Verse explainer

What does 1 Corinthians 13:5 really mean?

The word 'easily' in 'not easily provoked' isn't in the Greek — and that single insertion has quietly softened what Paul actually said.

KJV

Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil;

BSB

It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no account of wrongs.

The plain meaning

Verse 5 sits in the middle of Paul's sustained portrait of love in action (vv. 4–7). He is not giving abstract philosophy; he is correcting a Corinthian church fractured by rivalry, spiritual one-upmanship, and clique-loyalty. Against that backdrop, each clause lands hard. 'Seeketh not her own' means love is not angling for its own advantage — spiritual or material. 'Behave itself unseemly' captures the boorish, status-obsessed conduct that was apparently on display in Corinth's communal meals and worship. 'Thinketh no evil' (Greek: ou logizetai to kakon) does not mean love is naive; it means love does not keep a running ledger of wrongs done to it, does not rehearse injuries, and does not invent bad motives for ambiguous actions. And 'is not provoked' — with no qualifier in the original — says that genuine love does not reach the ignition point, not merely that it takes a long time to get there.

The common misreading

'Not easily provoked' means love has a long fuse — it can still blow eventually. This is probably the most consequential mistranslation in the verse, and Adam Clarke documented it exhaustively. The Greek is simply ou paroxynetai — 'is not provoked.' The word 'easily' appears in no Greek manuscript, in no ancient version (Vulgate, Syriac, Coptic, Arabic, Ethiopic all follow the plain text), and in no English translation before 1611. It was inserted in the King James Version and has been quietly teaching ever since that love merely has a high threshold for irritation — which lets every reader feel that their eventual outburst was the understandable exception. Paul's actual claim is more demanding: love does not reach the ignition point. That is consistent with the rest of the portrait — love that keeps no ledger of wrongs (v. 5), bears all things, endures all things (v. 7). A love that can finally be provoked into bitterness has, by that moment, stopped being the thing Paul is describing. Clarke notes bluntly: 'If love is provoked at all, it then ceases to be love.' The BSB rendering — 'is not easily angered' — unfortunately perpetuates the 1611 softening. The Greek gives no cover.

What the commentators say

Adam Clarkeearly 19th c. · PD

Clarke makes the sharpest textual point: the word 'easily' has no warrant in the Greek (ou paroxynetai), does not appear in Coverdale, Tyndale, the Geneva Bible, or the 1547 or 1548 English editions, and was introduced by the 1611 translators — possibly under royal influence. He argues this corrupts Paul's meaning: if love can be provoked at all, it ceases to be the love Paul describes; granting an exception ("not easily") quietly undoes the whole claim.

John Gill18th c. · PD

Gill unpacks 'thinketh no evil' as a refusal to impute evil — not to deny that evil exists, but to decline placing another's offense on one's own ledger, in the way God, when he forgives, is said not to impute sin. He also notes that love does not indulge evil surmises or groundless suspicions, and forgives so fully that the injury is not rehearsed or remembered.

Jamieson, Fausset & Brown19th c. · PD

JFB draw on Bengel and Grotius to clarify 'thinketh no evil': love does not meditate upon or brood over evil inflicted by another. Even where real evil is present (Proverbs 10:12), love makes allowance for human frailty and, in ambiguous cases, chooses the more charitable construction. The posture is not willful blindness but a deliberate refusal to rehearse grievance.

The word behind it

λογίζεται logizetai

'Reckoneth' or 'imputeth' — from logizomai, the accounting verb used in Romans 4 for God not counting sin against a person. Paul's choice of this word is deliberate: love does not enter the offense into the ledger. It is not that love fails to notice injury, but that it refuses to keep the running account that feeds resentment. The same root gives us 'logic' — the point is that love declines to reason its way from an ambiguous act to an assumed bad motive.

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