CORINTHIANS, EPISTLES TO THE, two canonical epistles of the New Testament, addressed by St Paul to the church which he had planted with his own hand at Corinth, during an eighteen months' residence there in the years A.D. 50 and 51. From an incidental allusion in the former of these, it seems that this was not the first epistle that St Paul had addressed to the Corinthian converts, and two letters still exist in an Armenian version, which, by Whiston and others, have been regarded as furnishing authentically the apostle's previous correspondence. These letters are now, however, universally regarded as spurious. In the note appended to the common version, the first epistle is said to have been written from Philippi, but from internal evidence we know it to have been written from Ephesus, and this is confirmed by the note appended to the Vatican MS. and the Coptic version. The date of its composition is generally assigned to a period very shortly before Easter A.D. 58. In writing it the apostle aimed chiefly at repressing the unseemly manifestations of party-spirit which had been betrayed by some of the leading members of the church, and also at giving them decisive answers on certain points of duty, in regard to which the practice of the Corinthian converts had been somewhat influenced by the characteristic immorality of the place. Of the parties then prevailing in the church there are generally distinguished four; but it is not to be supposed that these existed in open schism, and from the allusions to them in Clement's epistle, it seems that they were all of short duration. The party claiming Apollos as their leader differed from those who still held by Paul, in their peculiar fondness for the Alexandrian forms of thought; the Petrine section differed from both in still clinging to the shadows of Judaism; while the Christine party seems to have sprung from a reaction in favour of unity, which, however, in the troubled state of the church only caused farther division. The second epistle was written shortly after the first, and despatched from Phi-
lipp in that same year. It is in the main apologetic, and as a piece of oratory has been admired by the rhetoricians of every age. The authenticity of both epistles has scarcely ever been questioned.