whose property he became by that call. As the regimen following ascribes the call to God, the second meaning is to be preferred. The words, through the will of God, refer to all the providential circumstances of Paul's birth and education, whereby his apostolic mission had been prepared for; and especially the extraordinary act which completed this preparation, and triumphed over his resistance; all which Paul sums up in those expressions of the Epistle to the Galatians (1 Corinthians 1:15): “But when it pleased God who separated me from my mother's womb, and called me by His grace....” It is with a feeling of profound humiliation that he emphasizes so expressly this idea of the will of God; for he feels that it needed unfathomable mercy to snatch him from the obstinate rebellion to which he was giving himself up. But at the same time he is powerfully strengthened in relation to himself and to the Church, by the assurance that what he is, he is by the will of God. But at the same time he is powerfully strengthened, as regards himself and the Church, by the assurance that it is God who has willed that he should be what he is.

Paul joins with his name that of a Christian, the brother Sosthenes. Reuss regards this man merely as an obscure person who no doubt acted as secretary to the apostle. I believe that there are here two errors; the place in our verse ascribed to Sosthenes is wholly different from that which the apostle gives to a simple secretary, as, for example, Tertius (Romans 16:22). Paul uses particular delicacy in his way of mentioning those whom he associates with him in the composition of his letters. In his two Epistles addressed to the Church of Thessalonica, of which Silas and Timothy had been the founders along with him, he mentions them absolutely as his equals, except in so far as he puts himself in the first place; and the first person plural, which he frequently uses, again and again applies, as in 1 Corinthians 1:2, to the three taken together. It is nearly the same in Philippians 1:1, where Timothy's name is closely associated in the address with that of Paul, no doubt because Timothy had laboured with him in founding that Church. There is a marked difference between this form and that of the Epistle to the Colossians, where Timothy's name is certainly associated with Paul's, but where it is more profoundly distinguished from it by an appendix added to the latter, in the first place, then by the title of apostle given to Paul and the name brother to Timothy. This difference arises from the fact that neither the one nor the other having founded the Church, Paul writes here in his character of apostle to the Gentiles, which Timothy does not share. In the letters to the Romans and Ephesians, whom Paul addresses more expressly still as the apostle of the Gentile world, he associates no name with his own. The position given to Sosthenes in our address is therefore somewhat like the place of Timothy in the Epistles to the Philippians and Colossians. Paul makes this brother share to a certain extent in the composition and responsibility of the letter. Sosthenes is perhaps his secretary; but he is more than that: he must be a man enjoying high consideration among the Corinthians, a fellow-labourer with the apostle who, as well as Timothy (2 Corinthians 1:1), co-operated in the evangelization of Corinth and Achaia. If it is so, it is probable that we here find the same person who, as chief of the synagogue of Corinth, had played a part in the scene of Paul's appearance before Gallio (Acts 18:17). It was he who, after Paul's liberation, as the account of the Acts says, “was beaten by all ” (the words the Greeks are a gloss), consequently by Jews and Greeks, without Gallio's taking any concern. He took probably a doubtful attitude in this affair, later his position was more decided (see Hofmann). The place assigned him here is consequently, as Heinrici says, a place of honour; it reminds us of that ascribed by Paul to those mentioned in the address of the Epistle to the Galatians (1 Corinthians 1:2): “and all the brethren who are with me.” Assuredly those brethren were not all his secretaries, but all, in name of the Christian brotherhood, exhorted the Galatians to take to heart the warnings which Paul addressed to them as their spiritual father; so it is that the credit which Sosthenes has with the Church must be added to the superior authority of the apostle. Clement of Alexandria, according to the account of Eusebius (H. E. 1.12), made Sosthenes one of the seventy disciples: the statement is without value.

From the author, Paul passes to the readers: