First Christ, then those of Christ …so that God may be all in all

Abstract

In the pericope (the unity, or passage) preceding ours, vv.12-19, St. Paul attempted to demonstrate the futility of the argumentation 'if there was no resurrection of the dead'. But since all this is hypothetical, Paul now, in our pericope vv.20-28 speaks of the important reality of Christ's resurrection which he together with the converted Corinthians believed in, as we see in v.II: "Anyway, whether it was they or I, this is what we preach and what you believed." This makes the resurrection of the dead both necessary and inevitable in the proclamation of the gospel of the Risen Christ. We can say also that our passage, with its chapter, is one of the first literary testimonies of the Resurrection of Christ in the New Testament, being itself before the gospels.