NOTES for Co1 1:17

In the first Christian Church there were different ministries to which God called different people. One of these ministries was the ministry of apostle, or messenger, which existed not only in the Church but also in other Jewish religious brotherhoods of the Gospel era, according to whose model the first Christian Church was formed.

For religious brotherhoods, the ministry of messengers always had special significance, for these were communities without a rigid structure, more like communal movements than centralized organizations. Messengers played an important connecting role in such movements: they could bear witness to members of other communities about the important events, both social and spiritual, that were taking place in their own community. In this way an exchange of spiritual and life experience took place in the brotherhoods, without which the brotherhood, as a single whole, could not exist.

In the Church, the role of apostle-messenger had special significance, for it rested first of all on the good news and on witness. The Church was not a religious organization bound, as usually happens in religious organizations, by a single ritual or a single creed. Of course, most members of the first Christian Church were connected with the Synagogue, but the Synagogue too was not unified in this respect, especially since the Church included not only Jews but also recent pagans interested in Judaism, though not accepting it fully, for whom Jewish ritual was not as close and natural as it was for the Jews themselves.

The first Christian Church was united only by faith in Jesus as the Messiah promised by God, whom God raised from the dead, and in the Kingdom that this risen Messiah brought into the world and in which everyone who believes the risen Jesus and entrusts his life to Him can share. Here witness to the Risen One and to the Kingdom He brought into the world came to the forefront, and apostolic ministry became central.

That is why Paul rejoices that precisely apostolic ministry was entrusted to him by God. Of course, Paul did not have a church that he could call his own in the sense in which those who headed particular church communities called different churches their own. But this state of affairs did not upset him at all, for he understood what ministry had been entrusted to him by God.