1 Corinthians 5:1

1 Corinthians 5:1-8. The case of the incestuous person

1. It is reported commonly that there is fornication among you This explains the mention of the -rod" in the last verse.

and such fornication as is not so much as named amongst the Gentiles Two considerations of some importance, bearing on Church history, are suggested by this passage. The first is, that we must dismiss the idea, that the Christian Church at the beginning of its career was a pattern of Christian perfection. The Corinthian community, as described here and in chap. 1 Corinthians 11:21, was lamentably ignorant of the first principles of Christian morality and Christian decency, and we see how the Apostles had to begin by laying the very foundations of a system of morals among their depraved heathen converts. It is probable that nowhere, save in the earlier years of the Church at Jerusalem, was there any body of Christians which was not very far from realizing the Christian ideal, and which was not continually in need of the most careful supervision. The second point is that St Paul's idea of discipline seems to have differed greatly from the principles which were creeping into the Church at the end of the second century. See 1 Corinthians 5:5, and compare it with 2 Corinthians 2:5-8, which seems plainly to refer to the same person. In spite of the gravity of the crime it would seem (2 Corinthians 7:12) that it was committed while the father was alive we find here nothing of the long, in some instances life-long, penance which had become the rule of the Church for grave offences before the end of the third century. It is, perhaps, hardly necessary to remark that by the words - father's wife," stepmotheris meant. But the language of the Apostle seems to imply that she had been divorced by the father and married to the son, a proceeding which the shameful laxity of Corinthian society rendered possible. See note on ch. 1 Corinthians 7:10. Estius, however, thinks that the son was living publicly with his father's wife, as though she were his own.