Paul confronts two serious problems threatening the Corinthian church's witness and holiness. First, he rebukes believers for taking their disputes before pagan courts instead of resolving them within the church community. Second, he addresses sexual immorality with a powerful theological argument: Christians' bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, purchased at a price, and therefore must honor God in their physical lives.
Paul opens with a rhetorical question built on the verb *tolmaō* (dare), immediately putting the Corinthians on the defensive. The present tense participle *echōn* (having) suggests an ongoing situation: 'when he has a case.' The contrast between *epi tōn adikōn* (before the unrighteous) and *epi tōn hagiōn* (before the saints) is emphatic and binary, allowing no middle ground. The double negative *kai ouchi* (and not) reinforces the incredulity: how can you possibly choose pagan courts over the community of the redeemed?
Verses 2-3 escalate through a series of rhetorical questions, each introduced by *ouk oidate* (do you not know?), a formula Paul uses throughout this letter to recall foundational truths the Corinthians should already grasp. The future tense *krinousin* and *krinoumen* (will judge) points to eschatological realities: saints will judge the world and even angels. The logic moves from greater to lesser (*a fortiori*): if believers will adjudicate cosmic matters, surely they are competent (*anaxioi*, 'unworthy' used ironically) to handle 'the smallest law courts' (*kritēriōn elachistōn*). The term *biōtika* (matters of this life) in verse 3 dismisses earthly disputes as trivial compared to the coming judgment. Verse 4 is syntactically complex, but the thrust is clear: the Corinthians are appointing as judges those who are *exouthenēmenous* (despised, of no account) in the church—a stinging indictment of their inverted values.
Verse 5 makes Paul's rhetorical strategy explicit: *pros entropēn hymin legō* (I say this to your shame). The question that follows drips with sarcasm: is there not even *one* wise person (*oudeis sophos*) among you capable of arbitrating between brothers? This is particularly cutting given the Corinthians' pride in their wisdom (1:18-31; 3:18-20). The phrase *ana meson* (between, in the midst of) emphasizes the relational context—these are disputes within the family. Verse 6 states the shameful reality baldly: *adelphos meta adelphou krinetai* (brother goes to law with brother), and worse, *epi apistōn* (before unbelievers). The placement of *apistōn* at the end creates a climactic emphasis on the scandal of airing family disputes before those outside the faith.
Verses 7-8 shift from interrogation to declaration. The phrase *ēdē men oun holōs* (already therefore completely) piles up particles to emphasize totality: the defeat is comprehensive and already accomplished. Paul then poses two parallel questions with *dia ti ouchi mallon* (why not rather?), proposing the radical alternative of accepting wrong and fraud rather than pursuing litigation. The final verse inverts the proposal: *alla hymeis* (but you yourselves) are the ones doing the wronging and defrauding. The climactic *kai touto adelphous* (and this to brothers) leaves the sentence hanging with devastating force. The accusative *adelphous* as the final word ensures that 'brothers' echoes in the reader's mind—the ultimate indictment of their behavior.
The very existence of lawsuits between believers is already defeat, regardless of who wins the case. Paul's vision is not of a community that litigates more skillfully, but of a family that absorbs loss rather than fracture fellowship—a cruciform ethic that mirrors the self-giving of Christ himself.
Paul's rebuke draws deeply on Israel's covenantal tradition of internal adjudication. In Deuteronomy 1:16-17, Moses commands the appointment of judges 'from among your brothers' to 'hear the cases between your brothers' and 'judge righteously.' The emphasis on resolving disputes within the covenant community, not by appealing to outsiders, is foundational to Israel's identity as a people set apart. Deuteronomy 16:18-20 further establishes the principle that justice must be pursued within the structures of the holy community, with judges who know and fear Yahweh.
Paul's argument assumes that the church is the continuation and fulfillment of Israel's covenant community. Just as Israel was to maintain internal justice systems that reflected God's righteousness, so the church must resolve disputes within its own fellowship. The scandal is not merely pragmatic (pagan judges might be biased) but theological: taking disputes before 'the unrighteous' implicitly denies the church's status as the eschatological people of God, competent to judge even angels. The Corinthians' recourse to secular courts represents a failure to live as the new covenant community, a regression from the Deuteronomic vision of a people whose internal justice reflects the character of their God.
Paul structures this passage as a rhetorical question followed by a vice list, then a stunning reversal. The opening 'Or do you not know' (ἢ οὐκ οἴδατε) is Paul's characteristic way of recalling foundational truth the Corinthians should already possess—this is not new information but forgotten or ignored reality. The double negative construction in Greek (οὐκ... οὐ) creates emphatic negation: the unrighteous will absolutely not inherit God's kingdom. The verb κληρονομέω appears in future tense, pointing to eschatological consummation, yet the present behavior determines future inheritance. Paul then issues a sharp command—'Do not be deceived' (μὴ πλανᾶσθε)—suggesting the Corinthians are in danger of believing otherwise, perhaps influenced by the 'all things are lawful' slogan he has been correcting.
The vice list itself employs relentless repetition of οὔτε ('neither... nor') to create a drumbeat of exclusion. Ten categories of sinners are named, moving from sexual sins (sexually immoral, idolaters, adulterers, effeminate, homosexuals) to economic sins (thieves, covetous, swindlers) to sins of excess and speech (drunkards, revilers). The list is not exhaustive but representative, with sexual immorality receiving particular emphasis given the Corinthian context. The chiastic structure places sexual sins at the beginning and property/relational sins following, with the repetition of 'will inherit the kingdom of God' (βασιλείαν θεοῦ κληρονομήσουσιν) at the end of verse 10 creating an inclusio with verse 9. This is not mere ethical instruction but a declaration about cosmic citizenship—these behaviors are incompatible with the age to come.
Verse 11 pivots dramatically with 'And such were some of you' (καὶ ταῦτά τινες ἦτε). The demonstrative pronoun ταῦτα ('these things') points back to the entire vice list, while τινες ('some') acknowledges that not all Corinthians practiced all these sins, but the community included former practitioners of each. The imperfect ἦτε ('you were') emphasizes past continuous state now decisively ended. Then comes the threefold ἀλλά ('but'), each introducing an aorist passive verb: 'you were washed... you were sanctified... you were justified.' The repetition of ἀλλά creates rhetorical force—three times Paul contradicts their past with their present reality. The passive voice throughout emphasizes divine initiative: God washed, sanctified, and justified them. The prepositional phrases 'in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ' and 'in the Spirit of our God' locate this transformation in Trinitarian action—the authority of Christ's name and the agency of the Spirit working together to accomplish what the Corinthians could never achieve themselves.
The gospel does not merely improve sinners; it transfers them from one kingdom to another, from one identity to another. What you were is not what you are—the past tense matters eternally.
Paul opens with diatribe — quoting (probably with audible irony) a Corinthian slogan, then dismantling it. πάντα μοι ἔξεστιν ("all things are lawful to me") sounds like libertine boasting derived from a half-grasped doctrine of grace; Paul does not deny it outright but pins it between two limits, συμφέρει ("is profitable") and οὐκ ἐγὼ ἐξουσιασθήσομαι ("I will not be brought under the authority of"). The wordplay between ἔξεστιν and ἐξουσιασθήσομαι (same root, ἐξουσία) is untranslatable in English: freedom that masters me is not freedom at all but a counter-tyranny. The slogan-and-reply pattern continues into v. 13 with the food/stomach analogy the Corinthians appear to have stretched from digestion to genitalia ("the body is for sex the way the stomach is for food — both are passing"). Paul concedes the analogy for food (καταργήσει, "He will do away with") but breaks it for the body: the σῶμα is not destined for annihilation but for the Lord and for resurrection.
Verse 14 is the fulcrum. The same God who raised the Lord ἐξεγερεῖ ("will raise up") us, future tense, "through His power" (διὰ τῆς δυνάμεως αὐτοῦ) — the body is not a temporary husk but a permanent destiny. This single verse demolishes the platonic dualism powering Corinthian sexual ethics. Paul then deploys five rhetorical questions in vv. 15-19, each beginning with οὐκ οἴδατε ("do you not know"), which presupposes that the church already possesses this knowledge but is refusing to live by it. The grotesque image of "taking the members of Christ and making them members of a prostitute" depends on a literal-physical reading of union with Christ — believers are not Christ's adopted associates but His μέλη, the very limbs by which He acts in the world. μὴ γένοιτο erupts in v. 15 — Paul's strongest negation, the "may it never be!" that LSB preserves.
The Genesis citation in v. 16 ("the two shall become one flesh") is decisive. Paul invokes the foundational creation text not to dignify marriage but to expose πορνεία: every act of sexual union creates a one-flesh bond, regardless of the intent or duration. The prostitute-encounter the Corinthian "strong" treat as morally trivial is, in covenantal terms, a parody of marriage that mortgages the body to the wrong partner. Verse 17 then sets up the antithesis: ὁ κολλώμενος τῷ κυρίῳ ἓν πνεῦμά ἐστιν. Same verb (κολλάω), different sphere — the prostitute-union is "one flesh," the Christ-union is "one spirit." Paul does not deny the body's importance; he insists the prior union (with Christ, by the Spirit) governs every subsequent bodily act.
The command φεύγετε τὴν πορνείαν in v. 18 is present imperative — keep on fleeing, make it your habitual posture, not a one-time decision. Paul's claim that "every other sin is outside the body, but the immoral person sins against his own body" has puzzled commentators for two millennia (gluttony, drunkenness, and self-harm are obviously bodily sins too). The best reading honors Paul's argument-flow: πορνεία uniquely violates the σῶμα as the site of one-flesh union, since the sin is itself constituted by an act of bodily incorporation with another. Other sins act through the body; this sin acts against the body's covenantal integrity.
Verses 19-20 close with the temple metaphor and the slave-market metaphor stacked on top of each other. ναός (not ἱερόν) means the inner sanctuary, the holy of holies — the place of God's localized presence. Paul has already called the church corporately the temple in 1 Cor 3:16; here he individualizes it: your body is a sanctuary. Then the manumission language (ἠγοράσθητε... τιμῆς, "you were bought with a price") rewires the libertine's "the body is mine to do as I please." Bodies that have been purchased belong to the buyer. The aorist ἠγοράσθητε looks back to the cross; the present imperative δοξάσατε ("glorify!") looks forward to a life lived bodily for the buyer's honor.
Sexual ethics in Paul are not rules but anatomy: the body that has already been joined to Christ cannot be joined to a prostitute without tearing the seam. Freedom that ends in self-mastery's collapse is not freedom; it is a softer form of slavery, and the gospel ransomed you out of that market for good.
The pivot citation is Genesis 2:24: וְדָבַ֣ק בְּאִשְׁתּ֔וֹ וְהָי֖וּ לְבָשָׂ֥ר אֶחָֽד ("and he shall cleave to his wife, and they shall become one flesh"). The Hebrew verb דָּבַק (dāḇaq, "cling, cleave, adhere") is the term the LXX translates with κολλάω — exactly the verb Paul uses in 1 Cor 6:16-17 for both the prostitute-union and the Christ-union. The lexical thread is unmistakable: Paul reads πορνεία through Genesis 2, not through a Stoic ethics manual. Sex creates a covenantal bond by divine design, and the bond is unaffected by the intent of the participants.
Hosea 4:10-12 stands behind the prophetic indictment: Israel is described as having committed spiritual adultery by binding herself to idols, and Hosea uses sexual imagery to describe covenant infidelity precisely because the underlying logic is the same — bodies bound to false objects of worship cannot also be bound to Yahweh. Paul's transposition of this prophetic logic into the Corinthian church is exact: the body joined to a prostitute is the body un-joined (in act, not in legal status) from Christ. LSB renders both Hosea and 1 Cor with the strong "join / cleave" language so the Genesis-Hosea-Paul thread is visible to the English reader.
"May it never be!" for μὴ γένοιτο (v. 15) — LSB preserves the strongest negation in Koine Greek rather than softening to "Certainly not!" or "God forbid." The phrase appears 14 times in Paul (10x in Romans), always at the moment a wrong inference threatens the gospel; in 1 Cor 6 it is the only such use, and it lands precisely where the Corinthians' libertine logic threatens to coopt Christ.
"Sexual immorality" for πορνεία — older versions ("fornication") narrowed the term to pre-marital sex; LSB widens it back to its actual semantic range (any sexual act outside covenant marriage), which matches Paul's argument here against prostitution-encounters but extends naturally to the wider field he addresses in chapters 5 and 7.
"Members of Christ" for μέλη Χριστοῦ (v. 15) — LSB resists "parts of Christ's body" or "limbs of Christ," keeping the technical term members that Paul will pick up again in 12:12-27. The same word in both passages signals that the body-of-Christ ecclesiology and the body-as-temple sexual ethic are one teaching, not two.
"Bought with a price" for ἠγοράσθητε... τιμῆς (v. 20) — LSB preserves the slave-market verb; "redeemed" or "purchased" obscure the agora setting. The point is concrete: bodies have changed owners. The same root resurfaces in 7:23 ("you were bought with a price; do not become slaves of men"), tying chapter 6's sexual ethic to chapter 7's social ethic.