📖WEB · 1 Corinthians 15:13
What does 1 Corinthians 15:13 mean?
"But if there is no resurrection of the dead, neither has Christ been raised."
— 1 Corinthians 15:13 (World English Bible)
Surrounding context
But by the grace of God I am what I am. His grace which was given to me was not futile, but I worked more than all of them; yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me.
Whether then it is I or they, so we preach, and so you believed.
Now if Christ is preached, that he has been raised from the dead, how do some among you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?
But if there is no resurrection of the dead, neither has Christ been raised.
If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain, and your faith also is in vain.
Yes, we are also found false witnesses of God, because we testified about God that he raised up Christ, whom he didn’t raise up, if it is so that the dead are not raised.
For if the dead aren’t raised, neither has Christ been raised.
Explanation
1 Corinthians 15:13 states a simple but forceful logical connection: if it were true that dead people are never raised, then it would necessarily follow that Christ himself was not raised. Paul is not expressing doubt here; rather, he is drawing out the implications of a position some in the Corinthian church were apparently holding — that there is no such thing as resurrection from the dead. His point is that this belief cannot be held selectively. If resurrection as a category of reality does not exist, then Jesus' resurrection, which the Corinthians already affirmed, could not have happened either, since it belongs to that very category.
The context is Paul's letter to the church in Corinth, written to address a range of problems in that community, including confusion or denial regarding the resurrection of believers. By the time we reach chapter 15, Paul has already reminded them of the gospel he preached to them — that Christ died, was buried, and was raised on the third day, appearing to many witnesses, including Paul himself. Apparently some in Corinth, influenced perhaps by Greek philosophical assumptions that regarded bodily resurrection as distasteful or impossible, were affirming Christ's resurrection while denying that ordinary people would be raised. Paul confronts this inconsistency directly, using tight argumentation to show that the two truths stand or fall together.
Theologically, this verse anchors Christian hope in a single, unified reality: Christ's resurrection is not an isolated miracle unrelated to human destiny, but the first instance of the very kind of resurrection that believers are promised. Pa
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