Read the Bible with Me!

Welcome to the Pauline Family's "Year of the Bible"! We've been reading the Bible clear through this year. We are finishing the New Testament, so read along with me. But first, let us pray: 

Father,

When the fullness of time had come, you sent your Word in the One who said, “Whoever sees me, sees the Father.” No revelation can surpass this until Jesus comes again. By your gift, the Church continues to receive unfathomable riches from the inheritance handed on from the Apostles and guaranteed by the Holy Spirit.

Let the Spirit who inspired the writing of today's pages "guide me in the truth and teach me" to follow Jesus ever more closely, until he calls me to follow him to the Kingdom where he lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, forever and ever. Amen.

Today's chapters are 2 Corinthians 11-13.

We finish Paul's Second Letter to the Corinthians today, and it is amazing! Yesterday he began to address the superficial criticisms of his appearance and his oratory. That was just a warm-up. Paul lets the Corinthians know that these insinuations resemble the work of the Tempter in Eden, and it is not Paul who matters in this image, it is Christ, the New Adam whom they are being led away from. And by whom? People whom Paul will mockingly call "super-apostles."

This is where Paul's irony and paradox go into overdrive. To heighten the ridiculousness of the claims by the new arrivals, Paul takes each of their "boasts" and ups the ante. And then he surpasses them not in grandeur and glory (according to the normal worldly understanding), but in humiliations and sufferings for the sake of Christ! This, Paul demonstrates, is what it means to belong to Christ, to witness to Christ, to be in Christ: to be like Christ.

And then he suddenly gets serious, and begins to speak of his actual mystical experiences. Only here, in one of the most autobiographical confessions in all of ancient literature, Paul resorts to the third person, refusing to say outright "this happened to me." Instead, he says, "I know a man in Christ, who..." After all, Paul probably reasoned, "I didn't accomplish this by myself or for myself." He uses Jewish mystical tradition language in this narrative: the "third heaven" was the highest of the heavenly realms, the dwelling-place of God. As to the "thorn in the flesh," scholars love to speculate about what it might have been. What is helpful to all of us is to see that the great St Paul found this so burdensome that he repeatedly prayed to be relieved of it (three times means, "over and over," as Jesus prayed "three times" in the Garden of Gethsemane). We can pray for relief in our trials, too, even though we might get the same response that Paul did!

The letter closes with a brief but firm exhortation to repentance, demonstrating what is at stake: 

Examine yourselves to see whether you are living in faith. Test yourselves. Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you?—unless, of course, you fail the test.

Finish 2 Corinthians here.

For additional background

N.T. Wright's Paul: A Biography is the book I would recommend to someone who wanted to read one (only one) book that combined the life and letters of St Paul. Written by a noted Scripture, this is a flowing narrative that is scripturally enlightening and historically sound. Wright gives the reader a way of following Paul through the Acts of the Apostles and the writing of his letters, making Paul the person that much more approachable, and the letters themselves more readable as a result of having a social and historical context.

At the conclusion of Paul's letters to the Corinthians, you might enjoy A Week in the Life of Corinth. This historical novel is set in first-century Corinth and outfitted with historical footnotes and archaeological sidebars. Ben Witherington III is a Scripture scholar in the Evangelical tradition, so there are some points in which his description of the worship in the Corinthian community mirrors that tradition rather than the Jewish roots of the liturgy we know so well, but his description of the social life and values of ancient Corinth may be extremely helpful in understanding things Paul takes for granted in his letters.