One of Paul’s converts was living with ‘his father’s
wife’, probably his stepmother (see Deut. 22: 30; 27: 20; Lev. 18: 8). Paul
correctly says that this kind of sexual immorality ‘is not found even among
pagans’ (1 Cor. 5: 1). He brands this as a type of porneia, a word which he and
others used as a general term to cover all forms of sexual transgression. Paul
prescribes that the man be expelled from the church, being ‘delivered to Satan
for the destruction of the flesh’ (1 Cor. 5: 4—5). It appears from this that he
thought that the man would be punished by death, not at the hands of humans,
but simply by being turned over to Satan. He adds, however, that ‘his spirit
will be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus’ (5: 5).
This is a most instructive clash. Here the transgressor
was not following standard Gentile mores. He seems to have thought that his
deed was justified by his new Christian status. The sentence in 1 Corinthians
5: 3-4 is quite difficult, but the most likely rendering of it is this:
For I, though absent in body, am present in the Spirit,
[and] I have already condemned, as though present, the one who is acting thus
in the name of the Lord Jesus. When you are gathered together ... hand this man
over to Satan.
Most translators, seeking to avoid the implication that
the man committed incest ‘in the name of the Lord Jesus’, connect that phrase
either with ‘I have condemned’ or ‘when you are gathered together’. The
simplest rendering, however, is that given just above, and this also provides
the readiest explanation of the man’s behaviour: he acted ‘in the name of the
Lord Jesus’. It is clear what had happened: Paul had said ‘you are a new
creation’ and ‘live in the Spirit’. The man took seriously his being a new person
and concluded that old relationships had _ passed away. He then consulted the
spirit within him and began cohabiting with his stepmother. He had thought
through Paul’s own principles in a way Paul had not considered, and he accepted
a revolutionary implication of Paul’s theology which offended Paul himself.
We see also how loath Paul was to condemn a member of the
body of Christ to eternal destruction. He avoided it by accepting the Jewish
principle that physical death atones for sins, and he maintained that the
destruction of the body would lead to the salvation of the spirit. (E. P.
Sanders, Paul [Past Masters; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991],
106-7, emphasis in bold added)
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