The only meaning which the Greek seems to admit here
is a reference to the practice of submitting to baptism instead of some person
who had died unbaptized. Yet this explanation is liable to very great
difficulties. (1) How strange that St. Paul should refer to such a superstition
without rebuking it! Perhaps, however, he may have censured it in a former
letter, and now only refers to it as an argumentum ad homines. It has,
indeed, been allege that the present mention of it implies a censure; but this
is far from evidence. (2) If such a practice did exist in the Apostolic Church,
how can we account for its being discontinued in the period which followed,
when a magical efficacy was more and more ascribed to the material act of
baptism? Yet the practice was never adopted except by some obscure sects of
Gnostics, who seem to have founded their custom on this very passage.
The explanations which have been adopted to avoid the
difficulty, such as ‘over the graves of the dead,’ or ‘in the name of the dead
(meaning Christ),’ &c., are all inadmissible, as being contrary to the
analogy of the language. On the whole, therefore, the passage must be
considered to admit of no satisfactory explanation. It alludes to some practice
of the Corinthians, which has not been recorded elsewhere, and of which every
other trace has perished. (W. J. Conybeare and J. S. Howson, The Life and
Epistles of St. Paul [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1964], 412-13 n. 7)