Paul points to something people were doing that only makes sense if the dead rise. If they do not, the practice is empty. Both questions press the same point: what do these people gain, and why do it at all, "if the dead rise not at all"?

What the practice was is hard to know. Barnes writes, "There is, perhaps, no passage of the New Testament in respect to which there has been a greater variety of interpretation than this," and he lays out and weighs several views. He judges it "the most correct opinion" that Paul refers to the baptism all believers received, in the hope that the dead would rise. Gill weighs that view too but is "rather inclined to think" that "baptism is used here in a figurative and metaphorical sense, for afflictions, sufferings, and martyrdom," and Matthew Henry suggests the same reading, introducing it with "perhaps." On Gill's view, Paul is asking what becomes of those who suffered and even died for this hope, if the dead never rise. Whatever the practice was, the argument works the same way: it assumes a resurrection.

Paul does not stop to explain the practice or answer the question directly. The answer is left to stand on its own: if the dead rise not, such baptism is pointless. He moves straight on to his own life, with a question of the same kind: "And why stand we in jeopardy every hour?" (1 Corinthians 15:30). Then he answers for himself: "I die daily" (1 Corinthians 15:31).

Paul speaks of what "they" do, not what "we" do, and he gives no command about it; he only reasons from it. Barnes surveys several readings, including washing the bodies of the dead, a living person being baptized in place of someone who had died, and baptism as a picture of suffering. He rejects the idea of baptism in place of the dead, finding no evidence the custom existed in Paul's time, and he prefers the ordinary baptism of believers. Gill and Matthew Henry both point to Jesus' own words, where He spoke of His coming sufferings as a baptism: "to be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with" (Matthew 20:22).

Paul's argument here comes from how believers actually live. People do costly things because of their hope. If there is no resurrection, those choices make no sense; Paul has already said that "If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable" (1 Corinthians 15:19).

But Paul's confidence does not rest on what people do. It rests on what God has done and will do. Christ is "the firstfruits," and death is "the last enemy that shall be destroyed" (1 Corinthians 15:20, 26). The question points past a puzzling practice to a God who raises the dead.