1 Corinthians 15:3-5

“For I delivered unto you, first of all, that which I also received: how that Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures, 4. and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day, according to the Scriptures, 5. and that He was seen of Cephas, then of the Twelve.”

The for bears, not on either of the secondary ideas of the previous verses: If you hold firmly, or: By which you are saved, but on the principal idea: “I declare to you what I preached to you.” Paul means: “The points which I put in the first rank, when I preached the gospel to you, are the following.” He had laid down as the basis of Christian teaching, in the same way as he does here, the facts of the Lord's death and resurrection. We need not, with Chrysostom and Hofmann, give the word first the temporal meaning; it is the fundamental importance of those one or two points which Paul wishes to characterize by the term.

It was formerly held that the word I received referred, as in 1 Corinthians 11:23, to a direct communication from the Lord. Modern commentators rather think that the reference here is to a human tradition, to the narrative of the Twelve as witnesses to facts. And indeed it should be remarked that the apostle does not here say ἐγώ, I [emphatic], and that he does not add, as in the passage quoted, of the Lord. He evidently knew the facts of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus in the same way as the whole Church, by their public notoriety and the narratives of the apostles. If Paul afterwards speaks specially of two appearances which were granted to Peter and James, this agrees well with the fact that it was with these two men he had conferred personally during his first stay at Jerusalem, after his conversion (Galatians 1:19). But, true as this view is, perhaps it is incomplete. In the gospel preached by Paul at Corinth, there was not only, as we have seen, the historical side of facts; his preaching contained a higher element, the understanding of those facts as expressed in the words: for our sins, and: according to the Scriptures. And on such points Paul had received, as he says, Galatians 1:12, the teaching of the Lord Himself whereby alone the external facts related in apostolical tradition had become to him soteriological facts; I think, therefore, that he designedly used the verb παρέλαβον, I received, without regimen, leaving it in all its generality, that it might embrace both human tradition and Divine teaching.

The καί, also, expresses the exact conformity between the deposit committed to Paul and his conveying of it to the Corinthians.

The regimen: for our sins, has special importance, because it is the Divine meaning of the fact, as he will afterwards explain it, 1 Corinthians 15:17-18. It is quite clear that in this phrase the ὑπέρ does not signify: in place of, but: in behalf of: “In behalf of our sins to expiate them.” This phrase is found nowhere else in Paul; but comp. Hebrews 9:7; Hebrews 10:12.

The regimen: according to the Scriptures, has its importance: the Divine testimony of the Scriptures is designedly placed before all the apostolic testimonies which are about to follow. The Scriptures had said the event would happen; the witnesses declare it has happened.