Does Paul understand himself? NTiR (2 Corinthians 1-3)

By | July 22, 2010
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Bible and magnifying glass????EGAH!!!!!!!

For some reason, I was thinking that 2 Corinthians was a short book. I thought it was the start of the smaller epistles, and was looking forward to reviewing just a few chapters. Instead, 2 Corinthians is the last of the extra-long, drawn out letters. Paul loves to go on and on as he tries to coerce people to follow his teachings instead of the teachings of others around him. While the subtext of people deciding which of the former disciples most represents the words of Christ is intriguing, we are reading letters written by the man who won. And the victor gets to write history as he pleases.

Obviously, I am not looking forward to this book. Procrastinating isn’t making things any better, though, so let’s move on to:

Second Epistle to the Corinthians

Chapter 1Let’s see. We start off with greetings from Paul and Timothy. Paul states that it is good everyone suffered, because then they can help comfort others who are suffering. And apparently everyone is suffering a lot. Paul references the problems he ran into in Asia; it’ll be interesting to see if those are mentioned again.

Chapter 2The chapter starts off with Paul bemoaning the acts of one of the members of the church in Corinth. Is this the same guy from I Corinthians, or someone else? He then gives hints of a god complex (“what I have forgiven I did in the presence of Christ”) and compares the followers to the “aroma” of Christ. (“Savour” in the KJV) This aroma is good for some and deadly for others.

I dunno… I think that at least half the time, Paul doesn’t understand what he is talking about.

Chapter 3Paul gets into a glory contest here. Followers of Christ have more glory than followers of Moses do. Jesus has more glory than Moses does. Followers of Moses have a veil covering their hearts when reading what Moses wrote, while anyone who turns to the Lord has that veil ripped away.

Hmmm… sounds to me like there were a lot of Corinthians who didn’t want to give up their beliefs in Judaism. How is Paul going to win them over?

Up next: There’s something rotten in the state of Corinth…

New installments of The New Testament In Review will be posted each Monday and Thursday. The new posts will always be on my blog, http://biffster.org. The entire series is accessible via http://biffster.org/ntir. If you are one of my Facebook friends, you can get an advance preview on my Facebook page. You can also follow me (@biffster) on Twitter to be alerted to new posts.