G. Virgins (7:25–38)
G. Virgins (7:25–38)
25. Now about (peri de, see on 7:1) points to another matter on which the Corinthians had asked a specific question. Virgins (parthenoi) are usually female, though sometimes the word is used of men (in the New Testament only in Rev. 14:4). Some take it here as referring to both sexes (e.g. Bengel, Craig, Hurd, p. 68). J. K. Elliott sees in the plural a reference to engaged couples (NTS, 19, 1972–73, p. 220), while J. Massingberd Ford thinks of young widows or widowers (NTS, 10, 1963–64, p. 362). But the whole tenor of this passage shows that Paul is referring to young women only. Five times out of six his use of the feminine article shows that women are in mind, and the sixth, that here, should surely be taken in the same way. A girl’s parent or guardian largely determined whether she should marry or not. Paul has no saying of the Lord on this subject; he says so plainly and gives his own advice. His description of himself in terms of the Lord’s mercy emphasizes at one and the same time his own shortcomings and the centrality of his Lord. The perfect (ēleēmenos) indicates the permanence of the Lord’s mercies, and trustworthy (pistos) the obligations this lays on the recipient of God’s good gifts. It is possible to understand the word as ‘a believer’, but unlikely in this context.
26. Paul’s advice is conditioned by the present crisis (anangkē). This is usually taken to mean the troubles preceding the second advent, and indeed this is often held to be self-evident. But the word is never used in the New Testament in this way; the nearest is a reference to the troubles preceding the fall of Jerusalem (Luke 21:23). Paul often refers to Christ’s return, but he does not associate anangkē with it. When he uses this word it has meanings like ‘compulsion’ (v. 37), ‘compelled’ (9:16), ‘hardships’ (2 Cor. 6:4), etc., but never the events preceding the second coming. It seems here to denote more than the opposition the Christian always encounters. Some pressing constraint lay hard on the Corinthians at the time of writing (Bengel says firmly, ‘The famine in the time of Claudius, Acts xi. 28’). Whatever the precise meaning, Paul’s friends were at that time in unusually difficult circumstances, and in view of the troubled times Paul felt it best for them to stay as they were. When high seas are raging it is no time for changing ships.
27. Paul spells it out. The man who has married (the Greek means ‘is bound to a wife’) should not seek to loose the tie. The man who ‘has been loosed’ (which may mean divorced, that the spouse has died, or that he has never married) should not seek a wife. Both verbs are in the perfect tense and indicate settled states.
28. Paul has consistently maintained that, while it is good for some not to marry, yet marriage is the normal state. There is nothing sinful about it. He repeats this. Though in the prevailing troubles he advised a man not to marry, he says plainly that it is no sin if he does. And so with a virgin. Paul’s reason for not advocating marriage is the many troubles (actually thlipsis, ‘trouble’ is singular) the married face, but he does not define the nature of the trouble. Robertson and Plummer appropriately cite Bacon, ‘He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune’, and ‘children sweeten labours, but they make misfortunes more bitter’. Marriage implies responsibility, and marriage in times of distress must lead to some kind of trouble. In this life is more literally ‘in the flesh’, an expression which here points to human weakness, ‘the totality of the limitations under which we live’ (Ruef). Paul’s tenderness comes out in his refusal to pursue the matter further. His I is emphatic; he for his part is trying (conative present) to spare them.
29. What I mean (‘But this I say’) gives what follows a heightened solemnity. Short is a perfect participle: ‘the time has been shortened’. Many see a reference to the second advent. This may be right, but though he often refers to the Lord’s return, Paul never elsewhere gives this kind of counsel with regard to it. Both in his earlier and his later epistles he uses the second advent to inspire people to blameless conduct (e.g. 1 Thess. 5:1–11; Phil. 1:9–11). The note of present crisis, so marked here, is absent. Those who see the second advent here never seem to face the question of why the last generation should live differently from any others. We all face the same judgment. Calvin thought of the shortness of life (so also Robertson); but it is difficult to see how this justifies the following instructions. RSV has ‘the appointed time’, which raises the question, ‘appointed for what?’ It is best to see a reference to prevailing circumstances at Corinth (the ‘crisis’ of v. 26). The culmination was evidently not far off; in this troubled period many kinds of conduct must be transformed. In particular those who have wives must be ‘as those who have none’.
30. So with other things. Mourners tend to be engrossed in their mourning. Those that rejoice are taken up with their happiness. Purchasers concentrate on their new possessions. In the prevailing distress and the shortened time all will be jolted out of their normal attitudes. Believers should accordingly not be preoccupied with their earthly circumstances; they should be detached from them all.
31. The whole is summed up in the expression those who use the things of the world. The construction is unusual (chraomai with the accusative, only here in the New Testament), but the meaning is clear. Paul speaks of those who make any use of the things of time and sense. Engrossed translates the compound verb, katachraomai, of which the uncompounded form has just been used. The prefix kata sometimes gives the simple verb a sinister twist (‘use wrongly’, AV ‘abuse’). But it often simply intensifies the meaning (‘use to the full’), though the intensification is sometimes not marked (i.e. the simple and compounded verbs may differ little). In this context NIV seems to have the sense of it. Those who make use of the things of this world should not be engrossed in them, overlooking the transitoriness of earthly things and the importance of what is eternal. Schēma (present form) denotes the outward shape, especially when there is some idea that this is changeable. It is adapted to the thought of fickleness, the changing fashion. There is nothing solid and lasting in this world system; it is its nature to pass away. It is folly for believers to act as though its values were permanent.
32. Paul repeats his thought of vv. 27f. that he wishes his friends to be free from concern (‘anxieties’, RSV). The trying nature of the times meant that the married must take anxious thought for their partners: ‘A man who is a hero in himself becomes a coward when he thinks of his widowed wife and his orphaned children’ (Lightfoot on v. 26). This concern would distract from that perfect service of the Lord at which Paul aimed. But the unmarried man is concerned about the Lord’s affairs. Paul may see this as desirable (as most commentators hold). But he has just said that he wants his readers to be free from concern; he may thus mean that he wants their service of the Lord to be a relaxed acceptance of God’s will for their lives rather than a worried preoccupation with personal holiness and the like. MM shows that the verb areskō (please) includes the thought of service in the interests of another, in this case, of God. This is the extent of Paul’s preference for celibacy. He wants people to be given to the service of God without distraction.
33. The married man, by contrast, must have a certain concern about the affairs of this world. This does not, of course, mean ‘worldliness’, but is a reminder that the married man must take thought for the interests of his family. He has obligations, and their discharge demands some attention to the things of this world. He must face the question of how he can please (areskō, as in v. 32) his wife. We should probably take ‘and he is divided’ here rather than in v. 34. The man wants both to please the Lord and to please his wife. He ‘is divided’.
34. Some take the verb divided with this verse and see a difference between a wife and a virgin (as AV). But this is not a natural reading of the Greek. Rather Paul moves on to show that there is the same kind of difference between married and unmarried women as he has just shown exists between married and unmarried men. The unmarried woman may be a widow or divorced or, of course, a virgin, who is thus singled out for special notice. The woman who is not bound by the marriage tie is able to concentrate on the things of God without distraction. She can give herself over to being ‘holy in body and spirit’ (RSV). ‘Holy’ here refers not to ethical achievement, but to consecration. The virgin is no more righteous than the wife, but her consecration is unmodified by family responsibilities. The married woman, by contrast, must take into account the needs of her husband. Just as he does, she must give attention to the affairs of this world in order to please her partner.
35. The apostle insists that he has the best interests of the Corinthians at heart. He is seeking what is for their own good (‘benefit’ or ‘advantage’). Not to restrict you employs a metaphor from hunting, ‘not to throw a lasso over you’. Paul is not trying to capture and constrain them. He wants that which makes for ‘good order’ (euschēmon, ‘of good shape’) and which provides for constancy (euparedron). There need be no intermission in the service offered by the unmarried, no distraction of any sort.
36. As he has done repeatedly, Paul qualifies a statement pointing to the advantages of celibacy by making it clear that marriage is not to be despised. There is no sin if the virgin gets married. This verse is very difficult and three explanations have won support.
(a) Anyone means the parent or guardian of a girl, and acting improperly means not providing for her marriage. The parent has acted on the view that celibacy is to be preferred to marriage and has kept her unmarried (whether with or against her will is not clear). He now wonders whether he is doing the right thing. To withhold marriage from a girl of marriageable age and anxious to marry would have been to court disaster in first-century Corinth and bring dishonour on both father and daughter. Getting on in years renders a very unusual term (hyperakmos). It seems to mean ‘past the stage of being fully developed’ (akmē = ‘highest point’, ‘prime’; Plato speaks of a woman as at her akmē at the age of twenty, Rep. V. 460.E); she is, then, at or past the age when marriage would be expected. Paul adds a further point, if ‘it has to be’ (RSV), which probably means that she does not have the gift of continence (cf. v. 7). If the parent sees all this, he may do what he wants. There is no sin. Let them marry. The principal objections are two. ‘His virgin’ is not common for ‘his daughter’ (but it does occur; LSJ cites Sophocles as saying ‘my virgins’ for ‘my daughters’). It would be a quick way of including guardians as well as fathers. The other is that ‘let them marry’ is most naturally taken as referring to the man and the virgin spoken of earlier in the verse. This is so, but the grammarian, A. T. Robertson, sees the subject of the verb here as ‘drawn from the context (the two young people)’ (Grammar, p. 1204). AV and JB take this view.
(b) The view behind NIV (RSV, GNB) is that anyone refers to a young man and the virgin to his fiancée; the pair have agreed to remain celibate. Paul tells them that there is no sin if they change their mind and decide to marry. But this may be reading modern ideas of engagement into the text. The Greeks do not appear to have had an ‘engagement’ at all (Conzelmann). There was a betrothal among the Jews and the Romans, but this was more than our ‘engagement’; it was in effect marriage, stage 1, and could be broken only by divorce proceedings. And it was not brought about by an agreement of the couple; it was an arrangement made by the parents. Even if we allow the possibility of an ‘engagement’ the question arises, ‘Engagement for what?’ ‘Engagement’ surely means ‘engagement to marry’. Why should people get engaged at all unless they mean to marry? It is, moreover, difficult to put meaning into acting improperly towards the virgin on this hypothesis. There is nothing ‘improper’ in his not marrying a girl he has agreed not to marry. Again, ‘his virgin’ (NIV translates the Greek for ‘his’ by he is engaged to) is a very strange designation for a man’s fiancÈe. For all its popularity in some circles, Hillyer is probably right in saying that this view reflects ‘a more recent and western situation’.
(c) Many commentators think that Paul is referring to ‘spiritual marriage’, whereby people went through the form of marriage, but lived together as brother and sister. From highly spiritual motives they abstained from sexual intercourse. They sought a union of spirit, but not of bodies. Those who take this view often take hyperakmos as referring to the man (as is grammatically possible), and give it the meaning ‘over-passionate’ or the like. Paul gives permission to such people to marry if they find the strain too great. The decisive objection to this is that Paul regards the withholding of sexual relations by married people as an act of fraud (v. 5; few of those holding this position discuss this point). It may be done by mutual consent ‘for a time’, and the couple must then ‘come together again’. It is impossible to think that a man who valued the sex act in marriage so highly would acquiesce in a situation where it was done away with. Again, this view has to take the verb gamizō (‘give in marriage’) in the sense ‘marry’ (v. 38, where see note). Robertson and Plummer regard this as ‘decisive’. Further, it is more than doubtful whether hyperakmos can mean ‘over-passionate’. Moffatt says that it denotes ‘the surge of sexual passion’, but he gives no reason and it does not seem natural. If we feel that there is no change of subject and that it must apply to the man, this meaning is perhaps inevitable, but we would not expect such a meaning for the word. Finally, the earliest date at which ‘spiritual marriage’ is attested is well into the second century, and then it is vigorously opposed. There is no reason, in our present state of knowledge, for holding that it existed as early as this, or that Paul would have countenanced it.
None of the explanations is without substantial objection. But the first view should probably be accepted because the objections to it do not seem as forceful as those urged against the other two.
37. Paul reaffirms his preference that the virgin be not given in marriage, but lists four conditions before this course be followed.
(a) The man has settled the matter in his own mind; he is clear that this is the right course. (b) There is no compulsion, no external obligation such as a marriage contract. (c) He has ‘authority’ (exousia), i.e. ‘the right to give effect to his own purpose’ (Parry). Slaves, for example, would not have this right. (d) He has ‘made a judgment’ (kekriken) to keep his virgin (as a virgin). If these four criteria are fulfilled, then the man does the right thing in keeping her from marriage.
38. Paul concludes that the man who gives his daughter in marriage ‘does well’, while he who does not ‘will do better’. The verb ‘gives in marriage’ (gamizō) is not found before the New Testament. The -izō termination points to the meaning ‘gives in marriage’ (not ‘marries’), and this does not sit well with a reference to engaged couples or spiritual marriages (which requires the meaning ‘marry’). Those who hold such views point out that in the New Testament period the -izō termination was losing its force in many verbs. It was, but no-one seems to have shown that this is true of gamizō. Those who hold such views maintain that gamizō here has the same meaning as gameō in earlier verses. But why should Paul change his verb? And why do it just here? Why use a verb which elsewhere always means ‘give a woman in marriage’?