Yes.
Cited passages
With him they crucified two robbers; one on his right hand, and one on his left.
There were also others, two criminals, led with him to be put to death. When they came to the place that is called “The Skull”, they crucified him there with the criminals, one on the right and the other on the left. Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing.” Dividing his garments among them, they cast lots. The people stood watching. The rulers with them also scoffed at him, saying, “He saved others. Let him save himself, if this is the Christ of God, his chosen one!” The soldiers also mocked him, coming to him and offering him vinegar, and saying, “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!” An inscription was also written over him in letters of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew: “THIS IS THE KING OF THE JEWS.” One of the criminals who was hanged insulted him, saying, “If you are the Christ, save yourself and us!” But the other answered, and rebuking him said, “Don’t you even fear God, seeing you are under the same condemnation? And we indeed justly, for we receive the due reward for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.” He said to Jesus, “Lord, remember me when you come into your Kingdom.” Jesus said to him, “Assuredly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”
Examining the tension
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Usually considered reconciled
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
The apparent tension dissolves once the two passages are read in their own argumentative contexts, but the exercise is instructive because it exposes how atomized prooftexting manufactures contradictions. Luke 23:39-43 describes one of two criminals crucified with Jesus — Luke's word is kakourgos, 'evildoer/criminal,' not kleptes, 'thief'; Mark 15:27 and Matthew 27:38 use lestes, which in first-century usage denoted not a petty thief but a brigand or insurrectionist (Josephus regularly applies lestes to the Zealot rebels). The harmonizing reading thus has a lexical foothold: the man Jesus pardons is not strictly the 'thief' of Paul's catalogue at all. But the more decisive point is structural.
1 Corinthians 6:9-11 is a vice-catalogue, a recognizable Greco-Roman and Hellenistic-Jewish rhetorical form (compare 1 Cor 5:10-11, Gal 5:19-21, Rom 1:29-31, and the Stoic and Philonic lists Conzelmann documents). Such catalogues function paraenetically — they warn a community against backsliding by naming the conduct that marks those outside the kingdom. Paul's grammar is the hinge. In 6:11 he writes kai tauta tines ete — 'and such things WERE some of you' — using the imperfect, then three aorist verbs in the passive: apelousasthe, hegiasthete, edikaiothete ('you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified'). The aorists mark a decisive past event (baptismal conversion) that severs the Corinthians from their former identity. Paul's whole point is that people who once belonged to those categories now do not. He is not excluding the repentant; he is excluding the unrepentant who continue in the conduct.
The repentant criminal of Luke 23 is the paradigm case of exactly what 6:11 describes, telescoped into a single deathbed moment. Luke's Gospel makes repentance and last-minute reversal a structural theme — the prodigal (15:11-32), Zacchaeus (19:1-10), the tax collector justified over the Pharisee (18:9-14). Fitzmyer reads the crucified criminal as the climactic Lukan example of salvation extended to the marginal at the eleventh hour. The man confesses Jesus' innocence, acknowledges his own guilt, and appeals to Jesus' coming reign; Jesus answers with the only use of paradeisos in the Gospels. This is conversion, not an exception to Paul's rule.
Steel-manned, the skeptical case rests entirely on reading 6:9-10 in isolation from 6:11. Verses 9-10 do read as a flat categorical exclusion — 'neither... thieves... shall inherit the kingdom of God' — and a reader who stops there has a surface contradiction with Luke 23. But the exclusion clause and the rehabilitation clause are a single sentence-unit in Paul's argument; they cannot be severed without distorting the syntax. Thiselton and Fitzmyer both treat 6:9-11 as one indivisible movement: warning, then assurance. Critical scholarship accordingly does not regard this as a genuine theological contradiction. The two authors share, rather than dispute, the premise that the kingdom is closed to the unrighteous and open to the converted. Luke dramatizes the conversion; Paul states the principle. The only 'contradiction' is the artifact of quoting verse 10 and not verse 11.
It is worth noting the residual editorial point: Paul and Luke write from different theological idioms — Paul in forensic-baptismal categories, Luke in narrative-soteriological ones — but they are mutually intelligible and non-contradictory.
Where the critical reading lands: overstated; harmonizable on the plain reading of one additional verse.
Sources for this reading