2 Corinthians

What 2 Corinthians is about

Something has gone badly wrong between Paul and this church since his last letter. A painful visit, a severe letter now lost, rival teachers who have arrived with impressive credentials and undermined him, and a congregation that has partly turned. Second Corinthians is Paul’s response, and it is the least composed and most revealing thing he wrote.

He begins with comfort — God comforts us in our affliction so that we can comfort others with what we ourselves received — and admits how near despair he had been in Asia. He describes the ministry as treasure in jars of clay, so that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to the vessel. He sets out the message he was given in one dense sentence: God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, and has entrusted that message to us, so that anyone in Christ is a new creation.

Two long chapters handle a practical matter — a collection for the poor Christians in Jerusalem — and they are the New Testament’s fullest teaching on giving: voluntary, proportionate, cheerful, and modelled on Christ, who was rich and became poor.

Then, in the last four chapters, Paul takes on his rivals directly, and does it by boasting in reverse. Where they list their qualifications, he lists his beatings, imprisonments, shipwrecks, sleepless nights, hunger, and constant anxiety for the churches. He mentions an extraordinary vision only to move quickly past it to a thorn in the flesh he begged three times to have removed, and the answer he received: My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.

Where it sits in the story

The Corinthian correspondence is the most documented relationship in the New Testament — a founder and a congregation, over years, through real conflict. Acts 18 and 19 supply the background, and 1 Corinthians the earlier stage of the argument.

Why it is worth reading

Because it shows an apostle exhausted, hurt, and defending himself badly on purpose. Second Corinthians is the book for anyone in ministry who feels inadequate to it, and it does not solve that feeling so much as relocate it.