1 Corinthians 9:26-27

“I therefore so run, not as uncertainly; so fight I, not as one that beateth the air: 27. But I buffet my body, and lead it captive: lest, when I have preached to others, I myself should be rejected.”

The particle τοίνυν, conformably thereto, does not occur elsewhere in Paul's writings; it forcibly expresses a consequence inevitably resulting from what precedes: “In virtue, then, of this state of things in which there is nothing to be changed.”

The word run denotes the progress made in Christian sanctification; comp. Philippians 3:13-14.

As to the οὕτω, it is evidently here the antecedent of ὡς.

The adverb ἀδήλως has sometimes been taken in the passive sense: “Without being seen, remarked,” like a runner who is lost in the crowd of other athletes. The apostle would thus expressly designate himself here as the one who attracts the attention of the spectators, by outstripping the other runners. This meaning would be admissible if such an expression were not rather pretentious. It is better to give the adverb the active sense: “Without seeing the goal, and consequently the course, clearly, as when one walks in the dark; so: deviating to right and left.” This meaning is more in keeping, as we shall see, with that of the following figure: beating the air, which has an analogous signification, as is proved by the parallelism of the two propositions. Paul alludes to that sterile activity of the sages and orators of Corinth, who neglect the true end of Christian life, sanctification and final salvation, and are concerned only to charm their hearers, to enjoy themselves with them, and to lord it over them. As for him, he runs with his eye firmly fixed on the goal. Next, to bring home this obligation still more forcibly to his readers, he refers to a second and more formidable kind of contest, boxing. Here there is not only running, but striking and being struck. And the blows, to be effective, must not be lost on the air; they must fall on the adversary. The term beat the air has sometimes been taken as an allusion to the kind of gymnastics in which the athletes engaged to prepare themselves for the contest, and which was called sciomachy. But we are here in the heat of the contest itself. The allusion therefore, if there was one, could only in any case be very indirect.

Vv. 27. The apostle explains by his own example who the adversary is on whom these redoubled and redoubtable blows are to fall; it is his own body. He does not say his flesh, as if he wished here to lay stress on the characteristic of sin in the body; no, it is the organism, as such, that he curbs and bends by all sorts of exercises and austerities to make it a pliable instrument. There is room for hesitation between the two readings ὑπωπιάζω, I buffet (the verb strictly signifies: to strike under the eyes, so as to make blue wounds), and ὑποπιάζω or ὑποπιέζω, to grip so as to put under. This second reading would suit the following verb: to lead captive; but the first agrees better with the foregoing verb: to give blows with the fist. By this figure the apostle describes all the privations which he imposes on his body, all the labours to which he condemns it throughout the entire course of his life, and that especially in consequence of his refusing all payment and obliging himself to provide with his hands for his maintenance; comp. 2 Corinthians 6:4-5; 2 Corinthians 11:23-27; Acts 20:34-35.

The word δουλαγώγω, to lead captive, continues the figure. As the victor led the vanquished round the arena, amid the plaudits of the spectators, so Paul, after breaking the opposition of his body, leads it like a submissive servant before the face of the world in the labours of the apostleship.

And let not this be taken as a work of supererogation, fitted to confer on him some peculiar merit and a higher degree of glory! In his eyes, there is no luxury in the question, it is a simple necessary. Were he to act otherwise, he should be afraid, he who has stimulated others, of being himself finally rejected. One can hardly avoid seeing in the term κηρύσσειν, to fill the office of herald, to publish, an allusion to the function of the man whose duty it was to sound the trumpet and so summon the athletes to begin the contest. Such is the figure of what the apostle was doing for the Gentile peoples by the preaching of the gospel. Rückert, it is true, objects, that, in the public games, the herald himself did not enter the lists. Comparisons always halt somewhere; otherwise they would imply not comparison, but identity. The Christian ministry presents this exceptional character, that he who fills it has two tasks to perform simultaneously: that of calling others to salvation, and that of securing his own. Heinrici has thought that the point here was the approbation or disapprobation which the herald might deserve by the way in which he proclaimed the name and eulogy of the victors, after the combat. This is to press the figure beyond all measure.

The term ἀδόκιμος, non-acceptable, to be rejected, comes, grammarians say, from δέχομαι, to receive. This term also belonged to the language of the public games. Before admitting candidates to the honour of competing in the circus, they were subjected to a preparatory trial, called δοκιμασία, by means of which there were set aside all those who were not fit to enter the lists. Could Paul be alluding to this custom? It seems to me improbable. His concern is not about the trial for entrance into the contest, but about the exit trial. The terms δόκιμος and δοκιμή are so frequently used by the apostle, that it is unnecessary to explain the use of them here by an allusion which would be so far from appropriate. It is his salvation, the welcome to be received by himself from the Judge, which the apostle sees to be at stake, and with a view to which he thinks it his duty to use such severity toward his own body.

Such is the mode in which the apostle seeks to awake feelings of salutary fear and serious watchfulness in those self-infatuated Corinthians, who, on the ground of their superior knowledge and alleged emancipation, forgot the regard which they owed to the salvation of their brethren, without imagining that by this conduct they were compromising their own.

The better to inculcate the manner in which they should act, he seeks at that very moment to make himself a Greek to the Greeks, borrowing from their national life the figures most fitted to strike their imagination.

It has often and justly been remarked, how frequent these figures, borrowed from the contests of the stadium, are in the authors of the New Testament Epistles (Philippians 3; 2 Timothy 4; Hebrews 12, etc.), while they are wholly strange to the discourses of Jesus in the Gospels. Have we not here a proof of the fidelity with which the original form of the latter has been preserved to us? Why, if they had been composed later, and after the Gospel had penetrated into the Greek world, should not such figures so familiar to Greek thought appear in them?