Thing

Second Epistle to the Corinthians

Paul's most personal surviving letter, written to a community that had turned against him — and the source of the ascent to the "third heaven" that later visionaries kept returning to.

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 Greek around the middle of the first century, and 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.

The occasion is a quarrel. Between the first letter to Corinth and this one, something had gone badly wrong: rival apostles had arrived, Paul’s authority had been challenged, and a visit had ended in pain. Much of the letter is an attempt to repair that breach — by turns wounded, ironic, conciliatory, and fierce. He catalogues what his ministry has cost him in beatings, shipwreck, hunger, and fear, and refuses to make any of it sound like victory. 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.

Three passages have travelled 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 — a person he describes at a careful distance but is generally taken to be himself. In another he speaks of a “thorn in the flesh,” an affliction never named, given him so that he would not be exalted. In a third he calls the gospel a treasure carried “in earthen vessels,” fragile clay holding something not its own.

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. 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.

Within Christianity the letter has been read above all for its theology of weakness — the claim, put in the mouth of the divine voice, that “power is made perfect in weakness,” and Paul’s answer that he will therefore boast in nothing but his own frailty. 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.