Paul’s Greek – staccato?

As it happens in the annual schedule for covering the GNT in a year, I’ve been reading 2 Corinthians recently, and (not being very proficient) have found it particularly difficult to follow at times. So, I was comforted to see this comment in the first ICC commentary on the letter by Alfred Plummer.

Alfred Plummer (viii): Readers will do well to study the paraphrases prefixed to the sections before consulting the notes. No translation, however accurate, can give the full meaning of any Pauline Epistle, and this is specially true of 2 Corinthians. The only adequate method is to paraphrase….

Near obsession with suffering and death (and what follows)

Reading it in Greek (so far up to chapter 6), which for me requires a more intense focus on the text than following in English, has given me the impression that spilling out of his heart is a whole lot of stuff to do with suffering and death – and what follows from that. I suspect that this is not simply to do with the rhetoric he needs to adopt to make his point to the Corinthians, but because of his recent experiences in Ephesus and elsewhere. There is a real sense that what these experiences have taken out of him bodily will result in his death rather than be around for the Parousia.

Paul’s Anthropology underneath 2 Cor 5

I think it’s unlikely that one can interpret Paul’s meaning in 2 Cor 5:1-10 without bringing to the passage as an assumption some kind of framework on Paul’s Anthropology. A key question here for me is this: Is it possible for a human being to exist as other than embodied spirit? The options for understanding the passage depend on how one answers this question. If yes, then the ‘building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands’ can be the resurrection body envisaged in 1 Cor 15 received on the Day of Resurrection, and the immediate state after death will be disembodied spirit in the presence of Christ. If no, then it could be a new body received at death and perhaps we could say publicly revealed on the Day of Resurrection. I have come to the latter conclusion because I think that essential to Paul’s Anthropology is that to be human is to be embodied spirit.

Worrying about the unresolved tension with 1 Cor 15

There is no doubt that whatever position we take on the relationship between 2 Cor 5 and 1 Cor 15, there is a tension between them. Many have sought to resolve the tension over the centuries, but I haven’t yet come across a resolution that satisfies me. It seems to me, therefore, that the ancients were much less worried about loose threads in their thinking than we are, and they were happy enough to try to explicate according to the perspective from which they were seeing things: in this case Paul explaining things from the point of view of someone expecting to be alive at the Parousia in 1 Cor 15, and then in 2 Cor 5 from the point of view of someone expecting to die before the Parousia. All Paul’s letters need to be interpreted within their historical situation as far as we can know it – they are ‘occasional’ documents. So, perhaps we should be less inclined to build a watertight system of his thought.