1 Corinthians 13 is the thirteenth chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians in the New Testament of the Christian Bible. Authored by Paul the Apostle at Ephesus in the mid-50s AD, it is a sustained praise of love (, ), the word rendered "charity" in the King James Version and "love" in most other English translations. The chapter stands at the centre of Paul's discussion of spiritual gifts in chapters 12 to 14: Paul argues that no gift, however impressive, has any value without love, and that love, unlike the gifts, will never end.
The chapter falls into three movements: without love the gifts are worthless (verses 1 to 3), love described in action (verses 4 to 7), and love outlasting the gifts (verses 8 to 13). Its closing verses contain two of the most familiar phrases of the English Bible: "For now we see through a glass, darkly" and "faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity".
Often called the "love chapter" or the "hymn to love", it is among the most widely known passages of the New Testament, and has shaped Western ethics, Christian liturgy, and theological reflection on love, as well as a long history of use in literature, music and public life.
Text The original text was written in Koine Greek and is divided into 13 verses. The chapter division, applied in the Middle Ages, cuts across a longer unit: the bridge sentences at ("I will show you a still more excellent way") and ("Pursue love, and earnestly desire the spiritual gifts") frame the chapter and bind it to the discussion of spiritual gifts on either side.
The earliest surviving manuscripts containing the chapter are Papyrus 46 (c. AD 175–225), Codex Sinaiticus (330–360), Codex Vaticanus (325–350), Codex Alexandrinus (400–440) and Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus (c. 450).
The best-known textual variant in the chapter occurs in verse 3, where manuscripts divide between (, "so that I may boast") and (, "so that I may be burned"), a difference of a single letter. The oldest manuscripts, including Papyrus 46, Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, read "boast", the reading preferred by Bruce Metzger and modern commentators including Fee, Fitzmyer and Thiselton; other commentators, including Barrett, Bruce, Conzelmann and Collins, retain "be burned" as the reading that better fits Paul's escalating argument. Fee and Hays note that 1 Clement (55:2), written near the end of the first century, already echoes the verse.
The text reads:
Composition and context Chapters 12 to 14 of the letter form a single discussion of spiritual gifts, prompted by disorder in the worship of the young church at Corinth, where dramatic gifts such as speaking in tongues had become marks of status. Within that discussion, chapter 13 supplies the standard by which the gifts are to be measured. C. K. Barrett writes that "love provides the scale by which other gifts may be tested and measured"; Joseph Fitzmyer calls the chapter not an aside but "the climax to what Paul has been teaching in chapter 12". Several of the qualities denied of love in verses 4 to 7 (envy, boasting, being "puffed up", self-seeking) correspond to faults Paul has rebuked in the Corinthians earlier in the letter, so that the chapter also gathers up the letter's argument to that point.
The chapter's elevated style has led readers since to speak of it as a "hymn to love", but most modern commentators decline the label. Barrett judges it "prose", whose "rhythmical patterns are not regular enough to warrant presentation in the form of poetry", while adding that "the balance of the sentences and the point and power of the vocabulary are seldom equalled by Paul, or indeed in Greek literature generally". Fee likewise argues that it is exalted prose rather than a hymn. A widely used alternative classification is the encomium, a formal composition in praise of a person or quality: Raymond Collins finds in it the classical encomium's four-part pattern of prologue, deeds, comparison and conclusion, and Fitzmyer calls it "a rhetorical encomium of love, intended as an exhortation". Ben Witherington III, drawing on classical rhetoric (Quintilian, Rhetorica ad Herennium) describes it as a deliberate set piece in the rhetoric of praise (epideictic rhetoric), a planned digression in the technical sense of that word: not a wandering from the subject, but a self-contained showpiece inserted to strengthen the surrounding deliberative argument. Anthony Thiselton declines to fix any single genre label, holding that "no single language function should obscure its multilayered character".
Praises of a supreme virtue or power were a recognized form in the ancient world, and commentators cite parallels including Plato's praise of Eros in the Symposium, the praise of truth in 1 Esdras 4, and the twenty-one attributes of wisdom in the Book of Wisdom 7:22–23, which Fitzmyer considers the closest parallel. Hans Conzelmann traced the chapter's style to the wisdom teaching of Hellenistic Judaism, observing that it nowhere explicitly mentions Christ. Whether Paul composed the chapter for this letter or adapted an earlier piece of his own is debated. Fee, Hays, Witherington and Blomberg regard it as composed for its present place, and Collins argues that "the entire chapter reflects Paul's way of argumentation, his vocabulary, and his ideas"; Thiselton, citing C. T. Craig, holds that "almost every word in the chapter has been chosen with this particular situation at Corinth in mind". Barrett, by contrast, thinks the polished passage "was probably inserted into 1 Corinthians as a ready-made piece", though written by Paul and intended by him to stand where it does, and Bruce allows that it may have been an earlier composition of Paul's own, quoting Arthur Darby Nock's description of it as "one of the most strikingly original things St Paul ever wrote". Occasional suggestions that the chapter is a later interpolation by another hand have found little acceptance.
Commentators from at least the 4th century (Chrysostom) commonly divide the chapter into three paragraphs: the necessity of love (verses 1 to 3), the character of love (verses 4 to 7), and the permanence of love (verses 8 to 13). Kenneth Bailey analyses it as a ring composition, a symmetrical pattern in which the opening and closing sections mirror each other and the emphasis falls at the centre, here on the description of love in verses 4 to 7.
Summary
In the first three verses, Paul declares that the most exalted spiritual attainments are worthless without love. Speaking "in the tongues of men and of angels" without love is "a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal"; prophecy, understanding of "all mysteries and all knowledge", and faith sufficient "to remove mountains" amount, without love, to nothing; even giving away all one's possessions and surrendering one's own body gains nothing.
Verses 4 to 7 describe love through a series of actions. Love is patient and kind; it does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude; it does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love "bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things".
The final movement, verses 8 to 13, contrasts love's permanence with the gifts' impermanence: "Love never ends", but prophecies, tongues and knowledge will pass away, for "we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away". Paul illustrates the contrast with a child who grows up and puts away childish things, and with the difference between seeing "in a mirror dimly" and seeing "face to face". The chapter closes: "So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love."
Reception
The philosopher Simon May writing on the history of the idea of love, treats the chapter as the passage where, "for the first time in Western history, love is clearly named as ... the source of all other value... the fundamental principle of the moral universe" and as "the foundation stone" of a still-current Western belief that a life without love "is impoverished in a way for which no heroic deeds or original achievements can ever compensate". The historian Tom Holland agrees, observing that ranking of love above prophecy, knowledge and faith had no precedent in Greek and Roman ethics which preceded it in Western thought. He calls it "a formula for revolution", tracing its influence (alongside that of and ) through Augustine's dictum "love, and do as you will" and the civil-rights preaching of Martin Luther King, to the modern Western assumption of universal human dignity. Holland agrees with Nietzsche's own hostile account that the origin of the idea of human dignity lies in these passages: "not in the French Revolution, nor in the Declaration of Independence, nor in the Enlightenment, but in the Bible".
Early Church The chapter appealed strongly to early Christian interpreters, who found in it both a portrait of Christian character and a statement about the limits of human knowledge of God. John Chrysostom devoted three homilies to it (Homilies 32 to 34 on First Corinthians, preached in the late fourth century), reading each clause of verses 4 to 7 as a remedy for a specific Corinthian vice. For Chrysostom love was greater than every gift and even than martyrdom, and open to every Christian equally: "it is not one, or two, or three gifts that I point out to you, but one way which leadeth to all these".
Verse 12, with its contrast between seeing "in a mirror dimly" and "face to face", became one of the most cited biblical texts in early Christian discussion of the beatific vision, the direct sight of God promised to the blessed. Augustine returned to the verse repeatedly, in The City of God and in his sermons, to describe the vision of God in the resurrection; Gregory of Nyssa read the "mirror" as the purified soul, in which the divine image can already be glimpsed. The verse was also turned to polemical use: Chrysostom cited "now I know in part" against the Eunomians, who claimed complete knowledge of God's essence.
The closing triad of verse 13 became the basis of the three theological virtues of faith, hope and charity in Christian moral theology. Augustine's sermons already state the classic reasoning: "Faith is succeeded by sight, hope by reality, but love has no successor." Bruce notes that the three were later joined to the four classical cardinal virtues to form the traditional seven virtues. Liturgy In the historic Western lectionary, 1 Corinthians 13 was the epistle for Quinquagesima, the last Sunday before Lent, a position it held both in the Roman Missal before 1970 and in the Book of Common Prayer of 1662, whose collect for the day ("...all our doings without charity are nothing worth: Send thy Holy Ghost, and pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of charity...") is itself built on the chapter. In the modern Revised Common Lectionary it is read on the Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany in Year C.
The chapter is one of the most frequently chosen readings at Christian weddings. It appears among the appointed New Testament readings in the Catholic Order of Celebrating Matrimony, and the Church of England describes it as the most popular reading at its weddings. Hays cautions that the wedding association can obscure Paul's original concern, which was the ordering of a divided congregation's common life rather than romantic love.
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