to ruin something: to bring what was whole or pure into a spoiled, corrupted, or destroyed state, so that human corruption and the destruction it invites can be named by one word
At its heart this verb names a single movement: something sound, whole, or pure is brought down into a spoiled or ruined state. That one idea stretches across a wide range in the New Testament, from wrecking a building or a body, to rotting a person's character, to bringing a community under God's judgment. English needs several different words for these (destroy, corrupt, spoil, deprave), but the Greek uses one.
That single word is exactly what the New Testament writers want. Because the same verb can mean both to corrupt and to destroy, Paul, Peter, and John can say that the corruption itself is the destruction, and that the destruction fits the crime. In First Corinthians 3:17 the punishment is spelled with the very same verb as the offense: whoever ruins God's temple, God will ruin. The same move drives the warnings in Second Peter and Revelation.
The two poles of the range shade into each other. On one side the verb points to ruin and destruction, whether by human hands or as God's answering judgment. On the other it points to moral and spiritual corruption: bad company that rots good character, teachers who lead minds astray from Christ, the old self decaying under deceptive desires. Several passages sit deliberately between the two, meaning both at once.
Nuances
Which sense the first use of phtheirō carries at 1 Corinthians 3:17, where the same verb describes what a person does to God's temple and what God will do to that person in return.
- majorityA deliberate double sense: the verb means both to defile and to destroy at once. Greco-Roman religious discourse used the same verb for polluting sacred space and for the divinely sent destruction of the polluter, and Paul trades on that reciprocal logic. This is the current mainstream reading.; Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (NIGTC); F. F. Bruce, 1 and 2 Corinthians (NCB); Ethan Johnson, on 1 Corinthians 3:17 and Greco-Roman temple-pollution discourse (St Andrews, 2020)
- minorityPrimarily to destroy: Paul warns those in the process of destroying the church through their factions that God will destroy them in eschatological judgment, the verb being deliberately unspecific ruin rather than cultic defilement.; Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (NICNT); Richard B. Hays, First Corinthians (Interpretation)
- minorityPrimarily to defile or profane: the language is cultic desecration of the temple, and God's answering destruction is the standard biblical penalty for profaning sacred space.; Roy E. Ciampa and Brian S. Rosner, The First Letter to the Corinthians (PNTC); David E. Garland, 1 Corinthians (BECNT)