1 Corinthians 1:17 - Coke's Commentary on the Holy Bible

Should be made of none effect— If the doctrine of the crucifixion of the Son of God for the sins of men be indeed true, it is undoubtedly a truth of the highest importance; and it might reasonably be expected that a person who had been instructed in it by such extraordinary methods, should appear to lay the main stress of his preaching upon it. The design of this wonderful dispensation might therefore have been in a great measure frustrated, if it had been the care of the first preachers of it, and particularly of St. Paul, to study a vain parade of words, and to set off their discourses with those glittering ornaments which the Grecian orators so often sought, and which the Corinthians were so ready to affect. But amidst all the beautiful simplicity which a deep conviction of the Gospel tended to produce, there was room left for the most manly and noble kind of eloquence; which therefore the Christian preachershouldlabourto make habitual to himself, and of which this Apostle himself is a most illustrious example. From this verse to 1 Corinthians 1:31. St. Paul uses another argument to stop their followers from glorying in these false apostles; observing, that neither any advantage of extraction, nor skill in the learning of the Jews, nor in the philosophy and eloquence of the Greeks, was that for which God chose men to be preachers of the Gospel. Those whom he had made choice of for overturning the mighty and the learned, were mean, plain, and illiterate men. See Doddridge and Locke.