Let's get right into our Bible study. If you have your Bibles, let's go to First Corinthians.

First Corinthians. And if you are dexterous enough, you can also find Acts 18. If you go to

First Corinthians and then hang a left, go back to Romans. And then before that, the book of Acts,

and you can find Acts 18 as well. Because I'm going to be actually starting in Acts 18 as the background to the book of Acts and you can find Acts 18 as well because I'm going to be actually starting in Acts 18

as the background to the book of 1st Corinthians. But every time we begin a new book study and if

you're new to Cornerstone, we just go generally straight through the Bible, cover to cover.

And we're starting now into the book of First Corinthians. And so a little background of this book

and a little background on the city of Corinth,

I thought would be helpful to kind of set the stage. And so this book, First Corinthians, was

written by Paul, of course, inspired by the Holy Spirit. He wrote this book around the year 56 AD.

It was a letter to the church that he planted about five years before he

wrote this letter. So a little bit about Corinth, the city itself, because it kind of helps us to

understand the dynamics of the people that made up this first church. Corinth was an important

port city of Greece, and it was the Roman

capital for that particular region. Remember, this is first century, this is Roman Empire.

There were around 700,000 people who lived in Corinth during the time of the first century AD,

when Paul visited there. But please note, most of that population was slaves.

About 500,000 made up slaves. It was more than twice the population of the, of the freed population.

Roman citizens made up about 200,000. And of course, slavery was part of the downfall of the Roman Empire.

And so we see Corinth as a major metropolis with the slave population twice as much as the Roman citizen population. It was an

extremely immoral city. There were 12 temples that dotted the landscape of Corinth. The most

important one to them was the Temple of Aphrodite.

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