(Well, I did baptize the household of Stephanas, but no one else, as far as I remember.)

Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel. And to preach it with no fine rhetoric, lest the cross of Christ should lose its power!

Thus when I came to you, my brothers, I did not come to proclaim to you God's secret purpose with any elaborate words or wisdom.

what I said, what I preached, did not rest on the plausible arguments of 'wisdom' but on the proof supplied by the Spirit and its power,

I did the planting, Apollos did the watering, but it was God who made the seed grow.

I did not mean you were literally to avoid contact with the immoral in this world, with the lustful and the thievish, or with idolaters; in that case you would have to leave the world altogether.

If others share this right over you, why not we all the more? We did not avail ourselves of it, you say? No, we do not mind any privations if we can only avoid putting any obstacle in the way of the gospel of Christ.

Nor must we commit immorality, as some of them did ??and in a single day twenty-three thousand of them fell.

Nor must we presume upon the Lord as some of them did ??only to be destroyed by serpents.

And you must not murmur, as some of them did ??only to be destroyed by the destroying angel.

That is why many of you are ill and infirm, and a number even dead.

You challenge this rule? Pray, did God's word start from you? Are you the only people it has reached?

But by God's grace I am what I am. The grace he showed me did not go for nothing; no, I have done far more work than all of them ??though it was not I but God's grace at my side.

Now if we preach that Christ rose from the dead, how can certain individuals among you assert that 'there is no such thing as a resurrection of the dead'?

If 'there is no such thing as a resurrection from the dead,' then even Christ did not rise;

and if Christ did not rise, then our preaching has gone for nothing, and your faith has gone for nothing too.

Besides, we are detected bearing false witness to God by affirming of him that he raised Christ ??whom he did not raise, if after all dead men never rise.

For if dead men never rise, Christ did not rise either;

and if Christ did not rise, your faith is futile, you are still in your sins.

But it is not so! Christ did rise from the dead, he was the first to be reaped of those who sleep in death.

For since death came by man, by man came also resurrection from the dead;

Otherwise, if there is no such thing as a resurrection, what is the meaning of people getting baptized on behalf of their dead? If dead men do not rise at all, why do people get baptized on their behalf?

What would it avail me that, humanly speaking, I 'fought with wild beasts' at Ephesus? If dead men do not rise, let us eat and drink, for we will be dead to-morrow!

But, someone will ask, 'how do the dead rise? What kind of body have they when they come?'

So with the resurrection of the dead: what is sown is mortal, what rises is immortal;

Here is a secret truth for you: not all of us are to die, but all of us are to be changed ??52 changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet-call. The trumpet will sound, the dead will rise imperishable, and we shall be changed.