1 Corinthians 1:23 - Exposition

Christ crucified; r ather perhaps, a crucified Messiah. It was only by slow degrees that the title "the Christ," i.e. the Anointed, the Messiah, passed into the name Christ. A stumbling block. They had for centuries been looking for a regal and victorious Messiah, who should exalt their special privileges. The notion of a suffering and humiliated Messiah, who reduced them to the level of all God's other children, was to them "a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence" ( Romans 9:33 ; comp. Isaiah 8:14 ). These two verses, translated into Syriac, furnish a marked play on words ( miscol, stumbling block; mashcal, folly; seed, cross); and some have seen in this a sign that St. Paul thought in Syriac. Unto the Greeks; rather, unto Gentiles; א , A, B, C, I). Unto the Jews… unto the Greeks. Both alike had failed. The Jew had not attained ease of conscience or moral perfectness; the Greek had. not unriddled the secret of philosophy; yet both alike rejected the peace and the enlightenment which they had professed to seek. Foolishness . The accent of profound contempt is discernible in all the early allusions of Greeks and Romans to Christianity. The only epithets which they could find for it were "execrable," "malefic," "depraved," "damnable" (Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny, etc.). The milder term is "excessive superstition." The heroic constancy of martyrs appeared even to M. Aurelius only under the aspect of a "bare obstinacy." The word used to express the scorn of the Athenian philosophers for St. Paul's "strange doctrine" is one of the coarsest disdain ( ἐχλεύαζον ) , and they called him "a seed pecker" ( Acts 17:18 , Acts 17:32 ), i.e. a mere picker up of "learning's crumbs."