Second Epistle to the Corinthians

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The Second Epistle to the Corinthians is a letter of the apostle Paul to the Christian community at Corinth, preserved in the New Testament as the eighth book of the canon. It belongs to the small group of letters whose authorship is not seriously doubted, written in koine Greek around the middle of the first century — most likely from Macedonia in 55 or 56, roughly a year after the first letter to the same congregation. It is the most exposed and least guarded thing he left — a defense of his own standing, addressed to people who had begun to prefer other teachers to him.

Saint Paul Writing His Epistles, attributed to Valentin de Boulogne, early seventeenth century — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The quarrel

The Temple of Apollo at ancient Corinth, the city to whose Christian community the letter is addressed — via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA)

The occasion is a quarrel. Between the first letter to Corinth and this one, something had gone badly wrong. Rival apostles had arrived — Paul names them with a sarcasm that never quite settles into composure, the “super-apostles” who came armed with letters of recommendation and a polish he could not match. His authority had been challenged on its own ground: the congregation he had founded was weighing him against newcomers and finding him wanting in eloquence, in bearing, in the visible signs of a commissioned man. He went back to Corinth to confront the breach in person, and the visit ended in pain — he calls it, later, the painful visit, and resolves not to come again in sorrow. In its wake he wrote a letter so severe that he half-regrets it even as he stands by it, a letter of tears that does not survive intact and may, in the judgment of many readers, be partly folded into the epistle we have. Then came relief: Titus, sent ahead, returned from Corinth with news that the community had relented, and the reconciliation he had despaired of was possible after all.

Much of the letter is the work of repairing that breach — by turns wounded, ironic, conciliatory, and fierce. He catalogs what his ministry has cost him in beatings, shipwreck, hunger, and fear, and refuses to make any of it sound like victory. Where the rivals trade on strength, he answers with an inventory of his weaknesses, presented not as confession but as credential. Two chapters in the middle turn to a different matter entirely — the collection he was gathering across his Gentile churches for the poor of the mother community in Jerusalem, an appeal pressed with the diplomacy of a man who needs Corinth’s money and has only lately regained its goodwill. The tonal range is the widest in the Pauline corpus, and it is exactly this range that has made the letter’s seams a permanent problem for its readers.

The seams

Scholars have long noted that the tone shifts so sharply across the chapters that the text may join more than one letter, edited together after the fact; the seams are visible, and the debate is unresolved. The boundary most often pointed to falls between chapters 9 and 10: the first nine chapters move toward reconciliation and ask for generosity, and then the last four open without transition into the fiercest polemic Paul ever wrote, a sustained and bitter defense against the super-apostles that reads as though addressed to a community still in open revolt. A man who has just been reconciled does not usually round on his hearers like this. Some readers identify those four chapters — the so-called Fool’s Speech, in which Paul boasts against his will — with the lost letter of tears itself, surfacing out of order.

The partition question is old. Johann Salomo Semler proposed in the eighteenth century that the ninth chapter, a second appeal for the same collection already urged in the eighth, was a separate note spliced in. The most influential modern reconstruction, set out by Günther Bornkamm in 1961, divides the whole into as many as five originally distinct pieces: the reconciliation narrative broken across the opening and the seventh chapter, a self-contained apology for the apostolic ministry lodged in the middle, two independent collection appeals, and the angry final chapters. Estimates among critical scholars range from two letters to six. A shorter passage near the center, warning the believers not to be unequally yoked, sits so oddly in its surroundings and trades in such sharply dualist, almost sectarian vocabulary that some have read it as an interpolation Paul did not write at all — a contested reading, not a settled one. Against all of this stands a durable minority that defends the letter’s unity, arguing that its lurches of feeling are the natural register of a man writing under strain and that an ancient editor would have had no occasion to assemble so unflattering a self-portrait from scraps. The dispute is the most active of any in the Pauline letters, and it turns on the same feature that gives the epistle its power: a voice that will not hold one tone for long.

Three passages that traveled

Folio 142r of Papyrus 46 (P.Mich.inv. 6238, ca. 200), preserving 2 Corinthians 11:33–12:9 — the third-heaven and thorn-in-the-flesh passage — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Three passages have traveled far beyond their setting. In one, Paul writes of a man caught up to the third heaven, to paradise, who heard words that cannot be spoken — words, in the letter’s own phrasing, which it is not lawful for a man to utter. He places the rapture some fourteen years in the past and describes its subject at a careful, third-person distance, professing not to know whether it happened in the body or out of the body, that God knows and he does not; the man is generally taken to be Paul himself, narrating his own most extreme experience as though it belonged to a stranger. In another he speaks of a thorn in the flesh, an affliction never named, a messenger of Satan given to him, he says, so that he would not be exalted by the very abundance of those revelations. In a third he calls the gospel a treasure carried in earthen vessels — in his words, we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us — fragile clay holding something not its own.

The three belong together. Each turns on the same reversal: the highest thing a person can be given arrives lodged in frailty, and the frailty is the point. The man taken to paradise comes back with a thorn; the treasure is kept in clay precisely so that no one mistakes the vessel for its contents. This is the gravitational center of the letter, and the rivals are its foil at every step — where they boast of power and presence, Paul makes weakness itself into the proof of a genuine commission.

The ascent that later readers built

The third-heaven passage in particular became a fixed reference for later visionary and mystical literature. Readers in the ascent traditions of Judaism and Christianity found in it a scriptural warrant for the soul’s rise through graded heavens and for the conviction that the highest things seen there are not sayable — a knowing that outruns speech.

The cosmology Paul presumes was not his invention. A layered heaven, numbered upward, was a commonplace of the apocalyptic Judaism of his century: the Second Book of Enoch and the Apocalypse of Moses place paradise in the third of the heavens, and the vocabulary of being snatched up to it — the Greek harpazō, the root behind the later word rapture — belongs to a recognized language of prophetic transport. What the passage gave to those who came after was less a map than a license and a posture: the assurance that a living person could be carried to the throne-world and return, and the insistence that what is seen there cannot be told. Both became load-bearing in the ascent literature of Merkavah and Hekhalot mysticism, the late-antique Jewish current whose practitioners are described rising through seven heavenly palaces toward the chariot-throne; its hymns to the unsayable glory and its guarded silence about the innermost vision rhyme with Paul’s single, withholding sentence, though the two streams developed in their own idioms and on their own timelines.

In Christianity the passage produced an entire apocryphal book. The Apocalypse of Paul, the Visio Pauli, composed between the third and fourth centuries and reaching its surviving form in the late fourth, takes up Paul’s bare report and supplies exactly what he declined to give: a full tour of the heavens and the places of judgment, narrated as the content of the vision he had said was not lawful to utter. Augustine of Hippo dismissed it as a fabrication, and it was named among the rejected writings of the Decretum Gelasianum; it was nonetheless among the most widely copied and translated of all early Christian apocrypha, carrying its borrowed authority through the medieval imagination of the afterlife. What the text actually claims is spare: a single sentence, deliberately vague about whether the rapture was in the body or out of the body, with Paul professing not to know. The elaborate cosmologies built on it are the work of those who came after. The same ineffability — words it is not lawful to speak — also fed the apophatic strand of Christian mysticism, in which the highest knowledge is precisely the knowledge that the highest cannot be said; and it lent its prestige to every later claim of a saving gnosis received from above rather than reasoned out below.

The theology of weakness

The Apostle Paul in Prison, Rembrandt, 1627 (Staatsgalerie Stuttgart) — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Within Christianity the letter has been read above all for its theology of weakness — the claim, put in the mouth of the divine voice answering Paul’s prayer that the thorn be taken away, that my grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness, and Paul’s answer that he will therefore boast in nothing but his own frailty. The logic governs the whole epistle. The catalog of beatings and shipwreck and hunger and sleepless nights and the daily pressure of the churches is not a complaint and not, in the ordinary sense, a boast; it is an argument, mounted against opponents who counted strength as the mark of the Spirit. The treasure is in earthen vessels so that the power will be seen to be God’s. The man who reached paradise was given a thorn so that he would not be exalted. An apostolate is authenticated, on this reading, not by what it can do but by what it can bear — a reversal that shaped the long Christian valuation of suffering, of self-emptying, and of the ascetic life (asceticism) as a participation in the same pattern.

Scholarship and the text

The Greek of the letter survives in the early manuscript tradition of the Pauline corpus and is fixed in the modern critical editions of the New Testament; its place in the canon was secure from the earliest collections, and unlike several of the letters near it, its attribution to Paul has never been a live question. The interpretive labor has gone instead into two problems: the composition history and the meaning of the visionary passages.

On composition, the foundational modern statement is Günther Bornkamm’s reconstruction of an originally multiple text assembled by a later editor, against which the major recent commentaries — Margaret E. Thrall’s two-volume International Critical Commentary and Victor Paul Furnish’s Anchor Bible volume among them — weigh the evidence for and against unity without forcing a verdict. Hans Dieter Betz devoted a separate Hermeneia commentary to chapters 8 and 9 alone, reading them as two distinct administrative letters about the collection. A standard overview of the occasion, the partition debate, and the famous passages is given in the Encyclopædia Britannica’s treatment of the letter. On the afterlife of the third-heaven passage, the primary witness is the apocryphal Apocalypse of Paul, whose very existence is a reading of 2 Corinthians 12 — the document that decided the unnamed man was Paul and then went on to describe what he had refused to describe. For the Jewish ascent material the passage helped license, the critical apparatus runs through Gershom Scholem’s mid-century work and Peter Schäfer’s synoptic edition of the Hekhalot corpus, traced in the entry on Hekhalot and Merkavah mysticism.

It is, among the Pauline letters, the one that argues least and confides most, and the strangeness it reports it reports almost in passing, as though reluctant to have mentioned it at all.

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