Introduction

The Epistle of Reconciliation

Theophylact’s Argument gives this letter a double purpose. Paul had promised the Corinthians a visit and then delayed it, kept away by other pressing labors and by trials laid upon him, and the letter must first explain that delay. But it must also do something warmer: the first Epistle had rebuked the Corinthians sharply, and “since they had become better” as a result, Paul now writes “to receive and to praise them,” reserving his severity for its final chapters, where certain Jewish-Christian rivals had been slandering him as “an unlettered man and worthy of no account.” The letter therefore moves in a register unlike the first: tender and personal through most of its length, sharpening only at the end, where Paul must defend the authority of his own apostleship against men who questioned it.

Theophylact follows this shift closely, and his comment changes register with it. Where Paul consoles, he draws out the tenderness; where Paul answers the boasting of his rivals in chapters ten through thirteen, he traces the argument’s edge without blunting it, reading Paul’s forced self-commendation there not as vanity but as a reluctant necessity—a man defending, for his converts’ sake rather than his own, the truth of what God had done through him.

Treasure in Earthen Vessels

Two images of apostolic ministry occupy Theophylact’s closest attention in the letter’s middle chapters. The first is Paul’s description of the apostles as bearers of “this treasure in clay jars”—a figure Theophylact reads as itself a proof of God’s power, since “an earthen vessel contains such treasures,” and the frailty of the messenger only sets off more clearly that the strength shown through him is God’s and not his own. The second is Paul’s account of the ministry entrusted to the apostles as one of reconciliation: God, Theophylact writes, “sent the Son as ambassador,” and even after the Son was put to death by those who needed reconciling, “gave the ministry of the reconciliation to us”—the apostles sent out, in turn, as ambassadors to plead with the estranged on God’s behalf. Both images turn on the same point: an office of surpassing dignity carried by men who are, in themselves, nothing remarkable, so that the outcome can be credited to no one but God.

The Collection for Jerusalem

Between the letter’s tenderness and its final self-defense sit two chapters, eight and nine, devoted to a practical matter: the collection Paul was gathering among the Gentile churches for the poor of Jerusalem. Theophylact reads Paul’s appeal to the Corinthians as deliberately unforced. Holding up the generosity of the Macedonian churches as an example rather than a command, Paul “leaves their will free, that what is done by them may also be a virtue,” since a gift given only from shame or compulsion earns no true reward. Theophylact draws out the principle behind the appeal to “God loves a cheerful giver”: what matters is not the size of the gift but the freedom and joy with which it is made, a small chapter of practical almsgiving folded into a letter otherwise concerned with far weightier things.

The Thorn in the Flesh

Theophylact gives unusual care to Paul’s admission, in chapter twelve, of the “thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan,” sent to keep him from growing conceited after his revelations. He explicitly sets aside the reading—already current in his day—that takes this as a bodily ailment: Paul’s body, he insists, was never given over to the devil, since Paul himself commanded and restrained Satan elsewhere, delivering the Corinthian fornicator to him for correction. The “messenger of Satan” is instead read as the human adversaries who dogged Paul’s ministry—men named elsewhere in his letters, such as Alexander the coppersmith, and others of their kind who stirred up opposition wherever he preached. Read this way, God’s answer to Paul’s threefold prayer—“My grace is sufficient for you: for my power is made perfect in weakness”—becomes a word not about illness borne patiently but about opposition endured and, in the enduring, turned to the Gospel’s advantage.

How to Read This Commentary

Second Corinthians is, of Paul’s letters, one of the most personal, and Theophylact’s comment stays close to that intimacy rather than smoothing it into a treatise. A reader will do best to notice the letter’s changes of tone as they come—comfort, self-defense, appeal for the collection for Jerusalem, and finally a hard word to those still resisting him—and to read Theophylact’s gloss as following Paul’s mood rather than standing above it. Because so much of the letter turns on Paul’s own credibility as an apostle, the commentary rewards a reader willing to sit with the discomfort of watching a saint defend himself, and to see in that defense not self-regard but a shepherd’s care for a church still learning whom to trust.