The Expositor's Bible: The Second Epistle to the CorinthiansDenney, James
Religion
The Expositor's Bible: The Second Epistle to the Corinthians
Denney, James
Bible. Corinthians, 2nd -- Criticism, interpretation, etc.
the manifestation, as a frail and powerless thing.
The moral of the passage is similar to that of chap. i. 3-11.
Suffering, for the Christian, is not an accident; it is a divine
appointment and a divine opportunity. To wear life out in the service
of Jesus is to open it to the entrance of Jesus' life; it is to
receive, in all its alleviations, in all its renewals, in all its
deliverances, a witness to His resurrection. Perhaps it is only by
accepting this service, with the daily dying it demands, that that
witness can be given to us; and "the life of Jesus" on His throne may
become inapprehensible and unreal in proportion as we decline to bear
about in our bodies His dying. All who have commented on this passage
have noticed the iteration of the name of Jesus. _Singulariter sensit
Paulus dulcedinem ejus._ Schmiedel explains the repetition as partly
accidental, and partly indicative of the fact that Christ's death is
here regarded as a purely human occurrence, and not as a redemptive
deed of the Messiah. This points in the right direction, though it may
fairly be doubted whether Paul would have drawn this distinction, or
could even have been made to understand it. The analytic tendency of
the modern mind often disintegrates what depends for its virtue on
being kept whole and entire, and this seems to me a case in point. The
use of the name Jesus rather indicates that, in recalling the actual
events of his own career, Paul saw them run continually parallel to
events in the career of Another; they were one in kind with that
painful series of incidents which ended in the death of the historical
Saviour. People have often sought in the Epistles of Paul for traces
of a knowledge of Christ like that which is conserved in the first
three Gospels; in this expression, τὴν νέκρωσιν τοῦ Ἰησοῦ, and in the
repetition of the historical proper name, there is an indirect but
quite convincing proof that the general character of Christ's life was
known to the Apostle. And though he does not dwell on Christ's
sympathy with the fulness and power of the writer to the Hebrews, it
is evident from this passage that he was in sympathetic fellowship
with One who had suffered as he suffered, and that even to name His
human name was consolation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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