What does 1 Corinthians 15:3 mean?
As Paul begins to confront some confusion or false teaching about the resurrection from the dead, he has emphasized to the Corinthians that their eternal future stands or falls based on their belief in the entire gospel truth. That includes the truth of both Christ's death on the cross for our sin and His resurrection from the dead by God's power.Now Paul begins to spell out specifically what the gospel message about Jesus Christ really is. Paul insists that he presented it to the Corinthians exactly as it had been presented to him by Christ. In passages such as Galatians 1:12, Paul indicates that this reception was literal: he received this information directly from Jesus.
The first truth of the gospel message is this: Christ died for our sins. That is, the sinless Son of God was sacrificed on the cross to pay the penalty for the sins that we committed. He did so exactly as the Old Testament Scriptures predicted that He would. Famous passages explaining this include Psalm 53 and Psalm 22.