Passage

1 Corinthians 9.1

Book: 1 Corinthians · ASV / WEB / KJV / YLT

Immediate context (±2 verses)

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Setting

• Speaker: Paul, opening his defense of apostolic rights
• Audience: the Corinthian church, including those questioning his apostolic standing
• Location: written from Ephesus
• Time period: c. AD 54 to 55, during the third missionary journey

Theological reading

Four rhetorical questions, and the second is a resurrection claim. "Am I not free? Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord? Are you not my work in the Lord?"

The third question is the load-bearing one for the codex. Ouchi Iēsoun ton kyrion hēmōn heoraka; uses the perfect of horaō, "I have seen," the aspect of a completed act whose result stands. It is the same verb family that carries the appearance list at 1 Corinthians 15:5-8 six chapters later.

Why the question is placed second. The sequence is deliberate. Freedom, apostleship, having seen the Lord, and the Corinthians themselves as the fruit. The having-seen is offered as the ground of the apostleship, not as an additional credential. In the earliest Christian usage, apostolic standing is tied to having been a witness of the risen Christ; Acts 1:21 to 22 makes the same criterion explicit when the eleven replace Judas.

The apologetic weight, and its precise shape. This is a first-person, undisputed-letter, incidental claim to have seen the risen Jesus. Every one of those qualifiers matters.

First-person: Paul is not reporting what others say happened. Undisputed letter: 1 Corinthians is accepted as authentically Pauline across the critical spectrum, including by scholars hostile to the resurrection. Incidental: the claim is not the topic. Paul is arguing about his right to financial support and mentions having seen the Lord in passing, as an agreed premise he expects the Corinthians to grant. Incidental claims are generally better evidence than featured ones, because they reveal what the writer assumed rather than what he set out to prove.

The honest limit. That Paul sincerely claimed to have seen the risen Christ is about as secure as anything in ancient history. That the experience was veridical rather than visionary is a further question the verse does not settle, and the hallucination hypothesis is aimed precisely here. The codex's reply runs through the group appearances and the physical modality of the Gospel accounts rather than through this verse alone. See Argument from the Resurrection.

Key words

• horaō (G3708), to see; the perfect heoraka, "I have seen." See G3708 - horao.

• apostolos (G0652), apostle, one sent.

• eleutheros (G1658), free; the first question's term, framing the chapter's argument about rights.

• G1510 - eimi, eimi, Strong's G1510

• G5547 - christos, christos, Strong's G5547

• G2962 - kyrios, kyrios, Strong's G2962

• G2424 - Iesous, Iesous, Strong's G2424

Cross-references

• 1 Corinthians 15:5-8, the appearance list Paul places himself last in
• Acts 26:26, the public-checkability claim before Agrippa
• Luke 1:2, the eyewitness source category
• G3708 - horao, the seeing verb across the resurrection material
• Argument from the Resurrection, where this datum is deployed

Quoted in

Arguments and defeaters:

• Minimal Facts Argument
• Mythicism Refutation
• The Bible Is Just Second-Hand Sources Objection Defeater

Concepts:

• Apostle
• Fivefold Ministry

Passages:

• 1 Corinthians 15.5-8

Why these four translations

ris3n chose ASV, WEB, KJV, and YLT for two reasons together. They are the most literal English translations available (formal-equivalence: word-for-word renderings that preserve the Hebrew and Greek grammar rather than smoothing it into modern dynamic-equivalence idiom). And they are in the public domain in the United States, which means fair-use quotation at any length requires no publisher license. Modern licensed translations (NASB95, ESV, NIV) restrict volume of quotation under their copyright terms, so they are not used at stub-level coverage here. NASB95 appears only on hand-curated rich passage hubs under Lockman Foundation's fair-use allowance.

The four:

• ASV (American Standard Version, 1901). The basis of the modern critical-text English tradition.
• WEB (World English Bible, contemporary). Public-domain revision in the ASV line, in current English.
• KJV (King James Version, 1611). Reformation-era, Textus Receptus base.
• YLT (Young's Literal Translation, Robert Young, 1862). Hyper-literal preservation of Hebrew and Greek grammar; useful for word-study work even where English reads stiff.

See Bibles for the full per-translation history, translators, textual basis, strengths, and weaknesses.