xii.[99] For many reasons unknown to us the danger in Damascus, and the escape from it, may have had a peculiar interest for the Apostle; _hæc persequutio_, says Calvin, _erat quasi primum tirocinium Pauli_; it was his "matriculation in the school of persecution." He may have intended, as Meyer thinks, to make it the beginning of a new catalogue of sufferings for Christ's sake, all of which were to be covered by the appeal to God, and have abruptly repented, and gone off on another subject; but whether or not, to expunge the lines is pure wilfulness. The Apostle glories in what he endured at Damascus--in the imminent peril and in the undignified escape alike--as in things belonging to his weakness. Another might choose to hide such things, but they are precisely what he tells. In Christ's service scorn is glory, ignominy is honour; and it is the mark of loyalty when men rejoice that they are counted worthy to suffer shame for the Name.[100] When we go on to chap. xii., and the second of the two subjects with which boasting is to be associated, we meet in the first verse with serious textual difficulties. Our Authorised Version gives the rendering: "_It is not expedient for me doubtless to glory. I will come to visions and revelations of the Lord._" This follows the Textus Receptus: Καυχᾶσθαι δὴ οὐ συμφέρει μοι· ἐλεύσομαι γὰρ κ.τ.λ., only omitting the γὰρ (_for_ I will come). The MSS. are almost chaotic, but the most authoritative editors--Tregelles, Tischendorf in his last edition, and Westcott and Hort--agree in reading Καυχᾶσθαι δεῖ οὐ[101 συμφέρον μὲν ἐλεύσομαι δὲ κ.τ.λ.] This is the text which our Revisers render: "_I must needs glory, though it is not expedient; but I will come to visions and revelations of the Lord_." Practically, the difference is not so great after all. According to the best authorities, Paul repeats that he is being forced to speak as he does; the consciousness of the disadvantages attendant on this course does not leave him, it is rather deepened, as he approaches the highest and most sacred of all subjects--visions and revelations he has received from Christ. Of these two words, revelations is the wider in import: visions were only one of the ways in which revelations could be made. Paul, of course, is not going to boast directly of the visions and revelations themselves. All through the experiences to which he alludes under this name he was to himself as a third person; he was purely passive; and to claim credit, to glory as if he had done or originated anything, would be transparently absurd. But there are "things of his weakness" associated with, if not dependent on, these high experiences; and it is in them, after due explanation, that he purposes to exult.