Did Paul Blame Victims of Sexual Assault? (Part Three: 1 Corinthians 6)
Consent, coercion, and culpability in Paul
We’re continuing our series on the Apostle Paul’s views on sexual consent: Did he blame enslaved Christians for experiencing sexual abuse? Or did he honor them as full members of the body of Christ?
In Part One and Part Two, we looked at the cultural waters in which Paul swam. Because the ancients thought about sex differently than we do, we asked: Is it historically plausible that Paul could have distinguished between coercive violation and consensual sex?
The answer to that question turned out to be a resounding yes. Both Roman and Jewish contexts point to a shared norm: women were not legally or morally blamed for coerced sex, though they still endured social shame. In some cases, illicit sex could even be presumed coercive because of a patriarchal power dynamic.
In isolation, that doesn’t prove Paul’s view. It gives us a place to start—we can say that it’s probable that Paul shared this worldview. But now, let’s turn to the pages of 1 Corinthians to see what Paul himself has to say.
(We’re going to end up in 1 Corinthians 6 today, which gives us more language for addressing the perpetration of sexual abuse than it does for addressing victimization; next week, our focus will be on victims as we read 1 Corinthians 7 and 12.)
Seeing Corinthian Christians
The church in Corinth was a hot mess.
First Corinthians tells us that the church was diverse—men and women; well-off, middle-class, and poor; Gentiles and Jews; freeborn, freedpersons,1 and the enslaved; people with Greek and Latin names; followers of Paul and followers of Apollos. It also tells us that the church was fractious.
(Isn’t it comforting to realize we’re not unique—Christians have always dealt with conflict?)
Imagine, for a moment, that you’re a member of the Corinthian church. Tensions are running high. Everyone’s fighting.
And then, a well-off man named Stephanas and two of his freedmen—Fortunatus and Achaicus—return home from Ephesus with a letter from Paul.
The whole church gathers together. Then Fortunatus begins to dramatically read the letter—sometimes rolling his eyes to communicate Paul’s sarcasm, sometimes speaking with loving gentleness, sometimes staring at a particular member of the congregation who should feel especially called out.
Meditate for a moment on these words from Paul’s introductory greeting (1 Corinthians 1:4-5 NRSVUE):
I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that has been given you in Christ Jesus, for in every way you have been enriched in him, in speech and knowledge of every kind.
Now, think about the character you’re imagining yourself as.
Are they freeborn? Perhaps of your same socioeconomic class (or a little richer)? That’s normal!
Even when we try to put ourselves in the sandals of the “original audience” of the New Testament, we usually imagine a character who shares a lot in common with us—someone who seems like a “default early Christian.” Even though we know that the early church was diverse!
Unless we’re reading a passage that specifically talks about slavery, we don’t usually imagine how the enslaved would’ve heard the New Testament. (Think about your favorite New Testament passage—have you ever thought about how an enslaved person from that period might’ve understood it? Because until halfway through seminary, when I started formulating the ideas that ended up becoming my thesis, I definitely hadn’t.)
Today, I’d like us to consider a different member of the congregation, one we usually don’t see—an enslaved woman who couldn’t legally defend the boundaries of her own body. Roman law declared her devoid of honor and gave her enslaver the legal right to sexually abuse her, or even pimp her out.2
So, to humanize her, to help us see her, let’s imagine her name—we’ll use Prima again.
As Prima sits in the gathering of Corinthian Christians and listens to Fortunatus perform the letter we now call 1 Corinthians, how does she understand the text? What do Paul’s teachings on sexual morality mean for her? As she makes sense of Paul’s words, might she find, in his moral logic, a message of hope and freedom?
In short, what insights might her experience give us into Paul’s theological logic? How can we learn from the kinds of questions she might ask?
“Bought With a Price”
Paul talks about sex a lot in 1 Corinthians.
But I want to zero in on one particular metaphor. In 1 Corinthians 6:20, while blasting a group of churchgoing men for visiting prostitutes, Paul tells Corinthian Christians that they were “bought with a price.”
He uses “bought with a price” again in the very next chapter, in a discussion of slavery and freedom. After giving some brief instructions to enslaved Corinthians, he commands free Corinthians to not become slaves because they’ve been “bought with a price” (1 Corinthians 7:23).
So, this metaphor is used once in the context of sex and once in the context of slavery/freedom. Interesting, right?
More interesting—what sort of picture does “bought with a price” evoke? We tend to skip right over the word picture and think about what the picture points to—the death and resurrection of Jesus.
But in Paul’s world, it was the enslaved who were bought with a price.
“Bought with a price” is a metaphor rooted in the slave market.
Now, Paul routinely uses slavery metaphors, but this language is unique in the New Testament—and nowhere else in any of his surviving letters does he explicitly evoke the slave market.
When a biblical writer uses a unique phrase more than once like this, that’s a signal that we should pay attention. It invites us to examine both uses closely to see if there might be a connection between the two passages. And that’s especially true if the verbal echoes occur close together. Yet, most commentators haven’t noticed a clear connection between these passages. The verbal echo is usually treated as incidental.3
But might we find a connection if we read these passages with the concerns of enslaved women in mind?
Let’s imagine ourselves back in Corinth, listening to Paul’s letter. What emotions might the phrase “bought with a price” provoke in us?
A freeborn Christian, who’d never known the market as a place of terror, might have brushed past it with hardly a second thought—though they would have, of course, recognized it as a slave market metaphor.
For a freedwoman, the phrase might recall trauma—her former enslaver enforcing compliance with the threat of sale, or even a memory of standing naked on a platform, exposed and vulnerable, awaiting her fate.4
But for the enslaved—for Prima—the force of the metaphor would’ve been unavoidable, neither an abstraction nor merely a memory but an ever-present danger. On any day, her life—as difficult and demoralizing as it might be—could be upended in that market, her relationships severed, any sense of stability stripped away. She might be sold to a harsher enslaver, or to a brothel, or to a rural estate, never to be heard from again.
So, this week and next, I want to let the metaphor speak on its own terms, tracing each usage of “you were bought with a price” in its immediate context and asking how the echoes between them sound when heard from the floor of the Corinthian gathering.
This week, we’ll look at 1 Corinthians 6.
A note on terminology: The word prostitute sounds outdated, perhaps even offensive to many modern ears. Yet, it is the term most English translations use, and I know of no word better-suited to this context. Sex worker is overbroad and surely cannot be used of the enslaved; the alternatives are deeply derogatory. However, we must be clear: in the twenty-first century, we would rightly call an enslaved prostitute a victim of human trafficking.
1 Corinthians 6:12-20
In 1 Corinthians 6:12-20, Paul rebukes Corinthian men for engaging in sexual immorality by visiting prostitutes. These men claim that “all things are lawful”—that bodily appetites for sex and food are neutral, because the body is essentially disposable.5
Though the men use these arguments to claim sexual license for themselves, the enslaved might hear a more chilling implication—for they have always been seen as essentially disposable bodies. These men are claiming the right to use prostitutes—who are usually enslaved women—as sexual outlets. If these men think their own bodies are meaningless, how much more the body of a woman whose enslavement renders her legally permeable, devoid of honor, disposable?
Their slogan does not simply defend their own behavior; it reinforces the very logic that makes enslaved women vulnerable. The brothel becomes an extension of the auction block where bodies are taken, used, abused, and discarded without consequence.
But Paul says that the body matters. Sex isn’t a momentary indulgence; it forges a union between two people. Members of the church, who are united with Christ, should not forge a union with a prostitute in a brothel.
I find it interesting that Paul doesn’t address the prostitute directly. This may be because there are no prostitutes in the Corinthian church; perhaps, as some scholars believe, he thought it obvious that prostitutes were excluded from Christian fellowship.
But it’s also possible that he focuses on the men because he views them as culpable—they are the ones seeking out immoral sex while boasting in their own bodily freedom.6 (Remember, the Romans and Jews could deem a sex act immoral without morally condemning the coerced woman who participated—and enslaved prostitutes lived and “worked” in a constant state of coercion.)
Prima, who lived on the lowest rung of Roman hierarchy, may have heard a message of hope in Paul’s sharp condemnation of men exercising power over this class of vulnerable women. In 6:17, Paul writes that “anyone united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him.” For those accustomed to having their bodies claimed by others, such language might signal a different kind of belonging—one that invites everyone to imagine themselves joined to a Lord who does not treat their bodies as expendable.
Then Paul goes even further. He calls the Christian’s body a temple of the Holy Spirit, set apart as sacred space. For a legally permeable slave, such a statement is especially groundbreaking. If she, too, is a temple of the Holy Spirit, anyone who sexually abuses her is not merely committing violence against an easy target—they are defiling sacred space and inviting the wrath of an avenging God.
When Paul tells her that “you are not your own,” this wouldn’t come as news. She already knew she wasn’t her own. But neither does she belong, in the truest sense, to her enslaver, for she has been bought with a price. Because she belongs to the Lord, she should glorify God in her body.
But even as we trace the liberating possibilities of Paul’s argument, it’s plain that this final statement produces a dilemma for Prima. What does it mean to glorify God in her body when she is, in real and tangible ways, vulnerable to the choices of others? I want us to pause there, to sit with the layers of that fear.
How can a legally vulnerable woman live up to that standard?
Next week, we’ll answer this question by looking at the second usage of “bought with a price,” in 1 Corinthians 7. We’ll trace Paul’s theological logic to discern whether Prima might hear a message of condemnation—or a message of hope.
But today’s takeaway: 1 Corinthians 6 gives us a textual basis for condemning the perpetration of sexual abuse. Sexual abusers treat another person’s body as if it is disposable and violate sacred space.
May the church treat such violation with the seriousness that it deserves.
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ICYMI
A freedperson was someone who used to be a slave but had been manumitted (freed). Freedpersons remained in the orbit of their former enslaver and often stayed in the household. They retained a lifelong obligation to their former enslaver—they were to respect the enslaver and perform a reasonable amount of unpaid labor for him every year. (If they failed to fulfill these obligations, they could be re-enslaved!) Some freedpersons became Roman citizens, but they retained stigma and legal disadvantages for the rest of their lives.
Pimps were also held in dishonor; Romans of good social standing didn’t prostitute their slaves directly. But they could get around the rules using middlemen; they could also sell slaves to brothels.
For a representative sample, see Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1987), 263-266, 320; Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, NIGTC, (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), 476-479.
For a detailed description of slave markets, see Jennifer A. Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), 86-88.
On the threat of sale as a means of control, see Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 6.
I’ve linked to the NIV here because I think it places the quotation marks correctly. The slogan Paul quotes in 1 Corinthians 6:13 likely includes the phrase “and God will destroy both one and the other,” because these Corinthians are treating the body too lightly, as something destined for destruction rather than resurrection. For more on this argument, see Robert Scott Nash, 1 Corinthians, SHBC, (Macon, GA: Smith & Helwys Publishing, 2009), 164-166.
Lynn Cohick, Women in the World of the Earliest Christians, (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009), 281-282.
Thanks for the fresh perspective! I look forward to the next part.
Well this was a wonderful if not sobering read 😅 wow, well done!