Second Letter to the Corinthians written

This is the most personal and the most difficult of Paul's letters, and reconstructing what had happened between him and the Corinthians is a large part of reading it.

Something had gone badly wrong after the first letter. He refers to a painful visit, to a letter written out of great distress and anguish of heart and with many tears, and to an individual who had caused grief and had since been disciplined by the congregation. Neither the visit nor the tearful letter survives, and whether part of one is embedded in this letter has been argued for a century.

Meanwhile teachers had arrived at Corinth who impressed the congregation and undermined him. He calls them, with heavy sarcasm, super-apostles. Their case against him seems to have been that he was unimpressive in person, that his speaking was poor, that he refused payment and therefore was not a real apostle, and that he kept changing his travel plans.

His response occupies the last four chapters and it is one of the strangest passages in the New Testament, because he does what he has just said is foolish and boasts, and then lists the wrong things.

Instead of successes he gives the tally: imprisonments, floggings, five times thirty-nine lashes, three beatings with rods, one stoning, three shipwrecks, a night and a day in the open sea, danger from rivers, bandits, his own people, Gentiles, in the city, in the country, at sea, and from false believers. Sleepless nights, hunger, thirst and cold. And besides everything else, the daily pressure of concern for all the churches.

Then the thorn in the flesh, which he says was given to keep him from becoming conceited, and which he asked three times to have removed. What it was is unknown; eye trouble, malaria, epilepsy and persecution have all been proposed. The answer he received is the point: my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.

Two chapters in the middle deal with the collection for Jerusalem, and they are the most detailed treatment of money and giving in the New Testament, including the arrangements he made to ensure the funds were administered by others.

Whether the letter as it stands is one document or several combined is a genuine question. The tone changes sharply at chapter ten, and a section on partnership with unbelievers sits awkwardly in its context. Proposals for how many letters are involved range from one to five.

What is not in doubt is the relationship it describes: an apostle who has been publicly humiliated by a congregation he founded, writing to people he says he loves the more even though they love him less.

The super-apostles are never named and never precisely described, and everything known about them is filtered through the anger of the man they displaced.

What the letter reveals about Paul is more than any other. He describes despairing of life itself in Asia, being comforted by the arrival of Titus, having no peace of mind at Troas, and boasting of things that show his weakness because he had been told that was where the power was.

The collection chapters contain the principle he applies to giving: not that others might be relieved while you are hard pressed, but that there might be equality.