I wrote unto you in an epistle not to company with fornicators:
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Ambrosiaster
AD 400
Paul tells us here that he has already written to the Corinthians once. Because they failed to take action then, he is now writing a second time. Commentary on Paul’s Epistles.
I wrote unto you. In ver2of this chapter. So Theodoret and Chrysostom. But S. Thomas, Lyranus, Cajetan think that S. Paul wrote this in another former epistle which has perished.
Not to company with fornicators . . . for then must ye needs go out of the world. When I bade you have no fellowship with fornicators I did not mean what you were to avoid fornicating pagans, for then you would have to go out of the world, for the whole world is full of pagans, who are either fornicators, or covetous, or idolaters; but if any one who is a brother, says S. Ambrose, if any one who is a Christian, is publicly spoken ill of as a fornicator, then avoid him.
I wrote to you in an epistle. If he does not mean what he has said already in this epistle, it must have been in some other, which he had written to them before, (as some conjecture) and which is not now extant.
Now to keep company with fornicators, nor with such like public scandalous sinners, not so much as to eat with them. But you must take notice, that I mean, when they are brethren, or Christians, not when they are infidels, for this cannot be avoided, especially by those who are to labour to convert them. This admonition of the apostle, shows us how much such persons are to blame, who by their carriage encourage, applaud, and are delighted with wicked company. Them who are without the pale and fold of the Church, the apostle leaves to the great judge of the living and the dead. (Witham)
For since he had said, You have not rather mourned, that such an one should be taken away; and, Purge out the old leaven; and it was likely that they would surmise it to be their duty to avoid all fornicators: for if he that has sinned imparts some of his own mischief to those who have not sinned, much more is it meet to keep one's self away from those without: (for if one ought not to spare a friend on account of such mischief arising from him, much less any others;) and under this impression, it was probable that they would separate themselves from the fornicators among the Greeks also, and the matter thus turning out impossible, they would have taken it more to heart: he used this mode of correction, saying, I wrote unto you to have no company with fornicators, yet not altogether with the fornicators of this world: using the word altogether, as if it were an acknowledged thing. For that they might not think that he charged not this upon them as being rather imperfect, and should att...
But now I write to you, if any is named a brother among you, (being) a fornicator, or an idolater "(for what so intimately joined?), "or a defrauder "(for what so near akin?), and so on, "with such to take no food even"
