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New Testament Reading - The good news proclaimed

¹Now let me remind you, brothers, of what the Gospel really is, for it has not changed — it is the same Good News I preached to you before. You welcomed it then and still do now, for your faith is squarely built upon this wonderful message; ²and it is this Good News that saves you if you still firmly believe it, unless of course you never really believed it in the first place.

³I passed on to you right from the first what had been told to me, that Christ died for our sins just as the Scriptures said he would, ⁴and that he was buried, and that three days afterwards he arose from the grave just as the prophets foretold. ⁵He was seen by Peter and later by the rest of “the Twelve.”^{a 6} After that he was seen by more than five hundred Christian brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died by now. ⁷Then James saw him, and later all the apostles. ⁸Last of all I saw him too, long after the others, as though I had been born almost too late for this. ⁹For I am the least worthy of all the apostles, and I shouldn’t even be called an apostle at all after the way I treated the church of God.

¹⁰But whatever I am now it is all because God poured out such kindness and grace upon me—and not without results: for I have worked harder than all the other apostles, yet actually I wasn’t doing it, but God working in me, to bless me. ¹¹It makes no difference who worked the hardest, I or they; the important thing is that we preached the Gospel to you and you believed it.

1. The name given to Jesus’ twelve disciples and still used after Judas was gone from among them.