Rumours of these disorders had reached the Apostle from time to time, and he had already sent Timothy[1033] and Erastus (Acts xix. 22) from Ephesus to Macedonia, desiring the former if possible to continue his journey to Corinth, and recall to the Church there the image of his own teaching and life. But after their departure members of the household of Chloe arrived informing him that the factions had reached a still more formidable height (1 Cor. i. 11), and that an incestuous marriage, scandalous even to the heathen, of a man with his father’s wife, had been allowed to be contracted without rebuke (1 Cor. v. 1). This determined the Apostle to write the first of his extant letters[1034] to the Corinthians and other Christian communities in the province of Achaia (comp. 1 Cor. i. 2), in which he treated of all these points, directed that the incestuous offender should be expelled from the Christian community, and replied to various questions, which three members of the Corinthian Church, Fortunatus, Stephanas, and Achaicus (1 Cor. xvi. 17), themselves the bearers of the Epistle, had brought for his solution relating to the controversies respecting sacrificial feasts, meat offered to idols, the right of divorce, and the exercise of spiritual gifts in the public ministrations of the Church. At the time he dispatched this letter, it was the Apostle’s intention to proceed through Macedonia to Corinth, and after spending the winter there (1 Cor. xvi. 5, 6; Acts xix. 21) to proceed to Jerusalem, whence he contemplated a journey to Rome itself (Acts xix. 21). Till Pentecost, however, he resolved to stay at Ephesus (1 Cor. xvi. 8), for there _a great door_ was opened to him, and there were many _adversaries_ against whom he had yet to contend. But these designs were destined to be rudely interrupted.