BIBLE CHAPTER STUDY
1 Corinthians 13 — Hymn of Love
Paul ranks love above every spiritual gift, defines its character in a series of contrasts, and declares it the one thing that endures when partial gifts pass away.
Scripture
1If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am become sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal.
2And if I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.
3And if I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and if I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profiteth me nothing.
4Love suffereth long, and is kind; love envieth not; love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,
5doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not its own, is not provoked, taketh not account of evil;
6rejoiceth not in unrighteousness, but rejoiceth with the truth;
7beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.
8Love never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall be done away; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall be done away.
9For we know in part, and we prophesy in part;
10but when that which is perfect is come, that which is in part shall be done away.
11When I was a child, I spake as a child, I felt as a child, I thought as a child: now that I am become a man, I have put away childish things.
12For now we see in a mirror, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know fully even as also I was fully known.
13But now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; and the greatest of these is love.
What this passage means
Verses 1–3 empty out the most spectacular gifts — tongues, prophecy, knowledge, mountain-moving faith, total charity, even martyrdom — by attaching the single condition “have not love.” The repetition is rhetorical: each escalation makes the absence of love more striking, not more tolerable. The speaker without love is reduced to noise (a sounding brass or a clanging cymbal) or to nothing at all, and even heroic self-sacrifice yields no profit.
Verses 4–7 define love not as sentiment but as a pattern of action and disposition. Paul strings together fifteen short clauses in Greek: patience, kindness, absence of envy, boastfulness, and pride, refusal of rude or self-seeking behavior, a disposition that is not easily angered and does not keep a ledger of wrongs. The closing tetrad — bearing, believing, hoping, enduring all things — gives love an enduring, forward-facing shape rather than a momentary one.
Verses 8–13 locate love in eschatological time. Prophecies will be set aside, tongues will cease, knowledge will be set aside, because our knowing is partial and our prophesying is partial. Paul uses the mirror image and the child-to-adult analogy to picture the shift from partial to perfect. Faith, hope, and love remain; among these, love is the greatest, because it is the one that will outlast the partial age and carry into the perfected one.
Context
Chapter 13 sits inside Paul’s discussion of spiritual gifts in chapters 12 and 14. Chapter 12 insists that gifts vary but the Spirit is one, and chapter 14 turns to orderly worship. Chapter 13 interrupts that argument to insist that any use of gifts is worthless without love, then resumes the practical instructions in chapter 14. Some readers treat verses 4–7 as a self-contained poem; whether Paul composed it as a preexisting hymn or wrote it afresh for this letter is a question scholars debate, and the dispute is not settled by the text itself.
Verses 8–13 also address a Corinthian tendency to overvalue the more visible gifts. By pairing “in part” with “that which is perfect,” Paul does not deny present knowledge entirely but qualifies it; the contrast is between the partial and the complete, not the false and the true. The final triplet — faith, hope, love — is one of the best-known summaries of Christian existence, though Paul names only love as “the greatest,” leaving the reader to weigh why.
Key words in the original
- G0026 The Greek noun ἀγάπη (agapē) denotes a deliberate, self-giving orientation toward another. In this chapter Paul treats it as the indispensable condition under which every other spiritual activity has meaning, distinguishing it from mere affection or sentiment by tying it to verbs of action (suffers, believes, hopes, endures).
- G4102 πίστις (pistis) covers both trustful reliance and the content of what is trusted. It reappears in the closing triplet of verse 13 alongside hope and love, where Paul assigns it the enduring — but not the greatest — status.
- G1108 γνῶσις (gnōsis) means knowledge as an act or possession. In verse 2 it is paired with mysteries and called a gift; in verse 8 Paul places it in the list of things that will be “done away,” framing present knowledge as partial and provisional.
Related verses
- Colossians 3:14 Paul repeats the supremacy-of-love claim outside Corinth: love is the bond that holds the Christian community together, reinforcing 1 Corinthians 13’s verdict that love outranks every other mark.
- 1 Peter 4:8 Peter echoes the same hierarchy from a different setting: fervent love among believers, because love covers a multitude of sins. The practical effect in 1 Corinthians 13 — patience, kindness, refusal to count wrongs — matches the rationale Peter gives.
- Galatians 5:22 Where 1 Corinthians 13 catalogues love’s character clause by clause, Galatians 5:22 places love at the head of the Spirit’s fruit, presenting the same disposition under a different image: organic growth rather than charismatic gift.
Common questions
Why does Paul say love is greater than faith and hope?
In verse 13 Paul lists faith, hope, and love as the three things that remain, and singles out love as the greatest. He does not explain the ranking in the chapter itself; one commonly offered reason within the letter’s logic is that faith and hope are responses to what is not yet seen, while love corresponds to the perfected community Paul envisions in verses 8–12, so it carries across the boundary between the partial age and the one to come.
Does “that which is perfect” (verse 10) mean the end of all gifts?
The chapter contrasts partial knowledge and prophesying with what is complete, using the mirror and the child-to-adult analogies. The contrast is between the partial and the complete, not between false and true, so the text itself leaves room for differing readings on whether Paul has a future arrival in view or a maturation of the community; commentators differ and the dispute is not settled by verse 10 alone.
Is chapter 13 a poem that Paul quoted, or did he write it himself?
The rhythm of verses 4–7 has led some readers to propose a preexisting hymn that Paul incorporated, while others read it as Paul’s own composition tailored to the argument. The text does not settle the question, and scholars genuinely differ; the commentary tradition records both views without the chapter itself deciding between them.