1 Corinthians 3:4

The two examples the apostle gives in this verse are intended to prove that what he blames in the divisions which have been formed, is not any hostility they may have to his person, but the fact of those divisions themselves. And hence he puts forward his own party and the nearest to his own, that of Apollos. It follows that Paul starts from the fact of the most intimate harmony between him and Apollos, and that every attempt to apply to the ministry and party of this evangelist the foregoing polemic against worldly wisdom should be abandoned.

Instead of the received reading, Are ye not carnal? which is a surprise, as simply repeating the question of 1 Corinthians 3:3, there is read in most of the Mjj., Are ye not men, or rather, Are ye not (human) beings? A question which seems stranger still. We must undoubtedly explain it by the preceding expression: walking according to man. “Are ye not falling back from the higher state to which faith had raised you, into the state of the natural man? Are ye not becoming again what ye were before being in Christ?” Meyer quotes as an analogous form the word of the Anabasis: ἄνθρωπός εἰμι, “I am a man,” meaning: I am only a weak and fallible man. It is in the same sense that it is said, Genesis 6:3, “They are but flesh.” Hofmann rather sees in this question an appeal to the feeling of their dignity as men. But the question thus understood, to have a logical connection with the preceding proposition: “While one saith...,” would require to be put thus, “Are ye men?” The οὐκ or οὐχί is superfluous in this sense.

The placing of the μέν would lead us to suppose that he who pronounces the first watchword is the same person as pronounces the second (δέ); there is here an inaccuracy common in the classic style (see Meyer). This μέν must be logically put to the account of Paul in explaining the fact, not to the account of the interlocutor whom he brings on the stage.

expresses the result of the whole foregoing development, and forms the transition to the following passage. In order to attack the spirit of rivalry with effect, and the divisions which had invaded the life of the Church, Paul had gone to the very root of the evil: the false way of regarding the gospel itself. He had shown that the preaching of the gospel was, not the exposition of a new religious speculation, but the good news of a fact, and that a fact absurd in the eyes of reason: the salvation of humanity by a Crucified One; and now he deduces therefrom the true notion of the Christian ministry and of the part it has to play within the Church.

Holsten and others think that the apostle turns at this point to the partisans of Apollos to upbraid their infatuation for this teacher. This we think is an error arising from a misunderstanding of 1 Corinthians 3:4-5. We shall see that this special intention is foreign to the true sense of the following passage.