1 Corinthians 12:1-32, spiritual gifts, consider the so-called gifts of healing, which Paul writes in the plural, healings, as though each one were its own separate act of mercy, rather than a standing superpower somebody carries around in a pocket. Even the most spectacular item on the Corinthian list, speaking in tongues, Paul spends a whole later chapter pulling back down to earth, insisting that in the gathered church, five understandable words that actually help someone are worth more than 10,000 impressive words nobody can follow. Notice the pattern, every time Paul touches one of the flashy gifts, he immediately ties it to usefulness to whether it served and strengthened a real person sitting in the room. The dramatic packaging never impressed Paul, he kept asking what the gift was for.
Consider Ephesians 4:11-13 and something different happens again, that passage barely lists abilities at all, it lists people, apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers given to the church as if the gift were the gifted person handed over to the body to get it ready for the work. Then 1 Peter 4:10-11 zooms all the way out and refuses to give a detailed list at all, it sorts the entire universe of gifts into just two enormous buckets, whoever speaks and whoever serves, two categories and a single instruction. Whichever one is yours, carry it out with the strength that God supplies, so that in everything, God gets the glory.
Put all four side-by-side and the overlap is surprisingly thin, prophecy shows up in several of them, teaching appears in a couple. Past that, each list wanders off in its own direction and a number of gifts appear in only one passage and nowhere else in the entire Bible. Tongues, for instance, never appears outside the Corinthian material. The down-to-earth gift of showing mercy never appears outside Romans 12:6-8. If there were one official fixed roster of the spiritual gifts, this is simply not how you would expect inspired writers to record it. You would expect the lists to agree the way the multiplication table agrees with itself, no matter who writes it down, they do not agree, because there was never a fixed roster in the first place.
Consider Ephesians 4:11-13 and something different happens again, that passage barely lists abilities at all, it lists people, apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers given to the church as if the gift were the gifted person handed over to the body to get it ready for the work. Then 1 Peter 4:10-11 zooms all the way out and refuses to give a detailed list at all, it sorts the entire universe of gifts into just two enormous buckets, whoever speaks and whoever serves, two categories and a single instruction. Whichever one is yours, carry it out with the strength that God supplies, so that in everything, God gets the glory.
Put all four side-by-side and the overlap is surprisingly thin, prophecy shows up in several of them, teaching appears in a couple. Past that, each list wanders off in its own direction and a number of gifts appear in only one passage and nowhere else in the entire Bible. Tongues, for instance, never appears outside the Corinthian material. The down-to-earth gift of showing mercy never appears outside Romans 12:6-8. If there were one official fixed roster of the spiritual gifts, this is simply not how you would expect inspired writers to record it. You would expect the lists to agree the way the multiplication table agrees with itself, no matter who writes it down, they do not agree, because there was never a fixed roster in the first place.