Introductory Section (2:14–3:6)
Paul would likely have chosen a trusted co-worker to deliver this letter.
The opening greeting of that letter of defense was removed by a later editor to fit the letter between bookends containing Paul’s account of his anguished wait for Titus to meet him in Troas or Macedonia (2:12-13 and 7:5-7). It should surprise no one that later hands took such liberties with Paul’s letters, for neither he nor they thought of them as sacred scripture to be held inviolate. That would come a century and a half later.
Paul probably would have altered the stereotypical salutation to emphasize his fitness for ministry and to hint at the core of his defense.
Drawing on the themes and variations of the letter itself, we can plausibly imagine a salutation reading like this: “I, Paul, a minister (diakonos) of Christ Jesus by the will of God with fellow ministers Titus, Timothy, and Silvanus, to all God’s beloved in Corinth, grace to you and peace from God, our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”
In 2:14 we are left to wonder if a vestige of the original thanksgiving of the letter remains. There Paul begins, “To God be thanks . . .” (v. 14), and then goes on to articulate the basic theme of the letter (2:14–3:6). Certainly this introduction to Paul’s defense functions exactly as would a thanksgiving. It embraces the believers addressed, it affirms Paul’s place in God’s great cosmic mission, and it sets the theme of the chapters to follow.
It speaks optimistically of the spread of the gospel, and it offers a preview of Paul’s defense. This thanksgiving, if it be that, then gives way to the opening of the body of the letter and the defense of Paul’s ministry in 3:7.
The multiple references to ministry in this letter, unlike the one to follow (10:1–13:10), and the absence of a single reference to Paul’s apostleship place the defense and definition of ministry at the center of the discussion to come. Even those Pauline scholars who do not view 2:14–3:6 as the opening of a new letter do agree that these verses introduce a new section whose basic theme is Paul’s defense of his ministry.
God’s Triumphal Procession (2:14-17): These verses set the agenda of the letter. The hymnic opening (2:14-16a) begins with an expression of gratitude, “But thanks be to God,” which echoes the traditional Hebrew blessing formula (berakah) and may have extended the thanksgiving once preceding it but later removed to fit this fragment into the overall construction. Appended to this expression of thanks is the participial phrase, “who is always leading us in triumph.”
While this proclamation pulses with Paul’s expectation that in Jesus’
ministry, death, and resurrection God’s final apocalyptic scenario was initiated, the metaphor of this parade draws its evocative power from the popular religio-political vernacular. The reference to the triumphal procession evokes the image of a victorious commander returning home to cheering masses. This venerable metaphor had a history as old as the Epic of Gilgamesh of the second millennium B.C.E. and retained its ability to provoke the imagination well into Paul’s own day. In that popular epic after vanquishing Huwawa, or Humbaba—the evil, powerful, threatening god of the north—Gilgamesh and Enkidu return to Uruk to shouts of acclaim:
Riding through the market-street of Uruk,
The people of Uruk are gathered to gaze [upon them]
Gilgamesh to the lyre maids [of Uruk]
Says these words:
‘Who is most splendid among the heroes?
Who is most glorious among men?’
Gilgamesh in his palace holds a celebration.
(Pritchard 1955, 85)
More than two millennia later, Titus returns to Rome after brutally crushing the Second Jewish Revolt in 70 C.E. Josephus offers a gripping account of his sack of Jerusalem, the burning and looting of the city, the destruction of the temple, and the pillage and rape inflicted by Titus’s legions (War 7, § 132-62). His description of the triumphal procession welcoming the returning victorious Titus and his army to Rome is riveting.
After spending the night near the temple of Isis with his revered military hero and emperor father, Vespasian, Titus begins final preparations for the march of triumph. Father and son emerge in purple robes and crowned with laurel wreaths to receive shouts of acclamation from the troops. After acknowledging their salutes, they signal for silence, recite the traditional prayers, and address the troops and princes of equestrian rank. They then dismiss the troops and move to the “Triumphal Gate,” Porta Triumphalis, to sacrifice to the gods. After breakfast the commander gave the order to begin the pageant.
What an awesome spectacle it was. The sweet smells of holy incense and flowers hovered over the grand procession. Paraded on display was the booty taken in victory—gold, silver, ivory, tapestries of the rarest purple, images of the gods, golden crowns, sacred objects from the temple, and scrolls of the sacred writings—all flowing through the streets like a river. At the head of the procession were captives—prisoners, slaves, and Simon ben Gioras, a leader of the Jewish Revolt—all on display to exhibit the invincible power, courage, and god-given superiority of the Roman army.
There followed platforms exhibiting bloody scenes from the battle and the devastation visited on the enemy. Finally came the emperor, Vespasian, and his two warrior sons, Titus and Domitian, triumphantly parading on horses and accompanied by troops in formation. The triumphal procession on the Via Sacra (Sacred Way) led up to the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus.
There the commander of the enemy forces, Simon ben Gioras, was haled to the spot of execution, beaten, humiliated, and beheaded to exultant shouts.
After prayers of benediction and thanksgiving, all withdrew to their celebratory meals rejoicing in the pax (peace) secured.
In no other ceremony in the Roman experience did god and man draw so near each to the other. The purple robe of the triumphant rex (“king”) from earliest times symbolized that the ruler was both king and god (Jupiter) (Versnel 1970, 92), and even when the power of the mythic identification was later rejected, the ceremony offered a powerful symbol of victory, salvation, and good fortune, and the exciting promise of new beginnings (Versnel 1970, 397).
Second Corinthians 2:14 similarly places Paul and his partners on the big stage with God personally leading the procession: “Thanks be to God who is always leading us in triumph.” The participle thriambeuonti (“leading”) appears only here in the NT, nowhere in the LXX, and nowhere in first-century Greek texts with the same nuance. Josephus, however, does use the noun form in his graphic account of Titus’s triumphal procession after his armies sacked and burned Jerusalem and quashed the Jewish revolt (War, 7,§ 130-31). In the most lurid colors, he paints the thriambous (“triumphal processions”) snaking through the Triumphal Gate (Porta Triumphalis) between the Capitol and the Tiber. On that canvas the purple robes Vespasian and Titus don are thriambikas. Josephus uses both the Greek thriambe and the Latin trumpe for invocations to the gods to manifest themselves, and he well captures the symbolic power of both to describe this spectacle of triumph (Versnel 1970, 55). That Paul’s fertile mind could convert such a pregnant noun into a participial verb form and turn it to his use should surprise no one.
From Paul’s pen flows this graphic metaphor of God’s triumphant eschatological spectacle. A literal translation of the victory parade refers to God “who is always leading us [Paul and his partners] in his triumph in Christ and through us making known everywhere that fragrance which is the knowledge of himself” (AT; cf. 1 Cor 15:57; Rom 6:17; 7:25; and 2 Cor 8:16; 9:15). Given God’s campaign through a Messiah who died on a Roman cross and who now uses such physical weaklings as Paul as divine envoys, this metaphor is imbued with profound irony. But the metaphor also contains a bold response to critics of his ministry and his lack of physical
gravitas and his unfitness for ministry of the Anointed One, i.e., Messiah Jesus.
This metaphor, however, is multivalent, and it interacts with and is interpreted by a second—the aroma or fragrance that like holy incense silently spreads its aromatic message about and ascends to the heavens (vv.
2:14b-16). Like incense rising to praise and thank the gods for salvation, for the victory proclaimed, and for the Pax Romana secured, the fragrance of Christ rises up from God’s procession to spread everywhere giving off the aroma of the “new creation.”
This bold incense metaphor well captures the ambiguity of the procession spectacle and confronts those who read Paul’s ministry as deceitful and fraudulent and his bodily persona as radiating the very antithesis of divine glory. If the risen Christ spoke to him directly (e.g., Gal 1:12), his interlocutors must have asked, should not his body radiate the splendor of that encounter? Paul responds by inviting reflection on the ambiguity of his metaphor. For those “being saved”—i.e., victors—the fragrance is a token of life; but for those “perishing”—i.e., victims—the aroma reeked of rotting flesh from “death to death” (v. 16). His own mortality, human frailty, and impotence he knew in real not abstract terms (4:7-12), and he found in that mortal weakness not the acrid stench of death but the “sweet aroma of [the resurrected] Christ (christoū euōdia)” (v. 15).
Just as in the commingling of the odors of life and death, ambiguity and uncertainty intrude, Paul challenges his skeptical converts to join him in learning how in mortality a fragrance lurked that offered an epiphany of life.
This mix of metaphors invited an imaginative response. Was Paul really an agent heralding God’s apocalyptic triumph? In the metaphor of triumph and holy war, was he truly a minister of Christ announcing and celebrating the arrival of God’s rule, or was he a philosophical swindler, hawking his message for gain? Did his persona display the real marks of a true minister of Christ? The agora or market place of Corinth was alive with religious charlatans, hawking their message for gain, lining their pockets, and skipping town (v. 17); was Paul just one more of these swindlers?
In defense, Paul appealed to his own purity of motive and sincerity before God in Christ (v. 17b). These lingering suspicions and charges doubtless shocked Paul, who in 2 Cor 8 sought to avoid any blame associated with the offering (8:20) and to aim at what was honorable (kala)
“not only in the Lord’s sight but also in the sight of others” (8:21; see also 2 Cor 12:16-18). Paul’s protest of purity of motive and sincerity before God in Christ is the beginning of a lesson in theology and self-defense before the Corinthians, and is of a piece with his self-portrayal in 2:14 as an envoy of God in Christ. To that defense we now turn.
Paul’s Defense of the Sufficiency of His Ministry (3:1-6): In 3:1-3 Paul begins a defense that will stretch on to 4:6. In v. 1 we hear for the first time that in his absence itinerants have come, possibly the “super apostles”
of 11:5 who preached “another Jesus.” (We need not call them “heretics,”
for the struggle was ongoing to reach clarity about who Jesus was, the nature of his gospel, and the specific application of his message and life.) Of Jewish descent and professing to be “servants of Christ” (11:22-23), they came with “letters of recommendation” from other, perhaps Paul’s own, churches (v. 1). In v. 2 Paul shifts the gaze of his converts from these intruders to his relationship with the Corinthians, and he begins to improvise his response.
They are his letter of recommendation, inscribed on the heart. The reading, “our hearts” (NRSV), makes Paul an incarnation of the letter, but the alternate reading “your hearts” (RSV) better fits the logic of the context.
Both readings enjoy strong manuscript support, though the NRSV’s is stronger, and both refer to a letter enfleshed for all to read and understand.
Unlike the letter carried by Paul’s itinerant rivals, however, this epistle is from Christ himself, delivered through the ministry of Paul and his partners.
The aorist, passive participle in v. 2 (diakonētheisa “being ministered to [by us]”; NRSV: “prepared by us”) is part of a clutch of ten similar references (diakonia, diakoneo and diakonos [ministry, to minister, or minister]) in Paul’s defense while the word “apostle” (apostolos) is absent altogether.
Paul’s initial defense against a distorted and unflattering comparison of his ministry with that of his rivals slips into caustic irony as he requires them to imagine the irony of being ministered to by one whose fitness for ministry (diakonos) one questions (v. 3).
In v. 3 Paul’s fertile mind further improvises, summoning Jeremiah (31:33; LXX 38:33) and Ezekiel (36:26; LXX 36:26) to place an eschatological halo around and energy within the metaphorical letter written
—not with “ink” but “spirit” and not on “stone” but the human “heart”—
and to invoke suggestive “new covenant” language.
In vv. 4-6 at the close of the introduction, Paul returns to the question of his sufficiency or fitness (hikanotēs; NRSV: “competence”). He locates the source of his sufficiency not in himself, but in God, who made him and his co-workers “ministers of the new covenant not of writ, but of the spirit (pneumatos) that makes alive” (AT), a succinct summary of his theology of ministry and his defense against a slur that he was unfit.
The dispute about fitness was essentially a contest to define legitimacy, and at this point the outcome of that contest is not at all clear. Paul recognized that his claim was weak. He had never seen Jesus in the flesh.
Until after Jesus’ death he had had no association with Jesus’ followers. He himself recalls a fierce dispute with Peter, one of the “pillar apostles” of the Jerusalem church (Gal 2:11-21), and the desertion of his co-worker, Barnabas, left Paul still wounded. The furious debate was about credibility and what are the true marks of ministers of Christ. He lacked both the rhetorical skill and charismatic physical presence that would project an image of legitimacy. Moreover, Paul’s own theology was moving into uncharted waters.
Although Paul’s own thinking was emerging as he struggled against alternative views of ministry, he did not come to this task theologically naked. Deeply ingrained in him was the message of the prophets, in whom he found a language for talking about the great apocalyptic auroral display set loose in the ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Drawing on those resources and in the face of new challenges, he speaks of a ministry of the
“new covenant.” That bold claim may have meant little to his Gentile converts, but it was his charter coming from Jeremiah’s vision of God’s new age. Later he will speak of a ministry of righteousness whose roots were in prophets like Amos, Isaiah, and Micah. To that is connected a ministry of reconciliation projected in the grandest terms. What is so deeply ironic here about Paul’s grand, if not grandiose, image of God’s apocalyptic victory march in which he is taking part is the stark contrast between that claim and the unimposing physical presence of Paul and even suspicions that he is huckster hawking God’s gospel for gain. Only later will we have his best articulation of the profound paradox hidden in his claim to ministry.
His New Covenant Ministry (3:7–4:6)
After setting the cosmic stage on which his ministry played (2:14-16) and describing the sufficiency and expansive reach of his ministry through the Corinthians as his “letter of recommendation” (3:1-4), Paul lumped himself with his co-workers as “ministers of a new covenant (kainēs diathēkēs) not written but of the spirit” (3:6). In 3:7–4:6 Paul will unpack that core theological and richly evocative symbol to defend his ministry (diakonia) against all gainsaying. This section divides into two main parts (3:7-11 and 3:12-18) offering an imaginative commentary on 3:6 and a novel counter-argument to the charges of his accusers. The conclusion in 4:1-6 summarizes his angry rejoinders to malicious attacks on the integrity of his ministry, his behavior, his truthfulness, and on the opaqueness of his gospel, and ends with a negative and positive statement. The negative heaps ugly epithets on his accusers so blinded by the god of this world that they simply cannot see the brightness refracted in the face of Christ (4:4); the positive predictably offers a stunning contrast of his selfless preaching of Christ and a claim to superior knowledge from the light reflected from the face of Jesus Christ shining in “our” hearts (4:5-6).
Glory Compared with Glory—A Reflection (3:7-11): In v. 3 the letter metaphor begat another, the stone tablet metaphor, that in turn merged with another, the new covenant metaphor inscribed on the heart. The passage following was no midrash exploring every detail of the Exodus story of the giving of the law and its connection to the readers but rather a jumble of random reflections on Exod 34:27-35. Assuming his readers knew the story, Paul stares down critics who were at home in a Roman habitus and who could hardly stand to read Paul’s body as a medium of divine and manly valor. If he were a divine agent, should not his body reflect more of the glory of that agency? The relative absence of authenticating signs of apostolic ministry only clouded the more Paul’s claim to an apostolic ministry from Christ.
In the subtext of vv. 7-11 and vv. 12-18 lurk questions of Paul’s critics about the meaning of Paul’s body language. If Moses’ encounter with the glory of God painted his face with a blinding radiance, then why does the physical persona of Paul, who claims to be an apostle directly
commissioned through a divine revelation, refract so little glory? If Paul’s ministry really is a ministry of hikanos (sufficiency), then why is his bodily presence so feeble? And if his gospel really does come directly from Christ, as he earlier claimed in Galatia and probably also in Corinth (Gal 1:16-17), why is it so opaque (see later 4:3)? Where and what are the authenticating signs of his apostolic ministry?
In response, from the Exodus story about Moses on Sinai, Paul draws three comparisons from the lesser to the greater (rabbinic qal wahomer;
Daube 1949, 239-64). All grant the glory of the letter (gramma) or “script”
(Hays 1989, 130-31). To the unflattering comparison of his inglorious ministry with the glorious ministry of Moses, Paul offers a tripartite comparison that subverts that canon. First, if the “ministry of death”
(diakonia tou thanatou) carved in “script” on stone came with such glory (doxa) so that the children of Israel were not able to gaze on the face of Moses on account of the glory of his face (Exod 34:30) that was passing away (katargoumenēn), how much more will the “ministry of the spirit”
(diakonia tou pneumatos) come in “glory” (doxa, vv. 7-8)? For, he notes, the “script” with which the ministry is carved in stone kills, but the “spirit”
gives life (v. 6).
Paul’s loose paraphrase of Exodus offers further rebuttal. Paul says the children of Israel could not look on Moses’ face, where the text says instead they were afraid to draw near to Moses. The NRSV incorrectly translates the present passive participle (katargoumenēn) and describes the glory of Moses’ face as “now set aside,” which at least implicitly pits Paul against the Hebrew Scriptures. But the continuing action of the participle suggests a process now underway but not completed and is best rendered, “was in the process of being brought to an end,” or “was fading.” If Paul’s critics appealed to Moses to argue that the face or persona of a true evangelist should radiate divine glory, then Paul’s fixation on that glory’s fading nature subverted their premise.
Second, Paul responds that if the “ministry of condemnation” came in glory, will not the “the ministry of righteousness” (NRSV: “ministry of justification”) come with even greater glory (v. 9)? The term righteousness, dikaiosynē occurs thirty-one times in Romans but rarely in 2 Corinthians, but note its occurrence here (3:9; 5:21; 6:7). It connotes God’s action through Christ to reclaim or reconcile a fallen world (4:4 and 5:19), and here Paul claims a share in God’s active intervention on behalf of the weak.