What happened in Corinth in the Bible?

Corinth controlled the narrow isthmus that joins mainland Greece to the Peloponnese. It had two ports, Lechaion on one gulf and Cenchreae on the other, and goods and travelers crossed between them rather than sail around the stormy southern capes. Above the city rose the steep rock of Acrocorinth.

The old Greek city was destroyed by the Roman general Mummius in 146 BC. About a century later, in 44 BC, Julius Caesar refounded it as a Roman colony, and by Paul's day it was the capital of the province of Achaia: new, prosperous, ambitious, full of freed slaves, merchants, soldiers and newcomers from everywhere. It also hosted the Isthmian Games nearby, which may explain Paul's images of runners and prizes (1 Corinthians 9:24).

Corinth had a reputation for loose living, sometimes summed up by an ancient claim that a thousand temple prostitutes served Aphrodite there. That claim comes from the geographer Strabo and describes the older Greek city; many scholars doubt it applied to Paul's Roman Corinth. Even so, the letters show a church surrounded by competing gods, status-seeking and sexual freedom.

Tentmakers and a new church. Paul arrived from Athens and found Aquila and Priscilla, a Jewish couple recently forced out of Rome by the emperor Claudius. They shared his trade, so he lived and worked with them (Acts 18:1). He reasoned in the synagogue every Sabbath, and when opposition grew he moved next door to the house of Titius Justus. Crispus, the leader of the synagogue, believed with his whole household, along with many Corinthians (Acts 18:7).

Do not be afraid. One night the Lord told Paul in a vision to keep speaking, because he had many people in that city. Paul stayed a year and a half (Acts 18:9).

Before Gallio. Opponents brought Paul before Gallio, the proconsul of Achaia, at the judgment seat. Gallio refused to hear what he saw as a dispute over words and names within Judaism and drove them away (Acts 18:12). It was, in effect, a ruling that left the new movement free to keep meeting.

The letters. Paul's relationship with this church was close and stormy. He wrote to them more than once, and two of his letters survive. First Corinthians addresses rival factions (1 Corinthians 1:10), lawsuits, sexual morality, marriage, food offered to idols, the Lord's Supper, spiritual gifts, the famous portrait of love (1 Corinthians 13:4) and the resurrection of the body. Second Corinthians is Paul's most personal letter, defending his ministry and learning that God's power is made perfect in weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9). Most scholars think Paul also wrote Romans from Corinth, commending Phoebe of nearby Cenchreae and sending greetings from Gaius and from Erastus, the city treasurer (Romans 16:1, Romans 16:23-24).

The American School of Classical Studies at Athens has excavated Corinth since 1896, one of the longest-running digs in the Mediterranean. Visitors see the Roman forum, shops, fountains such as Peirene, and the columns of the sixth-century BC temple of Apollo, one of the few buildings that survived the city's destruction.

In the middle of the forum stands a raised stone platform that excavators identified as the bema, the speaker's platform where officials addressed the public. Acts uses that same Greek word for the place where Paul stood before Gallio. Many think this is the spot, which is reasonable, though the platform's precise use and date are still discussed.

The most important find for dating Paul comes from Delphi, not Corinth. Fragments of a letter from Claudius, carved in stone and published in the early twentieth century, name Gallio as proconsul. The letter dates to about AD 52, and because proconsuls normally served one year, it places Gallio in Corinth around AD 51–52. That makes Paul's eighteen months one of the firmest dates in his life, and an anchor for the whole chronology of his journeys.

In 1929 excavators found a Latin paving inscription near the theatre saying that Erastus laid the pavement at his own expense in return for his office as aedile, a city magistrate. Some scholars identify him with the Erastus of Romans 16; others note that the inscription's date and the different titles make that uncertain. It is a tantalizing possibility, not a settled fact.

Corinth is a comfort to every imperfect church. The believers there were gifted, generous and enthusiastic, and also divided, proud and confused. Paul did not give up on them. He called them saints and corrected them in the same breath, and some of the most treasured pages of the New Testament were written to this difficult congregation.

The city also shows how God builds his church through ordinary people: a couple running a tent business, a household opening its doors next to the synagogue, a frightened apostle told simply to keep speaking. Today the village of Ancient Corinth sits beside the ruins, a few kilometers from the modern city, and the stones of the forum still remind visitors that the gospel was first lived out in a real, messy city.