1. What kind of city was Corinth in the days of Paul?

CORINTH was “a renowned and voluptuous city, where the vices of East and West met.”a

“Its wealth,” it has been said, “was so celebrated as to be proverbial; so were the vice and profligacy of its inhabitants.”b Among its pagan religious practices was the worship of Aphrodite (counterpart of the Roman Venus). Sensuality was a product of Corinthian worship.

2. How was the Corinthian congregation established, and hence what bond did it have with Paul?

² It was to this thriving but morally decadent metropolis of the Roman world that the apostle Paul traveled in about 50 C.E.