1 Corinthians — Chapter 5

Authorship & Background

Deep Dive

Setting: Paul is still writing from Ephesus, in about AD 53–55, probably in the spring, since he plans to stay "until Pentecost" (16:8) and Passover imagery is close at hand in this chapter. Chapters 1–4 dealt with the church's divisions and its pride in favorite teachers, and chapter 4 ended with a father's question: "Shall I come to you with a rod, or with love?" (4:21). Chapter 5 shows why the rod was on his mind. The church that was so "puffed up" (4:6, 18–19) was tolerating open sexual sin in its own membership, and boasting while it did. Chapters 5–6 take up problems reported to Paul by word of mouth, before he turns to the questions in their letter (7:1). It is the New Testament's fullest single passage on church discipline.

Sexual Immorality Defiles the Church (vv1–13)

• "It is actually reported" (v1). The news came by word of mouth, perhaps from "Chloe's people" (1:11) or from Stephanas and his companions (16:17). The Corinthians had written Paul a letter of questions (7:1), but this was not one of them. "Actually" carries a note of disbelief: it is commonly known, and no one in Corinth thought to mention it.
• "Sexual immorality" (v1). The word is porneia. The lexicon gives "fornication," with a classical background in prostitution and general unchastity. In the New Testament it is the broad word for sexual sin outside marriage, and it covers this case even though the specific sin is incest. Paul uses the same word again in 6:13, 18 and 7:2.
• "Not tolerated even among pagans" (v1). Paul's point is that Corinth's church had fallen below the standards of the city around it. Corinth had a reputation for loose living, yet Roman law forbade marriage to a stepmother, and the Roman jurist Gaius lists it among forbidden unions. The orator Cicero, a century earlier, called a case of a woman marrying her son-in-law an incredible crime almost unheard of. The church was supposed to be "a new lump" (v7), and the pagans had better morals on this point.
• "A man has his father's wife" (v1). This is almost certainly his stepmother, not his own mother, since Paul would have said "mother." Leviticus 18:8 forbids exactly this, using the same phrase, "your father's wife," and Deuteronomy 22:30 and 27:20 repeat it. "Has" points to an ongoing relationship, not a single act, whether a marriage or living together. The father may have died or divorced her. Paul addresses only the man, and says nothing to or about the woman, which most commentators take to mean she was not a believer and so not under the church's discipline (v12).
• "And you are arrogant!" (v2). The word is physioō again, "puffed up," inflated like a bellows (4:6). The emphasis falls on "you." The man's sin is grave, but Paul's sharpest words are for the church. Perhaps they thought their freedom in Christ placed them above old rules (compare their slogan "All things are lawful," 6:12). Perhaps they were proud of being tolerant, or proud of this man's status. The text does not say why, only that they were proud while this was going on.
• "Ought you not rather to mourn?" (v2). "Mourn" is pentheō, the word for grieving the dead (Matt 9:15; Mark 16:10) and for the mourners Jesus blessed (Matt 5:4). Paul expects the church to grieve as if a funeral had happened among them. Later Paul says he fears he will have to "mourn over many" at Corinth who have not repented (2 Cor 12:21).
• "Let him who has done this be removed from among you" (v2). This is the instruction the rest of the chapter explains. Mourning should have led to action. There is no mention of a private warning first, as in Matthew 18:15–17. The sin was public and unrepentant, and the church already knew of it, so the time for quiet approaches had passed.
• "Though absent in body, I am present in spirit" (v3). Paul is not claiming to float over Corinth. He means his apostolic authority and his care are fully engaged with them, as in Colossians 2:5. "I have already pronounced judgment" uses krinō, the verb from 4:5. That verse forbade final verdicts on a servant's worth. This one is a judgment on plain, public conduct, which the church is commanded to make (v12).
• "When you are assembled in the name of the Lord Jesus" (v4). Paul does not act alone. The whole church is to gather, with Paul present in spirit and "the power of our Lord Jesus" among them, and carry out the discipline together. This echoes Jesus' promise about church discipline: "where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them" (Matt 18:20). In 2 Corinthians 2:6 Paul refers to a punishment inflicted "by the majority," which fits this kind of congregational act.
• "Deliver this man to Satan" (v5). The same phrase appears in 1 Timothy 1:20, where Paul hands over Hymenaeus and Alexander "that they may learn not to blaspheme." The New Testament pictures the world outside the church as the territory where Satan still rules (Eph 2:2; 1 John 5:19), and the church as the people Christ has rescued (Col 1:13). To put a man out of the fellowship is to put him back outside, without the protection, prayers and support of God's people.
• "For the destruction of the flesh" (v5). "Destruction" is olethros, which the lexicon gives as "ruin, destruction, death." It is a strong word, used elsewhere for sudden or eternal destruction (1 Thess 5:3; 2 Thess 1:9). What is destroyed, "the flesh," is debated. One view: "flesh" means his sinful nature, as it often does in Paul (Gal 5:24; Rom 8:13). Being put out of the church would make him feel the misery of his sin and break its hold. Another view: "flesh" means his body, and Paul expects physical suffering, sickness or even death, as with Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5) or the Corinthians who were sick and dying for misusing the Lord's Supper (11:30). The ESV footnote reflects this by offering "that his body" as an alternative. Both views are held by careful interpreters. Either way, God sets the limits and the aim is rescue.
• "So that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord" (v5). This is the purpose clause, and it governs everything else. Discipline is not revenge or simple house-cleaning. It is a last, severe remedy meant to bring a man back. "The day of the Lord" is the day of judgment Paul has already mentioned (1:8; 3:13). Some manuscripts add "Jesus" to "the Lord," but the meaning is unchanged. Many readers believe this man appears again in 2 Corinthians 2:5–11, where Paul urges the church to forgive and comfort a disciplined man "so he may not be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow." Others think that passage concerns a different offense, an insult against Paul himself (2 Cor 7:12). The identification is possible but not certain.
• "Your boasting is not good" (v6). Paul circles back to the pride of v2. Whatever they were boasting about, it was the wrong time and the wrong thing.
• "A little leaven leavens the whole lump" (v6). This was a proverb (Paul uses it again in Gal 5:9). Ancient bakers did not buy packets of dried yeast. They kept back a piece of fermented dough from the last batch and worked it into the new one, the way sourdough starter is used today. A small lump spread through the whole batch. Leaven usually stands for corrupting influence in the New Testament: the "leaven of the Pharisees" (Matt 16:6; Luke 12:1). One unchallenged sin, accepted as normal, changes a whole church's sense of what is acceptable.
• "Cleanse out the old leaven" (v7). Before Passover, Jewish households searched the house and removed every trace of leaven (Exod 12:15, 19; 13:7). The verb ekkathairō means to "cleanse thoroughly, cleanse out." In the Greek Old Testament it translates the Hebrew bāʿar, to burn out or purge, the same Hebrew verb behind the formula Paul quotes in v13. The leaven of v7 and the evil person of v13 are being removed in the same way.
• "That you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened" (v7). This is Paul's pattern of "become what you are." God has already made them a new, unleavened batch in Christ. Now they must live like it. Holiness is not how they earn a place in God's people. It is what that place looks like when it is lived out.
• "For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed" (v7). The Greek simply says "our pascha," and the lexicon notes this word can mean the feast, the meal or the lamb itself. Here it is the lamb, since it "has been sacrificed." In the order of the first Passover, the lamb was killed and then the leaven was put away for the seven-day Feast of Unleavened Bread (Exod 12:6, 15). Paul applies that order: the Lamb has already been slain, so the cleansing must follow. Jesus died at Passover (Matt 26:2), and John the Baptist (John 1:29), Peter (1 Pet 1:19) and Revelation (Rev 5:6) all present him as the Lamb. This short line is one of Paul's clearest statements that Jesus' death was a sacrifice for his people.
• "Let us therefore celebrate the festival" (v8). Paul includes himself ("let us"). The feast is not a single day but the whole Christian life, lived in the light of the Lamb's death. Its bread is "sincerity and truth," and its old leaven is "malice and evil." "Sincerity" is eilikrineia, which the lexicon gives as "sincerity, purity," with a classical sense of "unmixedness": something pure, with no foreign ingredient. It fits the picture of bread with no leaven worked in.
• "I wrote to you in my letter" (v9). This refers to an earlier letter, written before 1 Corinthians, which has not survived. Most scholars agree on that. A few have suggested part of it survives in 2 Corinthians 6:14–7:1, which speaks of separating from unbelievers, but there is no manuscript evidence for that theory.
• "Not to associate with sexually immoral people" (v9). The verb is synanamignymi, literally "to mix up together," and so "to associate closely with." It appears only here, in v11 and in 2 Thessalonians 3:14, where Paul gives the same instruction "that he may be ashamed."
• "Not at all meaning the sexually immoral of this world" (v10). The Corinthians had misunderstood, or chose to misunderstand, the first letter. Maybe they thought Paul meant to cut off contact with all immoral unbelievers, decided that was impossible, and ignored the whole instruction. Paul says plainly that he never meant that, "since then you would need to go out of the world." Jesus prayed not that his followers be taken out of the world but kept from evil in it (John 17:15). Paul assumes believers will share meals with unbelievers (10:27) and have unbelieving spouses (7:12–13).
• "The greedy and swindlers, or idolaters" (v10). "Greedy" is pleonektēs, "one desirous of having more," a person who always wants a bigger share. "Swindlers" is harpax. The lexicon gives "rapacious" and, as a noun, "swindler, extortioner." The same word describes the "ravenous wolves" of Matthew 7:15. These were ordinary sins of a commercial port city.
• "Anyone who bears the name of brother" (v11). The line is drawn at someone who claims to be a believer. The list grows from v10 to add "reviler" and "drunkard." "Reviler" is loidoros, "a railer," a person who habitually abuses others with words. This is not a full list of sins. It names patterns of life that, persisted in without repentance, contradict the name a person claims. The same list, nearly word for word, appears again in 6:9–10 as those who "will not inherit the kingdom of God." The Greek adelphos was used for fellow believers of either sex.
• "Not even to eat with such a one" (v11). In the ancient world, sharing a meal meant friendship, welcome and acceptance. Readers differ on how far this reaches. Some take it to mean only the Lord's Supper, the church's family meal. Most take it more broadly to include ordinary social meals, which in Corinth were often bound up with the church's gatherings (11:20–22). Either way, the aim is to make plain that the relationship has changed, not to cut off all contact or forbid every word. Paul tells the Thessalonians to warn such a person "as a brother," not treat him as an enemy (2 Thess 3:15).
• "What have I to do with judging outsiders?" (v12). Paul has no mandate to discipline the pagan world, and neither does the church. Its task is "those inside." Jesus' warning "Judge not" (Matt 7:1) forbids hypocritical, self-exalting judgment, as its context shows (Matt 7:3–5). It does not forbid a church from recognizing and dealing with open sin in its own family. The Corinthians had the order exactly backwards: proud of their tolerance inside, while Paul's earlier letter had been misread as a call to separate from the outside.
• "God judges those outside" (v13). Judgment of the world is left in God's hands (Rom 2:16). That frees the church to love its neighbors and witness to them, not police them.
• "Purge the evil person from among you" (v13). Paul closes with a quotation. This sentence is a refrain in Deuteronomy, where it follows the penalty for serious crimes in Israel: idolatry, false witness, rebellion, adultery and kidnapping (Deut 13:5; 17:7; 19:19; 21:21; 22:21, 24; 24:7). In Israel the penalty was often death. In the church it is removal from fellowship, with the hope of repentance. The verb exairō means "to remove." The church is now God's holy people, and the standard of holiness given to Israel applies to it, though the penalty is spiritual rather than civil.
• Discipline in the church's history. Christians have practiced this teaching in different ways. The early church developed long seasons of public penance before restoration. Medieval Catholicism used excommunication, sometimes with heavy political consequences. Reformed churches counted discipline as one of the marks of a true church. Anabaptist traditions emphasized "the ban" and shunning. Many churches today practice it rarely. The chapter itself sets the limits: it concerns professing believers, it addresses unrepentant and public sin, the whole church acts together, and the aim is the person's salvation.
• Commentators: All three see the church's pride as the deeper problem behind the man's sin. Matthew Henry: "churches should mourn for the scandalous behaviour of particular members." He adds that "It is a very wicked thing to glory over the miscarriages and sins of others." Guzik suggests the Corinthians may have mistaken tolerance for love. On "deliver to Satan" they divide. JFB reads it as Paul exercising a miraculous apostolic power to bring bodily disease or death, comparing Job and Paul's own thorn (2 Cor 12:7). Guzik reads it as expulsion: the man is returned to the world, the devil's domain, without the church's protection, and "flesh" means his sinful nature, not his body. Henry describes both views and suggests a mixed case, the church's censure combined with "a miraculous power or authority they had of delivering a scandalous sinner into the power of Satan." All three insist the purpose is the man's good. Henry: "The great end of church-censures is the good of those who fall under them." Guzik notes how this verse was later misused to justify torture during the Inquisition, the very opposite of its aim. JFB, like many, identifies the man with the forgiven offender of 2 Corinthians 2:5–10. On the leaven, Henry offers a farmyard proverb, "one scabbed sheep infects a whole flock," while Guzik explains the sourdough practice behind the picture. Guzik also suggests the yearly purge of leaven may have had a health benefit, since dough kept going year after year could spoil. That is his own suggestion, not something the text says. On v7, JFB thinks Paul wrote soon after Passover: "Doubtless he alludes to the Passover which had been two or three weeks before kept by the Jewish Christians." Henry says the Jews kept the feast of unleavened bread after the Passover was killed, and "So must we; not for seven days only, but all our days." On v8, JFB says "sincerity" describes "a thing which, when examined by the sun's light, is found pure and unadulterated." This depends on an old guess that the word comes from "sun" plus "judge." The lexicon gives only "sincerity, purity," with an older sense of "unmixedness," and does not confirm the sunlight origin. The picture of something proving pure under examination is still close to the meaning. On v9, JFB calls the earlier letter "a former one not now extant," and Guzik notes the verb literally means "mix up together," which the lexicon confirms. Henry draws the line in vv10–11 sharply: those who live this way "may call themselves brethren in Christ, but they are not Christian brethren," while "Christians must have gone out of the world to avoid the company of loose heathens." Guzik takes the swindler (harpax) as one who steals by violence, which is within the lexicon's "rapacious," though the word covers fraud as well as force.

Pointing to Christ

The heart of this chapter is one short sentence: "Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed." Everything else follows from it. The church is to be holy not to earn God's favor but because the Lamb has already died, and the leaven goes out of the house because the blood is already on the doorposts. The same Lord who gives the church authority to put an unrepentant man out also intends that "his spirit may be saved." Jesus is the shepherd who goes after the one sheep that wandered (Luke 15:4–7). Discipline at its best is not the church giving up on a sinner but the church refusing to pretend, so that he might come home. Paul's later plea to "reaffirm your love for him" (2 Cor 2:8) shows the door that discipline is meant to leave open.

Commentary

• Enduring Word (David Guzik): enduringword.com Guzik examines the nature of the sin, the church's wrong response, the purpose of discipline, and the leaven principle.
• Jamieson-Fausset-Brown (1871): blueletterbible.org A critical and explanatory commentary on the whole Bible, more concise than Matthew Henry and closer to the Hebrew and Greek, with attention to historical and geographical detail. Public domain.
• Matthew Henry's Exposition (1710): blueletterbible.org A devotional verse-by-verse commentary in the Puritan tradition, still among the most widely read three centuries on. Public domain.

Videos

Articles

• GotQuestions.org: gotquestions.org On the whole book: an overview of the book of 1 Corinthians -- who wrote it, when, why, and how it fits the rest of Scripture.

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Reflection

• Pride Instead of Mourning (v.2) — The Corinthians were arrogant about a serious sin in their midst instead of grieving over it. When you become aware of sin in your own church community, is your instinct grief and concern, or indifference?
• Discipline Aimed at Restoration (v.5) — Paul's instruction to remove the unrepentant man from the church is meant to save his spirit, not simply punish him. How does knowing the goal of church discipline is restoration change the way you think about accountability?
• Small Sin Never Stays Small (v.6) — Paul warns that a little leaven works through the whole batch of dough, meaning tolerated sin spreads. Is there something in your own life you've been excusing as small or manageable that's actually growing unchecked?
• Christ's Sacrifice as Motivation for Holiness (v.7) — Paul points to Christ as the sacrifice that makes a holy life both possible and necessary, not optional. How does Christ's sacrifice on your behalf shape your pursuit of holiness rather than becoming an excuse to keep sinning?
• Judging Those Within, Not Those Without (vv.12-13) — Paul says the church is responsible for addressing sin among its own members, while leaving outsiders to God's judgment. Are you holding fellow believers accountable with grace while resisting the urge to police those outside the church?