The Second Epistle to the Corinthians

The Second Epistle to the Corinthians is one of the seven letters that scholars regard as authentically Paul's own — the "undisputed" letters, written in his lifetime and in his own voice. (Scholarship) It is the most personal of them all: less a treatise than a defence, written to repair a bruised relationship between Paul and the church he had founded at Corinth. For anyone reconstructing Paul's life, it is indispensable, because it is here — more than in any other letter — that Paul speaks directly about his sufferings, his travels, and his inner experience, supplying biographical detail found nowhere else.

What it is

2 Corinthians is a letter, not a narrative, addressed "to the church of God that is at Corinth, with all the saints that are in all Achaia" (2 Corinthians 1:1, Douay-Rheims). (Scripture) It belongs to a longer and partly lost correspondence: Paul refers to earlier letters and to a painful visit, so the two canonical Corinthian epistles are only part of a larger exchange. The occasion is conflict. Rival teachers — whom Paul calls, with heavy irony, "the great apostles" (2 Corinthians 11:5) — had come to Corinth, questioned his authority, and unsettled the community. Much of the letter is Paul's answer: an anguished, sometimes ironic defence of his apostleship and his motives.

Authorship and dating

On authorship there is little dispute: 2 Corinthians is accepted across the confessional and critical spectrum as genuinely written by Paul. (Scholarship) It is one of the seven undisputed letters, alongside Romans, 1 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians and Philemon — the letters generally taken as the earliest surviving Christian writings of any kind, earlier than the Gospels.

What *is* debated is the letter's composition. Its tone shifts abruptly — the conciliatory chapters 1 to 9 give way to the sharp, defensive chapters 10 to 13 — and this has led many scholars to argue that the canonical letter is a composite, stitched together from two or more separate letters Paul sent to Corinth. Others read it as a single letter whose changes of tone reflect the emotional swings of a difficult situation. (Scholarship) This is a debate about editing and unity, not about whether Paul wrote the material.

The usual dating is about AD 55 to 57, written from Macedonia during or just after Paul's third missionary journey, not long after 1 Corinthians. (Scholarship) Precise dating, as always with Paul, is a reconstruction rather than a record.

What it tells us about Paul

More than any other source, 2 Corinthians preserves the raw material of Paul's biography in his own words.

The catalogue of hardships in chapter 11 is the richest single list of what Paul endured. Answering boast with boast against the "great apostles," he writes of himself: "in many more labours, in prisons more frequently, in stripes above measure, in deaths often. Of the Jews five times did I receive forty stripes, save one. Thrice was I beaten with rods, once I was stoned, thrice I suffered shipwreck, a night and a day I was in the depth of the sea" (2 Corinthians 11:23–25). (Scripture) He goes on to list perils on the road, hunger, cold, and "the solicitude for all the churches" (11:28). Almost none of this is recorded elsewhere; it is a window onto a life of relentless danger that the narrative of the Acts of the Apostles only partly captures.

The letter also fixes a rare chronological anchor. Paul recounts his escape from Damascus: "the governor of the nation under Aretas the king, guarded the city of the Damascenes, to apprehend me. And through a window in a basket was I let down by the wall, and so escaped his hands" (2 Corinthians 11:32–33). (Scripture) Because Aretas IV, the Nabataean king, died about AD 40, this reference helps historians bound the early years after Paul's conversion — one of the few points where his life can be tied, however loosely, to a datable ruler. (Scholarship)

Two further passages are famous for what they reveal of Paul's interior life. He tells, in the third person, of "a man in Christ" — understood to be himself — "caught up to the third heaven... into paradise," where he "heard secret words, which it is not granted to man to utter" (2 Corinthians 12:2–4). (Scripture) And he speaks of the affliction he calls, in the Douay-Rheims, "a sting of my flesh, an angel of Satan, to buffet me" — the passage more widely known as the "thorn in the flesh" — which he begged God three times to remove, receiving the answer: "My grace is sufficient for thee: for power is made perfect in infirmity" (12:7–9). (Scripture) Its nature has never been identified, and the caution proper to any reference is to leave it undefined, as Paul himself does.

Paul, his Jewish identity, and Tarsus

2 Corinthians does not mention Tarsus — Paul's birthplace is named only in Acts, never in his own letters. (Scripture) But it does assert his Jewish identity in his own hand: "They are Hebrews: so am I. They are Israelites: so am I. They are the seed of Abraham: so am I" (2 Corinthians 11:22). (Scripture) This first-person testimony from a son of the diaspora complements what Acts reports about his origins in Tarsus of Cilicia, and sits within the fuller picture drawn in our reference on the Apostle Paul. For short answers to common questions, see the questions and answers page.

Key passages

1:8–10 (the affliction suffered in Asia, "we were weary even of life"); 4:7–12 ("we bear about... the mortification of Jesus"); chapters 8–9 (the collection for the poor of Jerusalem); 11:22–33 (Jewish identity, the catalogue of hardships, the Damascus escape and King Aretas); 12:1–10 (the vision of the third heaven and the "sting of the flesh").