1 Corinthians — Chapter 8

Authorship & Background

Deep Dive

Setting: Paul is still writing from Ephesus, about AD 53–55, still answering the letter the Corinthians had sent him (7:1). Chapter 7 dealt with their questions on marriage and singleness. Now he turns to a question that touched daily life in a pagan city at every turn: food that had been offered to idols. Chapters 8–10 form one long answer. Chapter 8 lays the foundation, chapter 9 offers Paul's own example of giving up his rights, and chapter 10 warns against idolatry itself and gives practical cases. The same problem from chapters 1–4 sits underneath: a church proud of what it knew and slow to love.

Food Offered to Idols (vv1–13)

• "Now concerning" (v1). The same phrase (peri de) opened the marriage questions (7:1, 25) and returns at 12:1 and 16:1. Paul is working down the Corinthians' list.
• "Food offered to idols" (v1). One Greek word, eidōlothyton, "something sacrificed to an idol." It is a Jewish and Christian word with a sneer in it. A pagan would have said hierothyton, "sacrificed to a god," and in 10:28 Paul has a pagan host use exactly that word.
• Where Corinthians met this food. In a Greek city, sacrifice was part of public and private life. Part of an animal was burned for the god, and much of the rest was eaten by worshipers or went to the priests, and surplus could end up for sale in the meat market (makellon, 10:25). Temples also had dining rooms. The Asclepius shrine at Corinth had several, and surviving papyrus invitations ask guests "to dine at the table of the lord Sarapis" for a birthday or wedding. A Christian who refused every such meal could cut himself off from family, trade guild and city life.
• "We know that 'all of us possess knowledge'" (v1). The ESV puts the words in quotation marks because most scholars think Paul is quoting the Corinthians' own slogan back to them. He agrees with it, up to a point, and then turns it. "Knowledge" (gnōsis) here is religious understanding, insight into spiritual truth. This church prized it (1:5).
• "This 'knowledge' puffs up, but love builds up" (v1). Two pictures. "Puffs up" (physioō) comes from the word for a bellows, the same verb Paul used against their pride in 4:6, 18–19. "Builds up" (oikodomeō) is a builder's word, to put up a house. Knowledge alone inflates the one who has it. Love constructs something lasting in someone else. The love Paul means here will be described in full in chapter 13, where love "is not puffed up" (13:4, KJV wording).
• "He does not yet know as he ought to know" (v2). The man sure of his own knowledge has missed the one thing knowledge is for. Knowing rightly includes knowing its limits and using it in love (13:9–12).
• "If anyone loves God, he is known by God" (v3). Paul reverses the expected line. He does not say "he knows God" but "he is known by God." To be known by God, in biblical language, is to be chosen and owned by him (Gal 4:9; Amos 3:2). The deepest thing about a Christian is not what he knows but that God knows him. One very early papyrus copy has a shorter text, roughly "if anyone loves, he is known," but almost all manuscripts and modern translations read as the ESV does.
• "An idol has no real existence" and "there is no God but one" (v4). Two more slogans in quotation marks, and Paul agrees with both. An idol is "nothing in the world," a carved block with no god behind it. The second slogan is Israel's creed, the Shema: "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one" (Deut 6:4; compare Deut 4:35, 39; Isa 44:6). The KJV reads "none other God but one," but the oldest manuscripts lack "other."
• "So-called gods… many 'gods' and many 'lords'" (v5). Corinth had temples to Apollo, Aphrodite, Asclepius, Demeter and others, plus the cult of the emperor, who was hailed as "lord" (kyrios). Paul's "as indeed there are" does not mean these gods are real. He means they are real in the lives of their worshipers, and in 10:20 he adds that demons stand behind the sacrifices. Idols are nothing, but idolatry is not harmless.
• "One God, the Father… and one Lord, Jesus Christ" (v6). This is the theological heart of the chapter. Paul takes the Shema, whose key words in the Greek Old Testament are "God" (theos) and "Lord" (kyrios), and splits them across the Father and Jesus. Kyrios was the word the Greek Old Testament used for God's own name, the LORD. So Paul is not adding a second god beside the one God. He is confessing Jesus within Israel's one God. Many scholars call this "Christological monotheism," and it comes from roughly twenty years after the crucifixion.
• "From whom… for whom… through whom" (v6). The Father is the source and goal of all things. Jesus is the one "through whom are all things," the agent of creation (John 1:3; Col 1:16; Heb 1:2), and "through whom we exist," the agent of new creation. Romans 11:36 uses the same prepositions of God. The point for the food question is quiet but plain: the meat on the table was made by this one God through this one Lord, not by Apollo.
• "However, not all possess this knowledge" (v7). Here Paul turns. The Corinthian slogan said "all of us possess knowledge." Paul replies that not all do, at least not deep down. The weak are mostly Gentile converts, not Jewish ones: people who had eaten at idol feasts all their lives.
• "Through former association with idols" (v7). The word (synētheia) means habit, the force of long custom. For years these people had eaten sacrificial meat as an act of worship. Their heads may now know that idols are nothing, but their gut still tastes the old religion. When they eat, it feels to them like worship, and so it becomes sin for them. The KJV, following later manuscripts, reads "with conscience of the idol," a difference of a few letters in Greek. The oldest copies have "habit."
• "Their conscience, being weak, is defiled" (v7). "Conscience" (syneidēsis) is the inner sense that judges one's own actions. Paul calls it "weak," not "wrong" in the sense of wicked. It is unsure and easily wounded. To act against it, even in something lawful, stains a person, because he does what he believes is disloyalty to Christ (Rom 14:23).
• "Food will not commend us to God" (v8). The verb (paristēmi) means to present someone, to bring them before. Food will not bring anyone closer to God. Eating does not make the strong more spiritual, and abstaining does not make the weak less so (Rom 14:17). The principle cuts both directions.
• "This right of yours" (v9). "Right" is exousia, freedom or authority to act. The phrase "of yours" has an edge. The strong kept talking about their rights, and chapter 9 will use the same word again and again for the rights Paul himself gave up (9:4–6, 12, 18).
• "A stumbling block to the weak" (v9). A proskomma is something a person trips over. The issue is not that the weak will be annoyed. It is that they will fall.
• "Eating in an idol's temple" (v10). The word (eidōleion) appears only here in the New Testament. Paul has a real scene in mind: a well-informed Christian reclining at a banquet in a temple dining room, perhaps at a guild dinner, watched by a newer believer.
• "Will he not be encouraged" (v10). The verb is oikodomeō again, "built up." It is bitter irony. The strong boasted that their knowledge built others up, and it did, straight into sin. The weak brother is "built up" to do what he still believes is idolatry.
• "This weak person is destroyed, the brother for whom Christ died" (v11). "Destroyed" (apollymi) is a strong word, used elsewhere for perishing (1:18; John 3:16). Readers differ on how far to press it. Many Reformed readers take it as serious spiritual ruin, a fall from faith in practice, without teaching that a true believer finally loses salvation (John 10:28). Many Wesleyan and Arminian readers take it at full strength, as a real danger of final loss. Both agree on Paul's point: Christ thought this brother worth dying for, and the strong will not even give up a dinner for him (Rom 14:15).
• "Wounding their conscience when it is weak" (v12). "Wounding" is typtō, to strike or beat, the word for blows in Jesus' trial (Matt 27:30). Paul pictures a strong man hitting someone who cannot defend himself.
• "You sin against Christ" (v12). Christ so identifies with his people that a blow to them lands on him, as the risen Lord said to Saul, "why are you persecuting me?" (Acts 9:4; Matt 25:40).
• "I will never eat meat" (v13). "Food" earlier is the general word. Here it is kreas, meat, flesh. Paul says he would give up meat altogether, sacrificed or not, rather than make a brother fall. The verb "make stumble" is skandalizō, the word Jesus used for causing "one of these little ones" to sin (Mark 9:42). Paul switches from "you" to "I," which leads straight into chapter 9 and his own example.
• How chapter 8 fits chapters 8–10. In chapter 8 Paul argues from love and does not yet say temple dining is forbidden in itself. In 10:14–22 he says plainly that sharing in idol feasts is sharing with demons and cannot be combined with the Lord's Supper. Most interpreters think Paul is building his case in stages: first he undercuts the Corinthians' "knowledge" on their own terms, then he gives the deeper reason. Others think chapter 8 has in view social meals in temple buildings and chapter 10 actual acts of worship. Both readings agree that Paul never treats idol food as a neutral matter of taste.
• Acts 15. The Jerusalem Council asked Gentile believers to abstain from food offered to idols (Acts 15:29; 21:25), and Revelation still condemns eating it (Rev 2:14, 20). Paul does not appeal to that decree here. Some think the decree was aimed at Jewish-Gentile fellowship in Syria and Cilicia, while Paul answers the Corinthians from first principles. Others think Paul's teaching in chapters 8–10 is largely in line with the decree in practice, especially on temple meals.
• The limits of the principle. The "weak" here are people who might be drawn into sin against their own conscience, not people who simply disapprove of others' freedom. Paul did not give way to those who wanted to impose rules on Gentiles (Gal 2:3–5, 11–14). Love gives up a right for a brother who would fall. It does not hand control of the church to whoever is most easily offended.
• Commentators: All three read v1 the same way: knowledge alone puffs up, love builds. Henry: "That is best which is fitted to do the greatest good," and there is "no evidence of ignorance more common than a conceit of knowledge." JFB agrees: "The first step to knowledge is to know our own ignorance," and it takes v3 to mean that the one who loves God is "acknowledged by God as His." Guzik sharpens the contrast into an image of a bubble swelling versus a building rising. On v6 Henry stresses that "the unity of the Godhead is a fundamental principle in Christianity," and JFB comments, "So entirely are the Father and Son one." Guzik notes that kyrios translated God's name in the Greek Old Testament, and the lexicon confirms it, so calling Jesus "Lord" here carries real weight. On v10 both Guzik and JFB point out that "encouraged" is literally "built up," and the lexicon supports that, listing this verse as a negative use of oikodomeō. JFB: "by your example your building him up is the emboldening him to violate his conscience." On v11 JFB warns that "a single act seemingly unimportant may produce everlasting consequences," and on v12 likens the deed to striking "an invalid." Henry adds, "Liberty is valuable, but the weakness of a brother should induce, and sometimes bind, us to waive it," and "those whom Christ hath redeemed with his most precious blood should be very precious and dear to us." Guzik differs from the Tyndale notes on Acts 15. He treats the council's ruling as a temporary measure for the sake of Jewish outreach, while the Tyndale notes only observe that Paul does not mention it and builds his case on love. Guzik also stresses that the weak brother is weak in knowledge rather than willpower, and that legalists cannot use this chapter to bind others.

Pointing to Christ

The Corinthians knew there was one God and one Lord, and they used that truth as a license. Paul shows them what the one Lord actually did with his rights. The one "through whom are all things" did not hold on to his privileges. He died for the weak brother. Each time the strong lay aside a freedom for the sake of someone easily wounded, they walk the path of the Lord who laid down his life. And the ground under every Christian, strong or weak, is not how much they know but that they are "known by God" through him.

Commentary

• Enduring Word (David Guzik): enduringword.com Guzik examines knowledge vs. love, the idol-meat issue, the weaker brother principle, and Paul's radical self-limitation.
• Jamieson-Fausset-Brown (1871): blueletterbible.org A critical and explanatory commentary on the whole Bible, more concise than Matthew Henry and closer to the Hebrew and Greek, with attention to historical and geographical detail. Public domain.
• Matthew Henry's Exposition (1710): blueletterbible.org A devotional verse-by-verse commentary in the Puritan tradition, still among the most widely read three centuries on. Public domain.

Videos

Articles

• GotQuestions.org: gotquestions.org On the whole book: an overview of the book of 1 Corinthians -- who wrote it, when, why, and how it fits the rest of Scripture.

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Reflection

• Knowledge vs. Love (v.1) — Paul says knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. Is your understanding of Scripture making you more arrogant or more loving toward others?
• The Limits of What We Think We Know (v.2) — Paul warns that anyone who thinks he knows something doesn't yet know as he ought. Where might spiritual pride be blinding you to your own limits?
• Being Right Isn't Always Enough (v.4) — Paul agrees idols are nothing, yet correct theology alone isn't the point. Where might you be technically right but relationally unloving?
• Freedom Can Become a Stumbling Block (v.9) — Paul warns that a Christian's liberty can wound someone else's conscience. Is there a freedom you exercise that might be causing someone weaker in faith to stumble?
• Christ Died for the One You Might Wound (v.11) — Paul reminds the "strong" that the brother they could harm is someone Christ died for. How much weight do you give to the impact of your choices on fellow believers?
• Willing to Give Up Freedom for Love (v.13) — Paul commits to permanently limiting his own liberty for the sake of others' faith. What freedom might God be asking you to set aside for someone else's good?