ICC 1 Corinthians Commentary online
The following public domain book is now available for free download in PDF:
Archibald Robertson [1853-1931] & Alfred Plummer [1841-1926], A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians, 2nd edn. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1914. Hbk. pp.424.
International Critical Commentary on 1 Corinthians
§ I. Corinth
What we know from other sources respecting Corinth in St Paul’s day harmonizes well with the impression which we receive from 1 Corinthians. The extinction of the totius Graeciae lumen, as Cicero (Pro lege Manil. 5) calls the old Greek city of Corinth, by the Roman consul L. Mummius Achaicus, 146 B.C., was only temporary. Exactly a century later Julius Caesar founded anew city on the old site as Colonia Julia Corinthus. The re-building was a measure of military precaution, and little was done to show that there was any wish to revive the glories of Greece (Finlay, Greece under the Romans, p. 67). The inhabitants of the new city were not Greeks but Italians, Caesar’s veterans and freedmen. The descendants of the inhabitants who had survived the destruction of the old city did not return to the home of their parents, and Greeks generally were for a time somewhat shy of taking up their abode in the new city. Plutarch, who was still a boy when St Paul was in Greece, seems hardly to have regarded the new Corinth as a Greek town. Festus says that the colonists were called Corinthienses, to distinguish them from the old Corinthii. But such distinctions do not seem to have been maintained. By the time that St Paul visited the city there were plenty of Greeks among the inhabitants, the current language was in the main Greek, and the descendants of the first Italian colonists had become to a large extent Hellenized.
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