Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 1 Corinthians · About this commentary
Bought with a Price
1 Corinthians 6:15-20
15 Don’t you know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? May it never be! · WEB
Union with Christ and union with a prostitute are both bodily unions, and the passage ends with the reason a Christian's body is not his own to spend.
Don't you know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? May it never be! 1 Corinthians 6:15.
The argument is put as an outrage rather than a rule. In a city where recourse to a brothel was unremarkable, and where some believers were evidently defending it under the slogan of the previous verse, Paul does not begin with a prohibition. He asks what the act does with a body that already belongs to somebody. May it never be is the strongest expression of refusal he uses.
Or don't you know that he who is joined to a prostitute is one body? For, "The two," he says, "will become one flesh" 1 Corinthians 6:16.
And the text produced is the marriage text from Eden Genesis 2:24 Matthew 19:5. That is the force of the argument: the union that Scripture says makes two people one flesh is not suspended by the transaction being commercial or the intention being casual. What the Corinthians were treating as an appetite satisfied is described as a joining, whether or not either party meant anything by it. The act carries a significance the participants do not control.
But he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit 1 Corinthians 6:17.
The two unions are set side by side because they are the same kind of claim on the same person, and that is what makes them incompatible. Flee sexual immorality! 1 Corinthians 6:18 is the one imperative in the passage, and flight is what Scripture recommends here rather than resistance — Joseph left his coat behind Genesis 39:12 2 Timothy 2:22. Then a third slogan is quoted and answered: sins may be outside the body, they had said, but he who commits sexual immorality sins against his own body. The damage is not external to the person.
Or don't you know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God? You are not your own 1 Corinthians 6:19.
The temple image from chapter three, applied now to the individual 1 Corinthians 3:16. And the conclusion drawn from it is a matter of ownership rather than of purity codes: you are not your own. That sentence is the exact denial of the slogan the passage began with. All things are lawful for me assumes a self that owns itself and may dispose of itself; the gospel's claim is that this is the one thing that is not true of a Christian.
For you were bought with a price. Therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God's 1 Corinthians 6:20.
The price is not named, and does not need to be 1 Peter 1:18–19 Acts 20:28. In a port city where people were bought and sold, the image was concrete: a purchase transfers ownership, and a purchased slave does not decide the use of his own hands. The demand that follows is positive rather than prohibitive — not keep your body clean but glorify God in your body, the same body the resurrection will raise 1 Corinthians 6:14. Corinth's error was to think the body too trivial to matter. Paul's answer is that it is the instrument of worship.
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