1st Corinthians Chapter 1 verse 23 Holy Bible
but we preach Christ crucified, unto Jews a stumblingblock, and unto Gentiles foolishness;
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But we give the good news of Christ on the cross, a hard thing to the Jews, and a foolish thing to the Gentiles;
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but *we* preach Christ crucified, to Jews an offence, and to nations foolishness;
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But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness;
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but we preach Christ crucified; a stumbling block to Jews, and foolishness to Greeks,
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also we -- we preach Christ crucified, to Jews, indeed, a stumbling-block, and to Greeks foolishness,
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Pulpit Commentary
Pulpit CommentaryVerse 23. - Christ crucified; rather perhaps, a crucified Messiah. It was only by slow degrees that the title "the Christ," i.e. the Anointed, the Messiah, passed into the name Christ. A stumbling block. They had for centuries been looking for a regal and victorious Messiah, who should exalt their special privileges. The notion of a suffering and humiliated Messiah, who reduced them to the level of all God's other children, was to them "a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence" (Romans 9:33; comp. Isaiah 8:14). These two verses, translated into Syriac, furnish a marked play on words (miscol, stumbling block; mashcal, folly; seed, cross); and some have seen in this a sign that St. Paul thought in Syriac. Unto the Greeks; rather, unto Gentiles; א, A, B, C, I). Unto the Jews... unto the Greeks. Both alike had failed. The Jew had not attained ease of conscience or moral perfectness; the Greek had. not unriddled the secret of philosophy; yet both alike rejected the peace and the enlightenment which they had professed to seek. Foolishness. The accent of profound contempt is discernible in all the early allusions of Greeks and Romans to Christianity. The only epithets which they could find for it were "execrable," "malefic," "depraved," "damnable" (Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny, etc.). The milder term is "excessive superstition." The heroic constancy of martyrs appeared even to M. Aurelius only under the aspect of a "bare obstinacy." The word used to express the scorn of the Athenian philosophers for St. Paul's "strange doctrine" is one of the coarsest disdain (ἐχλεύαζον), and they called him "a seed pecker" (Acts 17:18, 32), i.e. a mere picker up of "learning's crumbs."
Ellicott's Commentary
Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers(23) But we preach.--The gospel of Christ crucified made its way by those very qualities which they regarded as "weakness and folly," vindicating itself as "the power of God," more mighty than any "sign" a Jew might ask for; and "the wisdom of God" surpassing any merely intellectual "wisdom" which a Greek might desire.
