Paul criticises those who take up lawsuits with other believers before the civil authorities – those who have no standing in the church. There should be people within the church who are "wise enough to decide between one believer and another": Paul asks whether there are any? It would be better to be wronged and to be defrauded than to take a matter to court before the "unrighteous" – for that is itself a greater fraud. Theologian Albert Barnes treats Paul's question as rhetorical: whereas William Robertson Nicoll, in the Expositor's Greek Testament, argues that Martin Luther, Beza, Lachmann, Osiander, Hofmann and Meyer "make the passage sterner and more telling" as an assertion than the common way of viewing it as a question, which is adopted also by Tischendorf and Ewald.
"Homosexuals" : catamites, those submitting to homosexuals
"Sodomites": male homosexuals
In 2019, Australian rugby playerIsrael Folau paraphrased from 1 Corinthians 6:9 on social media and was subsequently stripped of his multi million dollar contract when he refused to recant this post. $2 million was raised by the Australian public for his court costs. His appeal was subsequently settled.
Verse 12
"helpful" or "expedient" : Gill comments that "everything is not lawful to be done when the doing of them destroys the peace, comfort, and edification of others; when it stumbles and grieves weak minds, and causes offence to them"; see, so not "expedient" to use this liberty, to grieve a weak brother or to make oneself a "slave to one's appetite".
"You are not your own": the believers are often reminded in the Scripture that they "have passed from slavery to sin into slavery to Christ", but the slavery in Christ is the "true freedom of man", which enable a person to fulfil the law of one's being.
Final verse (6:20)
Verse 20
The majority of early manuscripts end this chapter with the words δοξάσατε δὴ τὸν Θεὸν ἐν τῷ σώματι ὑμῶν, doxasate de ton theon en tō sōmati humōn), "therefore glorify God in your body". The Textus Receptus adds καὶ ἐν τῷ πνεύματι ὑμῶν, ἅτινά ἐστι τοῦ Θεοῦ, kai en to pneumati humōn, hatina esti tou theou, which the New King James Version translates as "and in your spirit, which are God’s". The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges notes that "these words are not found in many of the best MSS. and versions, and they somewhat weaken the force of the argument, which is intended to assert the dignity of the body. They were perhaps inserted by some who, missing the point of the Apostle’s argument, thought that the worship of the spirit was unduly passed over."
