For an Informed Love of God
Bill Mounce
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Monday, April 7, 2025
Who is God’s Temple? (1 Cor 3:16)
Bill Mounce
Because “you” in English can be singular or plural, translation can become awkward when the Greek is plural. In 1 Cor 3:16, Paul is talking about divisions in the church and warns the Corinthians about the seriousness of their divisiveness. The ESV reads, “Do you not know that you* (ἐστε) are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you (ἐν ὑμῖν)?” Italics added. The footnote on “you” indicates “you” and the other pronouns are plural.
That’s all fine and good if you assume people read footnotes, which, considering all the superscript references in our Bible, is not a good assumption. The NIV reads, “Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in your midst? Two important differences.
1. The use of “yourselves” guarantees that the readers will understand the temple being spoken of is formed by the collection of all believers in Corinth. This in turn helps keep the reader from importing the singular use of the same imagery from chapter 6.
2. “In you” is an especially poor translation. It individualizes a corporate concept and works against seeing the Spirit as inhabiting corporate worship. “In your midst” is vastly superior. It also keeps the reader from thinking Paul is talking about the individual indwelling of the Spirit, a misunderstanding encouraged by the later “dwells/lives in you,” which really sounds like personal indwelling (NASB, ESV, CSB, NRSV, NET).
Most translations follow the same pattern as the ESV. The NLT so clearly makes the first reference plural that it does not have to worry about the reader misunderstanding the second: “Don’t you realize that all of you together are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God lives in you?”
My point is that with a little sensitivity to literary style it is often possible to communicate clearly without footnotes.
