The Second Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians

Overview

About twenty pages, thirteen chapters, written by Paul, probably from Macedonia, around 55 to 56 CE, to the church he had founded in Corinth, a large, prosperous, cosmopolitan Roman colony in Greece. It is generally regarded as the most personal, most emotionally raw of Paul’s surviving letters, and also one of the most difficult to read as a single, continuous composition, because something has clearly happened between the situation reflected in First Corinthians and this letter that the text itself only partially explains.

Paul refers to a painful visit to Corinth that he does not want to repeat, and to a severe letter, written in anguish and with many tears, that some scholars believe does not survive as a separate document but may in fact be preserved, in whole or in part, within the sharply different final four chapters of Second Corinthians itself, chapters whose tone changes so abruptly from the earlier, reconciled sections that many scholars have proposed the letter as we have it is actually a composite of two or more originally separate letters, later joined together by an early editor. Whether or not that composite theory is correct, the letter’s emotional volatility, moving between tenderness, relief, fundraising appeal and blistering sarcasm within a single document, is itself the letter’s most distinctive feature.

What happens

Reconciliation and relief, chapters 1 to 7. Paul opens by explaining and defending a change in his travel plans that had evidently caused offense, insisting he did not alter his itinerary out of fickleness but to spare the Corinthians another painful confrontation. He describes his ministry using two images that have become permanently attached to Christian vocabulary: the treasure carried in jars of clay, ordinary, fragile containers holding something of extraordinary value precisely so that the value is credited to God rather than to the messenger, and the ministry of reconciliation, the charge Paul says has been given to him and to every believer, to carry the message that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ.

Running through these chapters is real, evident emotional relief: Paul describes having been so distressed after sending his earlier severe letter that he could not settle even when a door for ministry opened for him in Troas, and pushed on to Macedonia specifically to find Titus and learn how the Corinthians had received it. Titus brings good news, that the Corinthians’ grief led to genuine repentance rather than resentment, and Paul’s joy at this outcome colors the whole first half of the letter.

The collection for Jerusalem, chapters 8 and 9. Paul turns to a practical matter he cared about deeply throughout his ministry: a fundraising collection among his largely Gentile churches for the relief of the poor among the Jewish believers in Jerusalem, a project he saw as both a genuine act of charity and a tangible expression of unity between Jewish and Gentile Christians. He holds up the example of the Macedonian churches, who gave generously despite their own severe poverty, and urges the Corinthians to complete a pledge they had apparently begun and then let lapse, insisting repeatedly that giving should be voluntary and cheerful rather than extracted under pressure or obligation.

The turn to conflict, chapters 10 to 13. The letter’s tone shifts sharply and, to many readers, jarringly. Paul turns to confront directly a group of rival teachers operating in Corinth in his absence, whom he refers to with heavy irony as super-apostles, men who by Paul’s account boasted of superior credentials, rhetorical polish and perhaps letters of recommendation, and who had been actively undermining Paul’s own authority and reputation among the Corinthian believers.

Paul’s response is unusual and deliberately uncomfortable for him to give: rather than matching his rivals’ boasting with credentials of his own, he insists he will boast, as he repeatedly says, like a fool, and proceeds to list not achievements but sufferings, beatings received from both Jewish and Roman authorities, shipwrecks, a night and a day adrift at sea, dangers from robbers, from his own people, from Gentiles, from false believers, constant labor and hardship. He then, still further into this uncomfortable boasting, describes a vision of being caught up into the third heaven, into paradise, hearing things that cannot be told, and immediately pairs this extraordinary experience with an admission of weakness: a thorn in the flesh, never specified, that he begged God three times to remove, and was told instead that grace is sufficient, that power is made perfect in weakness.

The letter closes with warnings, a call to self-examination, and a final exhortation and blessing, the same formula that would become the standard closing benediction of Christian worship: the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit.

How to read it

Read the abrupt shift between chapter 9 and chapter 10 with real attention, and consider the composite-letter theory as you do. Whether or not you accept that the final four chapters originally belonged to a separate, earlier and angrier letter, noticing the tonal break helps make sense of a document that otherwise reads as strikingly inconsistent within a single sitting.

Pay close attention to the theology of weakness running through the whole letter, the treasure in jars of clay, the thorn in the flesh, the paradoxical claim that power is made perfect in weakness. This is one of Paul’s most distinctive and most influential theological moves, redefining what counts as authoritative and impressive by inverting the terms his rivals were using to discredit him.

Read the fool’s boast in chapters 11 and 12 as a deliberate rhetorical strategy, not simply an unguarded outburst. Paul is performing a kind of parody of the boasting culture of Greco-Roman rhetoric, adopting his opponents’ own genre of self-praise and subverting it from within by listing sufferings and weaknesses instead of accomplishments.

Read chapters 8 and 9 as a genuinely important primary source for the early Christian practice and theology of charitable giving, and notice how careful Paul is to insist that the collection be voluntary and freely given rather than compelled, a distinction that shaped later Christian teaching on almsgiving considerably.

Read this letter alongside First Corinthians to see the fuller arc of Paul’s relationship with this particular, evidently difficult and contentious church, and alongside Galatians to compare two different registers of Pauline anger, the more purely theological fury of Galatians against a different set of rivals, and the more personally wounded, relationally complicated anger of Second Corinthians.

Questions it raises

• Does the letter’s abrupt tonal shift support the theory that it combines originally separate letters, and does resolving that question change how the letter should be read as a whole?
• What does Paul’s strategy of boasting about weakness rather than matching his rivals’ claims to credentials suggest about what he thought actually authorized someone to speak for God?
• Why does Paul refuse to specify the thorn in the flesh? Does the vagueness make the passage more or less useful to later readers facing their own unnamed afflictions?
• Is the fundraising appeal in chapters 8 and 9 primarily about material relief for the Jerusalem poor, or is Paul equally concerned with what the collection symbolizes about unity between Jewish and Gentile believers?
• How should a reader weigh a letter this emotionally raw as a source for theology? Does the personal anguish strengthen or complicate the authority of what Paul says here?
• What does it mean that early Christian communities were, evidently, this contested and this vulnerable to rival teachers and competing claims to authority, even within a single generation of the movement’s founding?