¹ Now when I came to you, brothers, I did not come with any brilliance of oratory or wise argument to announce to you the mystery of God.

² I was resolved that the only knowledge I would have while I was with you was knowledge of Jesus, and of him as the crucified Christ.

³ I came among you in weakness, in fear and great trembling

⁴ and what I spoke and proclaimed was not meant to convince by philosophical argument, but to demonstrate the convincing power of the Spirit,

⁵ so that your faith should depend not on human wisdom but on the power of God.

⁶ But still, to those who have reached maturity, we do talk of a wisdom, not, it is true, a philosophy of this age or of the rulers of this age, who will not last long now.

⁷ It is of the mysterious wisdom of God that we talk, the wisdom that was hidden, which God predestined to be for our glory before the ages began.

⁸ None of the rulers of the age recognised it; for if they had recognised it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory;

⁹ but it is as scripture says: What no eye has seen and no ear has heard, what the mind of man cannot visualise; all that God has prepared for those who love him;

¹⁰ to us, though, God has given revelation through the Spirit, for the Spirit explores the depths of everything, even the depths of God.

¹¹ After all, is there anyone who knows the qualities of anyone except his own spirit, within him; and in the same way, nobody knows the qualities of God except the Spirit of God.

¹² Now, the Spirit we have received is not the spirit of the world but God's own Spirit, so that we may understand the lavish gifts God has given us.

¹³ And these are what we speak of, not in the terms learnt from human philosophy, but in terms learnt from the Spirit, fitting spiritual language to spiritual things.

¹⁴ The natural person has no room for the gifts of God's Spirit; to him they are folly; he cannot recognise them, because their value can be assessed only in the Spirit.

¹⁵ The spiritual person, on the other hand, can assess the value of everything, and that person's value cannot be assessed by anybody else.

¹⁶ For: who has ever known the mind of the Lord? Who has ever been his adviser? But we are those who have the mind of Christ.

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The New Jerusalem Bible (NJB) is a Catholic translation of the Bible published in 1985. The New Jerusalem Bible (NJB) has become the most widely used Roman Catholic Bible outside of the United States. It has the imprimatur of Cardinal George Basil Hume.

Like its predecessor, the Jerusalem Bible, the New Jerusalem Bible (NJB) version is translated "directly from the Hebrew, Greek or Aramaic." The 1973 French translation, the Bible de Jerusalem, is followed only "where the text admits to more than one interpretation." Introductions and notes, with some modifications, are taken from the Bible de Jerusalem.

Source: The Very Reverend Dom (Joseph) Henry Wansbrough, OSB, MA (Oxon), STL (Fribourg), LSS (Rome), a monk of Ampleforth Abbey and a biblical scholar. He was General Editor of the New Jerusalem Bible. "New Jerusalem Bible, Regular Edition", pg. v.

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