Day 8 — The Starting Point: Who Jesus Is, and What He Has Done
Today’s Passage: 1 Corinthians 15:1-8
A man named Paul is writing to a small group of people in Corinth, a busy Greek port city, roughly twenty-five years after the death we read about on Day 6. These people are not strangers to him. He started this group. They have been arguing, and near the end of the letter he stops and takes them back to the beginning.
He is not opening a new subject. He is reminding them of the first thing he said when he arrived, and he is careful to tell them he did not think it up. He received it, and he handed it on. What follows in verses 3 to 5 is short and balanced, the shape of a sentence built to be memorised and repeated out loud. Which means it was already being said before Paul ever wrote it down.
Then he does something unusual for a religious text. He gives a list of names.
As you read, hold this: The Christian message began as a report of something that happened, carried by people who said they had seen it.
Context A letter, a port city, and a list of names
Corinth sat on a narrow strip of land between two seas, and ships and travellers moved through it constantly. A letter like this was read aloud to the whole group at once, which is why Paul writes as though he is speaking to a room. Some of the names would have meant something there. Cephas is the Aramaic name of the man usually called Peter. “The Twelve” were the inner circle Jesus chose and lived with. James was Jesus’ own brother, who had not believed Him while He was alive. “According to the Scriptures” means the Jewish scriptures, writings already centuries old, which that room could check for themselves. And one clause landed on a first reader the way it does not always land on us. Most of those five hundred, Paul says, are still living. Not distant figures. People who could be found and asked.
1 Corinthians 15:1-2 (BSB)
¹ Now, brothers, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, and in which you stand firm. ² By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain.
Gospel is an old word for news. Not advice, not a philosophy, not a set of values to try on. News is either true or it is not. Either something happened or nobody did it.
Then comes a hard clause, worth slowing down over. If you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain. Paul is not saying a person who truly belongs to God might slip out of His hands halfway through. He is saying something plainer and more uncomfortable. It is possible to have believed nothing at all: to hear a message, agree with the sentences, enjoy the sound of them, and go on entirely unchanged. A faith like that does not last, because there was never anything there to last. That is not a threat held over anyone’s head. It is an honest word about how cheap agreement is, and how easily a person fools himself with it.
1 Corinthians 15:3-4 (BSB)
³ For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, ⁴ that He was buried, that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures,
As of first importance. Of everything he could have led with, this came out of his mouth first.
And look what it is made of. Four short claims, no argument attached. He died. He died for our sins. He was buried. He was raised on the third day. Twice he says according to the Scriptures, so none of this was a surprise ending bolted on afterward, and the writings were there to be checked.
For our sins is the phrase carrying the weight. A death on its own is only a death. Paul says this one did something. It dealt with the thing that stands between a person and God.
And then the strange little word in the middle: He was buried. Ideas are not buried. Bodies are. Burial fixes a claim to a place and a day. Somebody carried Him somewhere and put Him down, and other people watched them do it.
Word study "passed on" — paredōka (1 Corinthians 15:3)
Greek: παρέδωκα (paredōka), pronounced par-EH-doh-kah. Strong’s G3860.
In English this sounds casual, one friend mentioning something to another. In Greek it is a formal word, used for handing over a fixed body of teaching intact, the way it was given to you. Paired with “what I received”, it is the standard language for passing on a set form of words. Paul is saying, as plainly as he can, that he is a link in a chain that starts before him.
1 Corinthians 15:5-7 (BSB)
⁵ and that He appeared to Cephas and then to the Twelve. ⁶ After that, He appeared to more than five hundred brothers at once, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. ⁷ Then He appeared to James, then to all the apostles.
Names, one after another, in order.
Notice the bookkeeping in verse 6. More than five hundred, at once, and he knows how many have died since. Fallen asleep was their ordinary way of saying it. Legends do not keep track of which witnesses are still breathing.
And that clause does something to the room it was written for. Corinth was a port, and ships left for the east all the time. Saying most of whom are still living to that room is saying: if you want to test this, they are not hard to find. Go and ask them. He is putting the claim somewhere it can be picked up and handled.
James is in the list too, and that is its own quiet detail. He grew up in the same house as Jesus and did not believe Him. Something changed. Paul does not explain it. He simply puts the name in.
1 Corinthians 15:8 (BSB)
⁸ And last of all He appeared to me also, as to one of untimely birth.
One of untimely birth is not a gentle phrase. It describes something born too soon and wrongly, and no man says it about himself to improve his standing.
The reason sits just underneath the sentence. The man writing this had been an enemy of it. He had gone after the people who said these things and tried to stamp it out. He was not drifting toward belief and then gently persuaded. He was travelling hard the other way when something happened to him on a road, and he never afterward got over being on the list at all. So he puts himself at the end of it, an afterthought, the one with no business being there.
That is how he introduces the centre of everything he believes. Not with a case, not with pressure. A short handed-down sentence, a list of names, and his own name last.
Study notes Witnesses
"God has raised this Jesus to life, to which we are all witnesses." Acts 2:32 (BSB)
This is Peter, speaking out loud in Jerusalem a few weeks afterward, in the city where it happened. The word he reaches for is not believe and not conclude. It is witnesses. From the beginning, the people carrying this said they were reporting, not theorising.
Today’s Decision
Read verses 3 to 8 again, slowly, out loud if you are somewhere you can. Listen to it as what it claims to be: a report with names in it, written down while the people named could still be asked. You do not have to reach a conclusion today. Then say to God, in your own words, what you honestly make of it, including “I do not know whether this is true.” Honesty is not an offence to Him, and pretending is not required.