<p>15:3 <i>For I delivered to you first of all that which also I received</i>- As noted on :1, Paul is ever seeking to build bridges of common experience between him and his readership. What they had received, he too at one point had also received and believed. And he asks them to follow his pattern of further response to it. &quot;First of all&quot; means 'most importantly'. The most important aspect of the Gospel is not the Kingdom of God on earth but the fact that Christ died for our sins.</p><p><i>That Christ died for our sins</i>- This was the &quot;first&quot; or most important aspect of the Gospel. Those who are not deeply convicted by their moral guilt and desperate need for forgiveness will never really see any urgency in the Gospel, nor behold the utter wonder of Chris's death for those sins. The Lord died &quot;for our sins&quot; and also &quot;for us&quot;, as so often testified in the NT. Our identity with &quot;our sins&quot; must not be forgotten. We are not to see our sin as some abstraction, somehow separate from us.</p><p><i>According to the scriptures- </i>It is tempting to assume that this refers to the Old Testament. But the same term is going to be used in :4 regarding how His burial and resurrection on the third day were also &quot;according to the Scriptures&quot;. There is little direct reference to these things in the Old Testament. So I suggest that the <i>graphe</i>, the written things, may refer to the early Gospel records which were already in circulation. If indeed Paul refers to the OT, then he would be expecting them to have figured things like Christ's burial and third day resurrection from the inferences of types and shadows- surely a big ask of illiterate, newly converted Gentiles with little access to the OT scriptures.</p>