1 Corinthians 5:6 - Exposition

Your glorying; rather, the subject of your boasting, the point on which you glorify yourselves. The Greek word does not mean the act of boasting, but the thing of which we boast. Not good . The Greek word is not agathon, but kalon, an almost untranslatable word, which implies all moral beauty, and resembles the English word "fair" or "noble." When he says that it is "not good," he uses the figure called litotēs; i.e. he employs an expression intentionally too weak, that it may be corrected into a stronger one by the involuntary indignation of the reader; as when Virgil calls the cannibal tyrant Busiris "unpraised." Hence the clause is equivalent to "the thing of which you are boasting is detestable." Know ye not. This clause is used by St. Paul in specially solemn appeals, and almost exclusively in these Epistles ( 1 Corinthians 3:16 ; 1 Corinthians 6:16 , 1 Corinthians 6:19 ; 1 Corinthians 9:13 , 1 Corinthians 9:24 ). A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump ( Galatians 5:9 ). The taint alluded to is not only the presence of the unpunished offender, but the general laxity and impurity displayed by their whole bearing in the matter (comp. the line of Menander quoted in 1 Corinthians 15:33 , and the "root of bitterness" in Hebrews 12:15 ). (For the word "lump," see Romans 11:16 .)