Paul's Thorn in the Flesh, Power Being Made Complete in Weakness, and Paul's Apostleship
(avg. read time: 10–19 mins.)
Today’s post is meant both as a final post on 2 Corinthians for this year and as a reflection on Paul’s teachings about apostleship. This is fitting because 2 Corinthians is the letter that provides the most reflection on apostolic ministry and the travails associated with it of all of Paul’s letters. This will also be building off of one of my essays that I wrote for one of my comprehensive exams. It was something of a nightmare scenario, as I had spent months preparing for my three exams, and I thought I was the best prepared for the context exam, but when I got the questions for the exam, not only were the questions rather long, not only did I have to write more than I expected I would need to in the six hours I had, but for all the questions I had prepared to write a lot for (and there were many), none of them were on the exam. Somehow, I ended up getting a high pass out of it, and I had to learn on the personal level that day the meaning of Paul’s message from God that his grace is sufficient for us, and that power is made complete in weakness. That is, in fact, part of what I had to write about in response to one of the questions about Paul’s notion of apostleship, and so I share it here today.
The Thorn in the Flesh
There has been much speculation on what Paul’s “thorn in the flesh” in 2 Cor 12:7 was. I will not go over all the options here, but they generally can be categorized as physical limitations (such as poor eyesight), diseases/disorders (such as epilepsy), temptations (such as John Shelby Spong’s salacious and asinine claim that this was an indication that Paul was a repressed homosexual), or some other kind of humbling limitation (such as his apparent lack of skill or charismatic presence as an orator compared to his writing, per 10:9–11). While I am inclined to think it was deficiencies as an orator that he described in terms of a messenger of Satan hindering him, I have limited interest in defending this particular view, and it is generally easier to critique overly speculative views than to argue strongly for a specific assertion. Paul either expects his readers to know what he is talking about, and we today have nothing to go off of except for his letters (especially this one, hence why I am inclined to think what I think), or Paul was simply not interested in explaining what he meant because it did not matter what exactly it was.
That is why I am inclined to think that as long as we are not getting Paul entirely wrong, our answer to what the thorn in the flesh was does not ultimately matter: for the purposes of this text, it does not matter. It is only a set-up for the fundamental point Paul makes about God’s response to his prayers for the removal of this thorn (12:8–9). It also helps to make this text more easily and broadly applicable, for it is a reminder that God’s empowerment does not always consist in removing this or that problem, or this or that weakness. It can come in working through us in spite of the intransigent obstacle. Paul’s own experiences, as outlined earlier in this chapter, could have led to him becoming too arrogant or haughty, thinking that there was something about him that made God favor him so much with such revelations, but this weakness keeps him grounded. It reminds him that he is what he is, and that he has received what he has received, only by God’s gift. Power is made complete in weakness because we are reminded 1) that we are ultimately reliant on God’s power and 2) that we worship the God who raises the dead.
The Power of the God Who Raises the Dead and Paul’s Apostleship
We have seen this point elsewhere with his contrast of weakness and power for the present body versus the resurrection body. The term for “weakness” can also refer to “illness” and “infirmity,” and is in any case a marker of the present mortal condition. In such a context, “power,” which Paul often identifies as an attribute of God (Rom 1:4, 16, 20; 9:17; 15:13, 19; 1 Cor 1:18, 24; 2:4–5; 5:4; 6:14; 2 Cor 4:7; 6:7; 12:9–12; 13:4; Gal 3:5; Eph 1:19–20; 3:7, 16, 20; Phil 3:10; Col 1:11, 29; 1 Thess 1:5; 2 Thess 1:11; 2 Tim 1:7–8), as a quality of the kingdom of God (1 Cor 4:20; 12:10, 28–29; 14:11), and specifically as God’s resurrecting power (1 Cor 6:14; 2 Cor 13:4; Eph 1:19–20; Phil 3:10), the response from God is a reminder of his resurrecting power as the clearest demonstration of his power coming to completion in weakness. As at the start of the letter (1:9), that the God Paul serves is the God who raises the dead motivates him to persevere. Indeed, it motivates him even to boast in his weakness for how it shows the power of God. This is the cruciform nature of his ministry, for as God’s power showed forth through Christ’s crucifixion followed by his resurrection (cf. 13:4), so too does it show through as the power of the risen Christ in Paul’s weakness. This is something we also see in Phil 3:10. And it is why Paul can be content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities, for they show forth the power of the risen Christ in his own cruciform and Christomorphic ministry. That is why he can say, “for when I am weak, then I am strong” (12:10). This leads us, now, to explore what it meant for Paul to be an apostle.
Paul described himself as an apostle to convey his sense that his role was to serve as an envoy or ambassador of the one who sent him: Christ Jesus. In that vein, he thought of apostleship in a few different aspects: witness, proclamation, and ethics. Most fundamentally, he described himself as an apostle because he saw the risen Jesus. Acts 1:22 sees this qualification as one of two necessary components of being among the Twelve (along with being a companion of Jesus for the entirety of his ministry). As the apostleship expanded beyond the Twelve, naturally, this qualification would continue to be the fundamental qualification. Paul himself assumes such in 1 Cor 9:1, where he follows up the rhetorical question of if he is not apostle with the rhetorical question of if he has not seen the Lord (which he states in 1 Cor 15:8–10, as well as Gal 1:15–17, that he has). Some scholars have supposed that Luke actually undermines Paul’s claim to apostleship because of how he describes Paul’s experience with the risen Jesus in contradistinction to the Twelve (i.e., that it seems to have more the qualities of a vision than an objective, bodily resurrection appearance). However, this can hardly be maintained, as Luke portrays Paul as proclaiming the same bodily resurrection of Jesus (Acts 13:30–37), and also as in continuity with the Twelve in proclaiming the same gospel as them. The number of resonances (which I have noted in published work and, besides the aforementioned posts, see here and here as well) between Acts 2, the first gospel proclamation, and Acts 13, Paul’s first kerygmatic speech, even down to the citation of a common Scripture in Ps 16, should sufficiently demonstrate this point.
On that note, we see a similar concern from Paul that an apostle is only a true apostle by proclaiming the true gospel of Jesus Christ and him crucified and risen. This was essential to his argument in 1 Cor 15, as this gospel constitutes the community of believers as believers, and it was this gospel that he and the other apostles had proclaimed to them (15:1–11). Indeed, his preamble to his discussion of his own apostleship in Gal 1:6–10 entails that he is a true apostle because he has proclaimed the true gospel. All others are disqualified and accursed, even if they should be an angel from heaven (cf. 2 Cor 11:1–4), if they should proclaim a false gospel. The pillar apostles of Peter, James, and John confirmed that he was entrusted with the true gospel and that was sufficient to confirm his apostleship. As Paul nears the end of his life during the writing of 2 Timothy, he once again stresses that he was an apostle because God entrusted him with the gospel by which God abolished death and brought life by Christ Jesus (2 Tim 1:10–11). It is to this gospel that he consistently points when exhorting his churches. It is this gospel that he presents as the true version of which all other teachings are perversions. And it is this gospel that he claims to embody in himself as one who himself witnessed the risen Jesus (1 Cor 11:1).
That leads to the third aspect of ethics. Paul consistently insisted that he was a proper apostle not only because he has seen the Jesus who was crucified and rose again, not only because he proclaimed the gospel of this Jesus to the gentiles, but also because he lived that gospel. The pattern of Christ’s story of obedience unto death and resurrection in vindication was a story he aimed to make his own (Phil 3:10–11), because it was this story that gave salvation to him and those who received his proclamation. When he prophylactically presented his defense of his apostleship in 1 Cor 9, he notes that the Corinthian Christians themselves were the seal of his apostleship, indicating that they could testify of his apostolic work (and if they could not, then they could not themselves have received the true gospel). When he describes the ministry of the apostles and how it is like God has put them on display as the last in a triumph, as those to be executed, this is the conclusion of his opening exposition on the gospel of Christ Jesus and him crucified. The apostles, unlike the Corinthians in their factitious strife and sundry sins against one another, embody the story of Jesus in how he himself was given over to suffering for the sake of others, that others may be saved. When he answers the “super-apostles” in 2 Cor 11, he provides a catalogue of sufferings that demonstrate that he embodies the gospel better than they do, for he has shared in the sufferings of Christ, whereby he will share in Christ’s resurrection by God’s power and God’s salvific verdict. As in Christ’s death he showed forth the power of God by his resurrection, so too the apostle shows the power of God in his weakness. He proved his apostleship to the satisfaction of the pillar apostles by his gospel and in response they only asked that he remember the poor, which Paul declared he was eager to do (Gal 2:10), again, as an embodiment of the gospel. Likewise, after discussing his rebuke of Peter/Cephas when he sought to eat with Jews to the exclusion of the gentiles, Paul reminds his audience that he has been a participant in the story of the gospel by being crucified with Christ so that he lives only by the resurrecting power of God in Christ (and, I might add based on Rom 8, by means of the Holy Spirit; Gal 2:19–20). The life he lives now is to be Christ’s life. To Timothy, he once again points to his own example of suffering for the gospel, that he should thereby rely on the resurrecting power of God who gave life through Christ Jesus (2 Tim 1:8–12). It is Christ’s life that he lives out and God’s purpose that he enacts as an apostle, and so it is to a cruciform life that he calls his fellow believers.
For all the narrative integrity of this vision of apostolic ministry, he faced objections to his claim to be an apostle, most notably from the Galatians and Corinthians. Among the Galatians, their objection rests primarily on the second aspect, his claim that he has proclaimed the true gospel. Galatian folk religion, with its reliance on strict observance of ritual precepts, was prime ground for the Judaizers to sow their seeds of a message in which salvation is attained in Christ, but by means of the works of the Law that distinguished one as a Jew. Paul points to his own life to show that their message cannot be the true gospel, for he was once a man who strictly observed the works of the Law but does so no longer, all because God revealed his risen Son to Paul and called him to proclaim a gospel that involves salvific union with Christ by faith and not the works of the Law. For those who care about such things, as the Galatians clearly did, Paul also had his gospel confirmed by the pillar apostles, including James, whom the Judaizers came from (Gal 2:12). And he further confirmed the truth of his gospel by his conduct, being more faithful to it than even Peter and Barnabas, his companion. The objectors who sowed seeds of doubt about Paul’s apostleship among the Galatians could not point to James as the superior authority, for he had already endorsed Paul, along with Peter and John, even though Peter was among those whom Paul later rebuked for conduct unbecoming of the gospel. By this means, he also neuters the potential force of pointing to the example of Peter or Barnabas.
In the case of the Corinthians, the objections seem rather to be based on how unimpressive Paul is by worldly standards (without recognizing that this is to his credit as an apostle of the crucified Lord). They found him unimpressive in speech, even though they thought his letters were powerful (they thus might have proposed that he was a fraud of a teacher, one who relied on others to make his letters more rhetorically forceful; 2 Cor 10:10). Indeed, the fact that he does not operate by the values of the cursus honorum and has no ambition to “get ahead” of others leaves people in such a mindset perplexed. But Paul insists through his sufferings that this is ethos of the gospel. He has reason to boast according to worldly standards, not least by virtue of his ascribed honor and status at birth (since he was a Jew, he could, by the Galatians’ standards, present himself as superior to others in this regard). But he boasts in his sufferings, because it is in those respects that he resembles the crucified Jesus who God vindicated, honored, and exalted by raising him from the dead and sitting him at his right hand.
(It is notable that there is no point in any text in which there is open doubt that Paul had seen the resurrected Jesus. At most, those who objected to his apostleship seem to have wanted to invalidate Paul’s testimony to seeing the risen Jesus by these others means. In other words, “Surely someone who has seen the risen Jesus would not say or do that!”)
These matters raise the question of whether or not there truly were competing versions of Christianity from the very beginning with starkly different visions of apostleship. It has been common to suggest that the tradition that would become the “orthodox” tradition was simply the one that triumphed, that it has no more right to claim itself as the original Christianity than any of the many other versions that have been around. There certainly was diversity from early on, one example being the different approaches of the Hebraic Christians and the Hellenic Christians to the temple in the early chapters of Acts. The Hebraic Christians continue to meet there while the Hellenic Christians (specifically, Stephen) have no consternation about proclaiming its destruction (Acts 7), as Jesus had done before them. But it remains the case that Paul and other apostles proclaimed a core that constituted a distinct community around such a message and story. Paul attests to it in his letter to the Corinthians, proclaiming what he had received (but not from the pillar apostles themselves) within a few years after the death of Jesus. Indeed, scholars often suggest that the gospel summary of 1 Cor 15:3–4 may have originated anywhere between three months and three years after Jesus’s death (as I have noted elsewhere). We see a similar core proclaimed in the gospel proclamations of Acts and in gospel summaries outside the Pauline literature. Anything that went against this core cannot properly be called Christianity. Anything that did not embody this core could not be a proper Christian apostleship. There may have been other gospels, as Paul himself testifies, but I doubt Paul would have seen these other gospels as representing “Christianities” properly speaking, any more than the “gospel” declarations of one of the Caesars would have been a form of Christianity.
Paul himself emphasizes this through describing his relationship to Peter, James, and John, the pillar apostles. He describes himself as independent from them, lest the Galatians be tempted to think that he was somehow subordinate to them. But he received his commission from Christ himself and not from them. That is why he emphasizes that their role was to confirm him, not to appoint him. Why then does he cite them at all? He cites them because he recognizes the importance of their recognition to his audience. Given that some from James have sought to undermine him, and given that he has had a public argument with Peter, it is crucial for him to state that they themselves affirmed that he proclaims the gospel of Jesus and no other gospel. He must have been absolutely confident that they would corroborate his testimony. He also saw the importance of stressing his fundamental unity with them, given the argument he makes in the rest of Gal 2:15–21. If he thought himself to be absolutely independent of the pillar apostles and did not acknowledge their authority (albeit, they did not have authority superior to his own), he would undermine his own emphasis on Christian unity via justification by the faithfulness of Christ and not by works of the Law like table fellowship. He could neither satisfy the Galatians, present himself as one who could rebuke Peter in the manner that he did, nor declare (without blatant hypocrisy) that there is unity in the justification that comes by faith, unity that breaks down divisions of fellowship that had previously been upheld. After all, the unity that should be demonstrated in table fellowship of Jews and gentiles is itself a sign that those thus united have received the declaration of “in the right” by the faithfulness of the Christ who made them to be one people who belong to one kingdom of which he is king.
Finally, it is necessary to address why Paul describes himself the way that he does in his listing of the apostles in 1 Cor 15, for which I rely on an extract of my dissertation. Paul considered himself the least of the apostles, as he says in v. 8 because he persecuted the church of God.1 Although Paul persecuted the church of God, Christ still appeared to him, and through this experience Paul experienced the resurrecting grace of God, for God’s favor has borne fruit in one who was dead to him by working through him to produce communities like the Corinthians.2 What particularly makes Paul’s story an exemplary demonstration of God’s resurrecting power in terms of life-giving transformation before the eschaton (and the literal resurrection) is his self-description as an ἔκτρωμα.3
This provocative term has inspired much discussion.4 It could refer to a “miscarriage” and it has often been translated more loosely as “one untimely born.” Ambrosiaster took the latter route and thought the sense of the term was that he was spiritually born “outside the time” of Christ’s ascension (Comm. 1 Cor. 15:8). Theodoret (Comm. 1 Cor. 15:8) and Thomas Aquinas (Comm. 1 Cor. §904) took the former route and presented Paul as one who was not fully formed and had not come to term. More ambiguously, C. K. Barrett states that the term, “suggested the characteristics of an unformed, undeveloped, repulsive, and possibly lifeless foetus.”5 Frederic Louis Godet, in agreement with Aquinas, thinks it is a fitting metaphor for the “violent and unnatural mode of his call to the apostleship,” particularly in reference to the Damascus Road experience.6 Archibald Robertson and Alfred Plummer focus on the comparison to the Twelve as those who were disciples before they were apostles, “Theirs was a gradual and normal progress; his was a swift and abnormal change.”7 Timothy Brookins and Bruce Longenecker combine these senses and add that, “Paul had turned to Christ late in life despite having been set apart for God from natural birth (cf. Gal 1:15).”8 George W. E. Nickelsburg previously expanded on this last point by suggesting that this term was linked with Paul’s self-conception (linked with Isa 49:1 and Jer 1:5) that he was called as an apostle from the womb.9 Harm W. Hollander and Gijsbert E. van der Hout think that the sense Paul derived from the LXX and Jewish tradition is that it, “refers to people who are in a deplorable position and whose lives are miserable and worthless.”10 Matthew W. Mitchell defines it in its normal sense of “abortion,” one forced out of the womb, and that Paul is, “cast aside or rejected in the manner of an aborted fetus, most likely with respect to his claims to equal authority with the other apostles.”11
The text scholars most often draw from to illuminate this one is Num 12:12, which describes Miriam after she was stricken with leprosy. In the various versions, the description is understood as referring to a baby born dead.12 Andrzej Gieniusz argues for another level of meaning based on the ambiguity of the Hebrew and the experienced reality of miscarriage in the ancient world: the baby born dead that is itself deadly.13 Since it was by not unusual for women to die in childbirth, the delivery of a miscarriage or stillborn baby could itself be lethal for the mother. This description fits how Paul explicitly describes his past as lethal to the community in which he has now been born. But the grace of the God who raises the dead was such that he made this one who was born dead, discarded, and disregarded live, and he bore further fruit in Paul by bringing life to other communities, such as the Corinthians.
Paul closes this portion of the argument by reiterating that, despite his special insufficiency and unworthiness, he has experienced the grace of the same God who made the others to be apostles, having received an appearance from the same risen Christ. The gospel he proclaims is the same as theirs, and it is this same gospel that the Corinthians came to believe. Those who undermine the implications of this gospel undermine the story that constitutes them as a community, and they undermine the messengers who proclaimed it (despite their attempts to claim allegiance to this messenger or that messenger).
While Paul called himself this because he persecuted the Church, this self-diminution would be influential in the early church for those who otherwise described themselves as the least of the faithful (Ignatius, Rom. 9:2; Smyrn. 11:1; Eph. 21:2; John Chrysostom, Hom. 1 Cor. 38.8; Jerome, Ep. 47). For other texts declaring insufficiency for God’s call, see Exod 3:11; 4:10, 13; Judg 6:15; 1 Sam 9:21; Isa 6:5; Jer 1:6; 2 Bar 54:9; As. Mos. 12:6–7; Eph 3:8; 1 Tim 1:15–16.
Fee observes about this statement, “On the one hand, it points both backward (v. 2) and especially forward (v. 14), where there is considerable danger that if they persist in their present folly, God’s grace to them will have turned out to be ‘useless.’ On the other hand, it points directly to their own existence in Christ; they themselves are the sure evidence that God’s grace in terms of Paul’s apostleship was not without effect.” Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, rev. ed., NICNT (Grand Rapids; Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2014), 815.
For others who describe this text in terms of resurrection imagery, see Stefan Alkier, “The Reality of the Resurrection: The New Testament Witness, trans. Leroy A. Huizenga (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2013), 24; David E. Garland, 1 Corinthians, BECNT (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 693; Andrzej Gieniusz, “‘As a Miscarriage’: The Meaning and the Function of the Metaphor in 1 Cor 15:1-11 in Light of Num 12:12 (LXX),” BibAn 3 (2013): 105–6; Sebastian Schneider, Auferstehen: Eine neue Deutung von 1 Kor 15, FB 105 (Würzburg: Echter, 2005), 138–39; Gerhard Sellin, Der Streit um die Auferstehung der Toten: Eine religionsgeschichtliche und exegetische Untersuchung von 1. Korinther 15, FRLANT 138 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986), 250; Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians: A Commentary on the Greek Text, NIGTC (Grand Rapids; Cambridge: Eerdmans; Carlisle: Paternoster, 2000), 1210; Philippe Wargnies, “Témoins de Dieu qui relève les morts: Un regard sur 1 Co 15,1–19,” NRTh 121 (1999): 357; N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, vol. 3 of Christian Origins and the Question of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), 329.
For more on the history of interpretation, see Gieniusz, “‘Miscarriage,’” 102–4; Harm W. Hollander and Gijsbert E. van der Hout, “The Apostle Paul Calling Himself an Abortion: 1 Cor. 15:8 within the Context of 1 Cor. 15:8-10,” NovT 38 (1996): 224–27; Matthew W. Mitchell, “Reexamining the ‘Aborted Apostle’: An Exploration of Paul’s Self-Description in 1 Corinthians 15.8,” JSNT 25 (2002–2003): 470–73.
C. K. Barrett, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, BNTC (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1968), 344.
Frederic Louis Godet, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, trans. A. Cusin, vol 2. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1971), 339.
Archibald Robertson and Alfred Plummer, First Epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians, 2nd ed., ICC (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1914), 339.
Timothy A. Brookins and Bruce W. Longenecker, 1 Corinthians 10-16: A Handbook on the Greek Text, BHGNT (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016), 142. Cf. Paul Gardner, 1 Corinthians, ZECNT (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2018), 657.
George W. E. Nickelsburg, “An Ἔκτρωμα, Though Appointed from the Womb: Paul’s Apostolic Self-Description in 1 Corinthians 15 and Galatians 1,” HThR 79 (1986): 198–205.
Hollander and van der Hout, “Abortion,” 231.
Mitchell, “Reexamining,” 484.
Gieniusz, “‘Miscarriage,’” 94–101; Hollander and van der Hout, “Abortion,” 227–32.
Gieniusz, “‘Miscarriage,’” 101, 105–6.