Space constraints prevent me from surveying and interacting with the full range of scholarship in this commentary (I have included perhaps 5 percent of my sources). The following list is a relatively concise sample introduction to some sources, omitting many good books and most good articles. More works were consulted than can be mentioned here; I will interact with them in my academic commentary on 1 Corinthians.

PAUL AND PHILOSOPHY

See A. J. Malherbe, Paul and the Popular Philosophers (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989); several articles in Paul in the Greco-Roman World: A Handbook, ed. J. P. Sampley (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity, 2003). For Stoicism in particular, see T. Engberg-Pedersen, Paul and the Stoics (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2000); D. A. deSilva, “Paul and the Stoa: A Comparison,” JETS 38 (1995): 549–64. This must supplant the older view of Gnosticism in Corinth, argued most pervasively by W. Schmithals, Gnosticism in Corinth: An Investigation of the Letters to the Corinthians, trans. J. E. Steely (Nashville: Abingdon, 1971). The Hellenistic Jewish opponents of D. Georgi, The Opponents of Paul in Second Corinthians (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986) are less subjective than Schmithals's Gnostic thesis but still require significant speculation and “mirror-reading.”

RHETORIC AND 1 CORINTHIANS

Many scholars address the prominence of rhetoric in 1 Corinthians, esp. in 1–4; see esp. S. M. Pogoloff, Logos and Sophia: The Rhetorical Structure of 1 Corinthians, SBLDS 134 (Atlanta: Scholars, 1992); D. Litfin, St. Paul’s Theology of Proclamation: 1 Corinthians 1–4 and Greco-Roman rhetoric, SNTSMS 83 (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1994); B.W.Winter, Philo and Paul among the Sophists, SNTSMS 96 (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1997); see also a number of articles by J. F. M. Smit.