Free Study Guide Included1 Corinthians: A Friends Illuminated Commentary
"The foolishness of God is wiser than men." Paul's letter on spiritual gifts, gathered worship, and the nature of the body of Christ — texts Friends debated intensely as they worked out the practice of silent waiting meeting.
- 16 chapters · ~60,000 words
- EPUB + Study Guide
This edition
Read itE-book · EPUB
- Time to read2 hours
- Length28,229 words
- Files1 EPUB, DRM-free
How we get 2 hours
This figure is here so you can compare one book against another. Every title on the site is timed from its own word count at the same reading speed — nothing is adjusted book by book — so if this edition says 2 hours and another says half that, the second one really is about half the reading. It is a measure of size, in the way a page count is. Your own pace is your own: at the speeds typical adult readers actually manage, this edition runs anywhere from 1.6 hours to 2.7 hours.
What is in this edition
| Modernized text | 28,229 words |
|---|---|
| Total | 28,229 words |
Counted from the text of the EPUB you receive. Navigation, the title page, the table of contents and the licence page are excluded — they are packaging, not reading.
The reading rate
238 words per minute, for adult silent reading of non-fiction, applied unchanged to every title on the site. We did not pick the number; it is the pooled result of a published meta-analysis. Nothing is adjusted book by book — that consistency is what makes two of these figures worth comparing.
Brysbaert, M. (2019). How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate. Journal of Memory and Language, 109, 104047. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2019.104047
190 studies, 18,573 participants.
The same paper puts most adult readers between 175 and
300 words per minute, and those two speeds give the
1.6 hours and 2.7 hours above.
Because time is words divided by speed, an even range of speeds produces an
uneven range of times, so 2 hours sits nearer the fast end of that
range than the middle of it.
If it were a paperback
Roughly 81–113 pages.
Words per printed page is a typesetting convention, not a measurement — it moves with trim size, type size and leading. The range above assumes 250–350 words a page. Friends Illuminated publishes no print edition of this book; the figure is here only because pages are a more familiar size than words.
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About This Edition
First Corinthians was one of the most contested biblical texts in early Quaker history — not because Friends doubted its authority, but because they read it very carefully and drew conclusions that set them apart from all other Protestants. Paul’s treatment of spiritual gifts in chapters 12–14 gave Friends their understanding of gathered ministry: the Spirit distributes gifts as it will, any member of the body may receive the gift of prophecy or teaching, and the gathered meeting must discern among ministries that arise spontaneously from the Spirit’s movement. The famous passage about women keeping silence in the churches (1 Cor 14:34–35) was a particular battleground: Friends argued, citing other Pauline passages and the testimony of their own experience, that women were among those on whom the Spirit’s gifts were poured.
The commentary also engages with Paul’s extended treatment of the Lord’s Supper (chapters 10–11), which Friends cited in arguing that the outward ceremony was neither commanded nor necessary — that the true communion was inward and spiritual. And it explores the Hymn to Love in chapter 13, which Friends read as a description of the fruit that authentic Spirit-led community must produce. The free Group Study Guide makes these disputed passages accessible for group discussion.
