The Second Letter to the Corinthians — The Letter No One Doubted and No One Can Agree Is One Letter

Part of the series: The New Testament Canon—How 27 Books Survived the Ancient Gauntlet

Here is a small puzzle at the heart of the New Testament. No ancient list ever doubted the Second Letter to the Corinthians. It stands in Marcion’s collection, in the Muratorian Fragment, among Eusebius’s “acknowledged” books, in Athanasius’s canon, at Florence and at Trent — always, without a murmur of dispute, “two to the Corinthians.” And yet this is the one letter of Paul whose modern students cannot agree is a single letter at all. Where the reception is placid, the composition is a battlefield: critics have carved 2 Corinthians into two, three, five, even six original fragments, stitched together, on their reconstruction, by a later editor’s hand. The book the Church received without hesitation is the book scholars can least agree how Paul wrote.

That is the paradox this essay is about. Not a verse-by-verse tour, but the letter itself: out of what broken relationship it was born, why it is the most personal thing Paul ever wrote, what it gave the Church — the ministry of reconciliation, the treasure in earthen vessels, the grace made perfect in weakness — and then the two questions this series always asks. How secure is the text? And how did it travel into the canon? The answers pull in opposite directions, and holding them together is the whole interest of the case. Externally, 2 Corinthians is one of the most secure books in the New Testament. Internally, its seams are the most disputed in the Pauline corpus. Both things are true, and neither cancels the other.

I came into the Catholic Church from the evangelical world, and 2 Corinthians was everywhere in that world without anyone ever quite reading it whole. Its lines were the ones on the coffee mugs and the sympathy cards — we have this treasure in jars of clay, God loves a cheerful giver, my grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness — plucked out of a letter almost no one read from beginning to end. Learning where those famous fragments actually sit — inside a wounded, furious, self-defending letter, written by a man fighting for the loyalty of a church that had turned on him — did not shrink them. It gave them their weight.

A letter born of a broken relationship

Romans was written to strangers; 1 Corinthians to a church Paul founded and knew intimately. Second Corinthians is written to that same church after the relationship had nearly collapsed. Something had gone badly wrong at Corinth in the interval between the letters, and the second letter is Paul’s attempt to repair it — which is why it reads less like a treatise than like a wound talking.

The circumstances have to be reconstructed from hints, because Paul assumes his readers already know them. “We have no information about these circumstances,” the New American Bible’s introduction concedes, “except what is contained in the letter itself … Consequently the reconstruction of the letter’s background is an uncertain enterprise about which there is not complete agreement.”⁠¹ With that honest caution in front of us, the outline is still reasonably clear. After 1 Corinthians reached Corinth, relations soured. Paul made a quick, unplanned visit that went so badly he calls it, ever after, the visit he would not repeat: “I decided not to come to you again in painful circumstances.”⁠² During that visit, or soon after, someone at Corinth wronged him publicly — an offender whose challenge to Paul’s authority scandalized the community.⁠³

Rather than return at once for another humiliating confrontation, Paul did something else. He wrote a letter — a severe one, and it cost him to write it: “For out of much affliction and anguish of heart I wrote to you with many tears, not that you might be pained but that you might know the abundant love I have for you.”⁠⁴ He sent it by his most trusted lieutenant, Titus, and then could not rest until he knew how it had landed. He tells the story with unusual transparency: he came to Troas to preach, found a door wide open — and walked away from it, because Titus was not there with news. “I had no relief in my spirit because I did not find my brother Titus. So I took leave of them and went on to Macedonia.”⁠⁵ An apostle abandoning an open door for the gospel because he is too anxious about a personal quarrel to preach: it is one of the most human moments in the New Testament.

The relief, when it came, came through Titus. “But God, who encourages the downcast, encouraged us by the arrival of Titus,” Paul writes, “as he told us of your yearning, your lament, your zeal for me, so that I rejoiced even more.”⁠⁶ The severe letter had worked. The Corinthians had been “saddened into repentance”; they had disciplined the offender; the breach was healing.⁠⁷ Out of that flood of relief Paul writes 2 Corinthians — or at least its first nine chapters — from Macedonia, most likely in the autumn of A.D. 57, roughly a year after the first letter.⁠⁸ That the letter belongs so demonstrably to the middle of Paul’s career, a quarter-century after the crucifixion, is not in doubt; the date is anchored, as with 1 Corinthians, by the Delphi inscription that fixes Paul’s founding stay at Corinth to the proconsulship of Gallio, around A.D. 51 to 52.⁠⁹

The lost letters and the shape of the correspondence

One consequence of reading 2 Corinthians carefully is the discovery that the two letters we have are the survivors of a larger exchange. The New Testament preserves a selection of the apostolic correspondence, not the whole of it, and the Corinthian file is the clearest proof.

Count what the letters imply. Before 1 Corinthians, Paul had already written the Corinthians a letter that has not survived: “I wrote you in my letter not to associate with immoral people.”⁠¹⁰ Then came 1 Corinthians. Then the painful visit. Then the “letter of tears” — the severe letter carried by Titus, which Paul describes but does not quote, and which is itself very possibly lost.⁠¹¹ Then 2 Corinthians. That is at least four letters to a single church, of which two survive; and the surviving two mention at least three visits, since Paul announces this next one as his “third”: “This third time I am coming to you.”⁠¹² The apostolic correspondence was voluminous, occasional, and — like most ancient correspondence — largely perishable. What we have is what the Church kept.

This matters for the way we read Scripture. The letters were not composed as chapters of a book; they were real mail, sent to solve real crises, and only later gathered, treasured, and canonized. To feel the force of 2 Corinthians is to feel that it is the fourth act of a drama whose first and third acts we have lost, addressed to people who had lived through all four. Titus shuttles between the parties as courier and peacemaker; the offender is disciplined and then, tenderly, forgiven — “you should forgive and encourage him instead, or else the person may be overwhelmed by excessive pain.”⁠¹³ Nothing in the letter is abstract. It is a pastor’s voice, at the end of a long and painful negotiation, still trying to hold a wayward church together.

The most personal letter Paul ever wrote

If 1 Corinthians answers questions, 2 Corinthians reveals a person. “The Second Letter to the Corinthians is the most personal of all of Paul’s extant writings,” the New American Bible’s introduction says, “and it reveals much about his character.”⁠¹⁴ One moment he is venting frustration and uncertainty; the next he is pouring out affection and relief. The letter is emotionally volatile in a way no other Pauline text quite matches, and that volatility is not a defect of composition — it is the record of a relationship under strain.

Paul writes, moreover, as a man defending himself. Interlopers had passed through Corinth — rival missionaries whom Paul witheringly calls “superapostles” — and had cast doubt on his credentials, his style, even his courage.⁠¹⁵ Much of 2 Corinthians is therefore an apologia, a defense of his ministry, and it falls naturally into the rhetoric of the ancient philosophical preacher: a barrage of questions, paradox heaped upon paradox, irony, even insult. “In passages of great rhetorical power,” the NABRE observes, Paul “enumerates the circumstances of his ministry and the tribulations he has had to endure for Jesus and the gospel,” expressing “a spirituality of ministry unsurpassed in the New Testament.”⁠¹⁶ The paradox that governs the whole is the paradox of the cross: that God’s power is made visible precisely in human weakness. It is the thread that runs from the treasure in clay pots of chapter 4 to the thorn in the flesh of chapter 12, and it is the most important thing the letter has to teach.

Ministers of a new covenant

Before the self-defense turns combative, Paul offers one of the richest meditations on Christian ministry in the New Testament, and it opens with a contrast that would echo through Christian theology for two millennia. His rivals, it seems, carried letters of recommendation and prided themselves on their credentials. Paul answers that his credential is the Corinthians themselves, and that he is a minister of something new: “a new covenant, not of letter but of spirit; for the letter brings death, but the Spirit gives life.”⁠¹⁷ The phrase “new covenant” is not casual. It is drawn, as the NABRE note points out, straight from Jeremiah’s prophecy of a covenant written not on tablets of stone but on the heart.⁠¹⁸

From there Paul develops the image that gave Christian art its recurring picture of the veiled Moses: the glory of the old covenant was real but fading, and a veil lay over it, so that “whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their hearts, but whenever a person turns to the Lord the veil is removed.”⁠¹⁹ The point is not that the Law was bad but that it was provisional — glorious, but glorious like a face that will stop shining. What replaces it is not another code but a Person and a Spirit, in whose presence “all of us, gazing with unveiled face on the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory.”⁠²⁰

And then, having claimed this staggering ministry, Paul immediately undercuts any impression of grandeur with the letter’s most famous image. “But we hold this treasure in earthen vessels,” he writes, “that the surpassing power may be of God and not from us.”⁠²¹ The Greek suggests cheap terracotta — the disposable clay lamps of an ancient household, fragile and unremarkable, in which a great light is nonetheless carried. It is a deliberate deflation, and it is theological to its core: the fragility of the minister is not an obstacle to the gospel but the proof that the power belongs to God. The Catechism of the Catholic Church quotes the verse at the head of its treatment of the sacraments of healing, applying it to every baptized Christian who carries the new life of Christ in a body still “subject to suffering, illness, and death.”⁠²² Around that treasure Paul then arranges one of his great catalogues of paradox: “afflicted in every way, but not constrained; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.”⁠²³

The ministry of reconciliation

At the center of the letter’s first half stands a passage that a Catholic cannot read without a jolt of recognition, because the Church has built on it directly. Having described his ministry as one of glory and of life, Paul names it a third way: a ministry of reconciliation.

And all this is from God, who has reconciled us to himself through Christ and given us the ministry of reconciliation, namely, God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting their trespasses against them and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. So we are ambassadors for Christ, as if God were appealing through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.⁠²⁴

This is bedrock. The Catechism cites these verses when it explains why the Church, and specifically her ordained ministers, can forgive sins: Christ “entrusted the exercise of the power of absolution to the apostolic ministry which he charged with the ‘ministry of reconciliation.’”⁠²⁵ The bishops and priests who absolve in the confessional are, in the Catechism’s reading of Paul, the successors of the ambassadors through whom God still makes his appeal.⁠²⁶ When Paul writes elsewhere in the same letter that the apostles are “ministers of a new covenant” and “ambassadors for Christ,” the Catechism gathers the phrases together as a description of the apostolic office itself.⁠²⁷ The sacrament of reconciliation is not a medieval invention laid over the New Testament; it is the Church’s obedience to a commission Paul says he received.

The passage ends with a line that has been fought over for five centuries: “For our sake he made him to be sin who did not know sin, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him.”⁠²⁸ Protestant readers in the Reformation tradition often took “become the righteousness of God” to mean that Christ’s righteousness is imputed to the believer — reckoned to his account without changing him. The Catholic reading, which the NABRE’s own note supports, is transformative: “As Christ became our righteousness,” the note says, “we become God’s righteousness.”⁠²⁹ The exchange is real, not merely forensic; we are not declared righteous while remaining unrighteous, but actually made into what we are called. That is the reading the Council of Trent defended against the Reformers in its decree on justification, and 2 Corinthians 5:21 sits near the center of the dispute.⁠³⁰ A few verses earlier Paul has already sounded the note of judgment that the Catholic theology of merit presupposes: “we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive recompense, according to what he did in the body, whether good or evil.”⁠³¹

God loves a cheerful giver: the collection for Jerusalem

For two chapters in the middle of the letter Paul turns from theology to fundraising, and the result is the longest sustained treatment of Christian giving in the New Testament. The project was the great collection Paul was organizing among his Gentile churches for the impoverished mother church in Jerusalem — a matter of both charity and unity, a way of binding the Gentile congregations to the Jewish Christians who had given them the gospel.⁠³²

Paul’s appeal is a small masterpiece of pastoral tact. He shames no one; he holds up the poverty-stricken but generous Macedonians as an example, grounds the whole enterprise in the self-emptying of Christ, and insists throughout on freedom rather than compulsion. The theological anchor is one of the letter’s loveliest sentences: “For you know the gracious act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that for your sake he became poor although he was rich, so that by his poverty you might become rich.”⁠³³ The Catechism cites that verse for the mystery of the Incarnation itself — Christ enriching us “by becoming poor.”⁠³⁴ And then the principle that has underwritten Christian almsgiving ever since: “Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows bountifully will also reap bountifully… . for God loves a cheerful giver.”⁠³⁵ Not the amount but the heart; not exaction but joy. The giving that pleases God is the giving that is glad to give.

The fool’s boast: power made perfect in weakness

Then, at chapter 10, the letter changes. The tone drops from relief to combat, and Paul squares off against the intruding “superapostles” who have been undermining him at Corinth. He knows how he is being caricatured: “his letters are severe and forceful, but his bodily presence is weak, and his speech contemptible.”⁠³⁶ To answer, he does something extraordinary. Because his rivals boast of their credentials, Paul will boast too — but he will do it as a “fool,” and he will boast of exactly the opposite of what they parade. He will boast of his weakness.

First comes the boasting his rivals would recognize, and even here it is inverted. Paul out-suffers them. The catalogue is one of the most harrowing autobiographical passages in ancient literature:

Five times at the hands of the Jews I received forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned, three times I was shipwrecked, I passed a night and a day on the deep; on frequent journeys, in dangers from rivers, dangers from robbers, dangers from my own race, dangers from Gentiles, dangers in the city, dangers in the wilderness, dangers at sea, dangers among false brothers; in toil and hardship, through many sleepless nights, through hunger and thirst, through frequent fastings, through cold and exposure. And apart from these things, there is the daily pressure upon me of my anxiety for all the churches.⁠³⁷

Then, having earned the right, he tells of a vision — but tells it in the third person, as if embarrassed by it: “I know someone in Christ who, fourteen years ago … was caught up to the third heaven … into Paradise and heard ineffable things, which no one may utter.”⁠³⁸ A man who has been to Paradise, and whose response is to change the subject. For lest the revelation make him proud, he says, he was given a counterweight — the letter’s most discussed affliction: “a thorn in the flesh was given to me, an angel of Satan, to beat me, to keep me from being too elated.”⁠³⁹ Interpreters have guessed at the thorn for centuries — a chronic illness, a disability, a temptation, a persistent enemy — and the honest answer is that we do not know; Paul does not say, and the NABRE note lists the possibilities without deciding.⁠⁴⁰

What matters is the answer he received, because it is the theological summit of the letter and, arguably, of Paul’s whole account of the Christian life. He begged three times to have the thorn removed. The Lord refused, and told him why:

My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness. I will rather boast most gladly of my weaknesses, in order that the power of Christ may dwell with me… . for when I am weak, then I am strong.⁠⁴¹

There is the whole paradox, stated by the risen Christ himself. Strength is not the removal of weakness; it is the presence of God’s power within it. The Catechism twice draws on this verse in its treatment of divine omnipotence — the power that “is made perfect in weakness,” the faith that “glories in its weaknesses in order to draw to itself Christ’s power.”⁠⁴² It is the same logic as the treasure in clay pots, the same logic as the cross: the God who saves the world through a crucified man perfects his strength in the frailty of those who carry his gospel. That a letter of wounded self-defense should arrive at this is the deepest thing about it. Paul defends his apostleship by giving up the very ground his rivals fight on. He wins the argument by conceding that he is weak.

The letter no one can agree is one letter

Now to the puzzle with which we began, and the reason 2 Corinthians has a place in a series about the canon that it might not otherwise claim. The question is not whether Paul wrote it — that has never been in serious doubt. The question is whether he wrote it all at once, as the single continuous letter we now read, or whether what we call 2 Corinthians is an editor’s splicing-together of several shorter Pauline letters into one.

The problem is a matter of tone, and any attentive reader can feel it. Through chapter 7 the letter is a letter of reconciliation, cresting in a sentence of pure relief: “I am filled with encouragement, I am overflowing with joy all the more because of all our affliction.”⁠⁴³ Then, at chapter 10, without transition, the sky darkens: “I who am humble when face to face with you, but brave toward you when absent … I intend to act boldly against some who consider us as acting according to the flesh.”⁠⁴⁴ Four chapters of threat, sarcasm, and combat follow, ending in a warning: “if I come again I will not be lenient.”⁠⁴⁵ How, critics ask, can the man overflowing with joy in chapter 7 be the man threatening war in chapter 10 — in the same letter, to the same church, a few sentences apart? The New American Bible does not flinch from the difficulty. Its own note on these final chapters grants that they “have their own unity of structure and theme and could well have formed the body of a separate letter.”⁠⁴⁶

The suspicion is old, and it has a lineage. The first to propose that 2 Corinthians is a compilation was the German scholar Johann Salomo Semler, in a commentary of 1776.⁠⁴⁷ In 1870 Adolf Hausrath advanced the influential “four-chapter hypothesis”: that chapters 10 through 13 are all or part of the lost “letter of tears,” written before chapters 1 through 9, and only later attached to them.⁠⁴⁸ In the twentieth century the knife cut finer. Günther Bornkamm, in a foundational 1961 study, reconstructed 2 Corinthians as a compilation of five separate Pauline letters, edited together after his death.⁠⁴⁹ Walter Schmithals divided the whole Corinthian correspondence into six letters or more.⁠⁵⁰ Hans Dieter Betz argued that even the two collection chapters, 8 and 9, are two originally independent administrative letters, since chapter 9 largely repeats chapter 8.⁠⁵¹ A separate question hangs over one short passage, 6:14–7:1 — the call to “not be yoked with unbelievers” — whose stark dualism and Qumran-like vocabulary strike many readers as un-Pauline; the NABRE note itself records that “critics suspect that this section was inserted by another hand.”⁠⁵²

That is the case for partition, and it is strong enough that, unlike the fringe partition theories about 1 Corinthians, it is genuinely mainstream for the second letter. But there is a serious case for unity, and it deserves to be stated in full. First, and decisively for a series about how the text was transmitted: there is no manuscript evidence whatever for any partition. Every witness that preserves 2 Corinthians preserves it whole, in the order we have it. Papyrus 46, the Chester Beatty codex copied around A.D. 200 and the earliest substantial witness to Paul, has 2 Corinthians virtually complete and in its canonical sequence, chapters 10 through 13 following 8 and 9, with not a trace of a seam.⁠⁵³ If an editor stitched several letters together, he did it early enough and cleanly enough that the manuscript tradition never once remembered the join. Second, the tonal shift can be explained without a scissors. The NABRE offers the standard alternative: perhaps the “inconsistencies” are due to “changes of perspective in Paul that may have been occasioned by the arrival of fresh news from Corinth during its composition” — bad news that reached him mid-letter, turning relief back into alarm.⁠⁵⁴ Third, catchwords and themes bridge the alleged seams, and a growing number of commentators — Murray Harris, Paul Barnett, Frank Matera among them — defend the letter’s literary integrity on rhetorical grounds.⁠⁵⁵ The NABRE, weighing both sides, leans cautiously toward the compilation view but keeps the single-letter reading explicitly open: “Others continue to regard it as a single letter.”⁠⁵⁶

Here is the point that keeps all of this from being a threat to the canon, and it is worth stating plainly. The partition debate is a question about the letter’s literary prehistory — about how the canonical text was assembled — and not about its authorship or its canonicity. On every partition theory, the material is genuinely Paul’s; the only question is whether he sent it as one letter or several. Even the most radical reconstruction is a theory about an editor gathering authentic Pauline letters, not inventing text. (The single exception, 6:14–7:1, is a fragment-level authorship question, not a canonicity question: the passage is canonical Scripture regardless of whose pen first drafted it.) So the paradox resolves without paradox. Scholars doubt how 2 Corinthians was composed; no one ever doubted that it was Paul’s, and no one ever doubted that it belonged in the Bible. The seams, real or imagined, are behind the canon, not in front of it.

The text that stood still

Turn from the composition question to the transmission, and 2 Corinthians proves as stable as any book in the New Testament. Whatever debates rage about how the letter was assembled, the text that came down to us barely moved once it was assembled.

Its earliest substantial witness is Papyrus 46, from around the year 200, in which 2 Corinthians survives virtually complete.⁠⁵⁷ The great fourth- and fifth-century codices carry it too. Sinaiticus, the one uncial to preserve the entire New Testament, has it complete; Vaticanus, whose Pauline text runs unbroken until it stops in Hebrews, has it complete.⁠⁵⁸ There is one notable gap, and it is a curiosity worth naming: Codex Alexandrinus, the fifth-century witness, is missing three leaves precisely here — a lacuna running from 2 Corinthians 4:13 to 12:6, so that of the great early codices it is the one that fails us in this letter, and in this letter alone among Paul’s.⁠⁵⁹ But a missing leaf in one manuscript is a physical accident, not a textual dispute, and the text is abundantly attested elsewhere.

What 2 Corinthians conspicuously lacks is a famous textual crux. First Corinthians has its “broken” body and its silenced women; the great problem of 2 Corinthians is not a variant at all but the integrity question we have just examined. Its text, once it existed, stood remarkably still. The drama of this letter is entirely in its composition and its reception, never in the wording that the manuscripts transmit.

2 Corinthians in the early Church

And here the paradox we began with sharpens to its finest point. The reception of 2 Corinthians is a study in an honest tension: the letter was never doubted, yet its earliest external footprint is quieter than its sibling’s.

Recall how loud 1 Corinthians is in the earliest sources. Around A.D. 96 Clement of Rome told the Corinthians, in so many words, to take up Paul’s letter to them and re-read it — naming the epistle, its recipients, and its subject. There is nothing like that for the second letter. Clement uses the first, not the second; the letters of Ignatius, around 107, show no clear citation of 2 Corinthians; and the earliest reasonably clear echo of it appears somewhat later, in Polycarp of Smyrna’s letter to the Philippians, and even there as an allusion rather than a citation by name.⁠⁶⁰ For its first two generations, in other words, 2 Corinthians is markedly harder to hear in the record than 1 Corinthians. It is a real datum, and honesty about the canon requires facing it rather than smoothing it over.

Yet the moment 2 Corinthians does appear clearly in the record, it appears as unquestioned Scripture — and it never once appears among the disputed books. Around 144 it stood in the earliest known edition of Paul’s letters, the Apostolikon of the heretic Marcion, placed with 1 Corinthians right after Galatians; and here the usual, vital point applies, that Marcion did not create the Pauline collection but pruned one that already existed.⁠⁶¹ Tertullian, refuting Marcion clause by clause, devotes a chapter of his fifth book against Marcion to “the Second Epistle to the Corinthians,” engaging its language of “the god of this world” and “the treasure in earthen vessels” — proof that the letter was firmly in the collection the Church and the heretics alike were arguing over.⁠⁶² Irenaeus, writing in Gaul around 180, quotes it by name, citing “the Second [Epistle] to the Corinthians” for Paul’s phrase about “the god of this world” who “has blinded the minds of them that believe not.”⁠⁶³ The Muratorian Fragment, the oldest surviving catalogue of New Testament books, notes that Paul “writes once more to the Corinthians,” registering the second letter alongside the first.⁠⁶⁴

By the fourth century the witnesses are unanimous. When Eusebius of Caesarea sorts the books around 325 into the acknowledged and the disputed, he places all of Paul’s letters among the acknowledged: “Paul’s fourteen epistles are well known and undisputed,” he writes, noting that the only shadow over any of them touches Hebrews’ authorship, never the Corinthian letters.⁠⁶⁵ And when Athanasius of Alexandria, in his Thirty-Ninth Festal Letter of A.D. 367 — the first document to list exactly our twenty-seven-book New Testament — enumerates Paul, he writes: “the first, to the Romans; then, two to the Corinthians.”⁠⁶⁶ Two to the Corinthians, without qualification, uncontested from the moment the letter enters the visible record. The quiet of its earliest attestation never became a doubt.

The Catholic canon: Florence and Trent

The canon the early Church received, the Catholic Church defined, and in both of its great conciliar enumerations 2 Corinthians stands, as it always had, second among Paul’s letters to Corinth. The earlier act was the Council of Florence. In its Bull of Union with the Copts, Cantate Domino, promulgated on 4 February 1442, the council professed that “one and the same God is the author of the old and the new Testament” and listed the sacred books it received, “fourteen letters of Paul, to the Romans, two to the Corinthians,” heading the Pauline enumeration.⁠⁶⁷ This was the first time an ecumenical council reckoned in the Latin Church enumerated the full canon. A century later, against the Reformation, the Council of Trent made the definition solemn and binding. In its Fourth Session, on 8 April 1546, the council decreed the list “lest a doubt may arise in any one’s mind, which are the books that are received by this Synod,” naming for the New Testament “fourteen epistles of Paul the apostle, (one) to the Romans, two to the Corinthians,” and attaching its anathema against anyone who “receive not, as sacred and canonical, the said books entire with all their parts.”⁠⁶⁸

There is a quiet irony in that last phrase, “entire with all their parts,” when it falls on 2 Corinthians. The Church that defined the canon received this letter as one book, whole and integral — even as scholars would spend the next centuries debating how many original parts had been gathered to make it. The two claims do not collide. Trent defines what the Church holds as sacred and canonical Scripture: the letter as it stands. The critics investigate how the letter came to stand that way. The council’s concern is the canonical text; the scholar’s concern is its literary history; and a Catholic can hold both, receiving 2 Corinthians as the inspired word of God in exactly the form the manuscripts and the councils handed it down, while remaining entirely free to find the compilation hypothesis persuasive or not.

Why 2 Corinthians endures

Return, at the end, to the paradox we began with — because the paradox turns out to be the point. Second Corinthians is the New Testament book most secure in its reception and least settled in its composition, and both facts flow from the same source: that it is real correspondence, wrung out of a real crisis, by a man who let himself be seen. The very features that make its literary history a puzzle — the swings of tone, the abrupt turns, the seams that may or may not be seams — are the features of a letter written from the heart, under pressure, in the middle of a fight for a church he loved. Its unruliness is the unruliness of life.

That is also why the Church could never do without it. The books the early Church argued over — Hebrews, James, Second Peter, Revelation — were argued over because their apostolic pedigree was uncertain. Second Corinthians had no such problem; its Pauline authorship was never in question, and it was being read as Scripture within living memory of the apostle. But there is a deeper fittingness. This is the letter that gave the Church the ministry of reconciliation by which she forgives sins, the new covenant of the Spirit that gives life, the treasure carried in fragile clay, the grace made perfect in weakness, and the Trinitarian blessing — “the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the holy Spirit be with all of you” — that the priest still prays over the congregation at the beginning of Mass.⁠⁶⁹ A book that gives the Church her words of reconciliation and her prayer of blessing is exactly the kind of book she would receive without hesitation, whatever the scholars decide about its seams. The most personal letter Paul ever wrote turned out to carry some of the most public words the Church would ever pray.

For readers who want to go further, the standard Catholic starting point is the volume in the Sacra Pagina series; for the history of the integrity debate and the case for the letter’s rhetorical unity, Frederick Long’s study of 2 Corinthians as a single apology is the best recent treatment, while the great reference commentaries of Victor Paul Furnish in the Anchor Yale Bible and Margaret Thrall in the International Critical Commentary lay out the partition case in full.⁠⁷⁰

Frequently Asked Questions

Who wrote 2 Corinthians, and when?

The Apostle Paul wrote 2 Corinthians, together with a co-sender named Timothy (1:1). He composed it from Macedonia about a year after 1 Corinthians, addressing the same church he had founded around A.D. 51. The New American Bible dates the letter to “about the autumn of A.D. 57”; the broader scholarly range is roughly A.D. 55 to 57. It is one of the seven “undisputed” letters accepted as authentically Pauline across the whole scholarly spectrum — even the radical nineteenth-century Tübingen School granted it, listing it among the four “chief letters” (Romans, 1–2 Corinthians, Galatians) it could not deny.

Is 2 Corinthians one letter or several?

That is the great scholarly question about the letter. Because the tone shifts abruptly from reconciliation (chapters 1–9) to sharp self-defense (chapters 10–13), many scholars believe 2 Corinthians is a compilation of several genuine Pauline letters, edited together later. Proposals range from two letters to five or six fragments. But there is no manuscript evidence for any partition — every witness, including Papyrus 46 (c. 200), preserves the letter whole and in order — and a growing number of commentators defend its unity, explaining the shift as Paul’s response to fresh bad news arriving mid-letter. Crucially, this is a debate about how the letter was assembled, not about whether it is Paul’s or whether it belongs in the canon: on every theory, the material is genuinely Pauline.

Why does the tone change so sharply at chapter 10?

Through chapter 7 Paul is overflowing with relief that a painful crisis has been resolved; at chapter 10 he turns to threaten and rebuke, warning that “if I come again I will not be lenient” (13:2). Scholars who see 2 Corinthians as a single letter usually explain this as a reaction to fresh news from Corinth that reached Paul while he was still writing — word that rival missionaries were undermining him — which turned his relief back into alarm. Scholars who see it as a compilation take the change of tone as a seam between two originally separate letters, with chapters 10–13 possibly belonging to the earlier “letter of tears.”

What does 2 Corinthians teach that the Catholic Church relies on?

A great deal. The “ministry of reconciliation” (5:18–20) grounds the Catechism’s teaching on why bishops and priests can absolve sins in confession. The “new covenant” of the Spirit (3:6), the “treasure in earthen vessels” (4:7), and grace “made perfect in weakness” (12:9) all shape Catholic spirituality and are cited in the Catechism. The Trinitarian blessing of 13:13 — “the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the holy Spirit” — is prayed at the start of Mass. And 5:21 (“so that we might become the righteousness of God in him”) is a key text in the Catholic understanding of justification as a real transformation, not merely a legal imputation.

What is the “thorn in the flesh”?

In 12:7 Paul says that, to keep him from becoming proud after his visions, “a thorn in the flesh was given to me, an angel of Satan, to beat me.” He never says what it was, and interpreters have proposed a chronic illness, a physical disability, a recurring temptation, or a persistent human opponent. The New American Bible’s note lists these possibilities without deciding, and the honest answer is that we do not know. What Paul does tell us is the point of it: when he begged three times to be rid of it, the Lord answered, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness” — the theological heart of the letter.

Was 2 Corinthians ever doubted or disputed in the early Church?

No. Unlike Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, and Revelation, 2 Corinthians never appears among the “disputed” books in any ancient list. It stands in Marcion’s collection (c. 144), is quoted by name by Irenaeus (c. 180), is registered in the Muratorian Fragment, is filed among Eusebius’s “acknowledged” books (c. 325), and appears in Athanasius’s canon (367), at Florence (1442), and at Trent (1546) — always as “two to the Corinthians.” Interestingly, its earliest explicit external attestation is quieter than 1 Corinthians’: the first clear echo comes only with Polycarp, somewhat later than Clement of Rome’s explicit use of the first letter. But once 2 Corinthians enters the record, it enters as unquestioned Scripture and never leaves.

Footnotes

1. 1. Introduction to 2 Corinthians, New American Bible, Revised Edition; bible.usccb.org/bible/2corinthians/0. All Scripture quotations follow the NABRE unless otherwise noted.

2. 2. 2 Corinthians 2:1 (NABRE). The NABRE note on 2 Cor 13:1 explains the reckoning of visits: "designation of the forthcoming visit as the 'third' (cf. 2 Cor 12:14) may indicate that, in addition to his founding sojourn in Corinth, Paul had already made the first of two visits mentioned as planned in 2 Cor 1:15." The intervening "painful" visit (2 Cor 2:1; 13:2) is not recorded in Acts.

3. 3. 2 Corinthians 2:5–11 and 7:12 (NABRE). The NABRE note on 2:5–11: "The nature of the pain (2 Cor 2:5) is unclear, though some believe an individual at Corinth rejected Paul's authority, thereby scandalizing many in the community."

4. 4. 2 Corinthians 2:4 (NABRE). Cf. 2 Cor 2:3, "I wrote as I did so that when I came I might not be pained by those in whom I should have rejoiced."

5. 5. 2 Corinthians 2:12–13 (NABRE). Paul resumes the interrupted narrative at 2 Cor 7:5.

6. 6. 2 Corinthians 7:6–7 (NABRE). See also 7:5, "when we came into Macedonia, our flesh had no rest, but we were afflicted in every way—external conflicts, internal fears."

7. 7. 2 Corinthians 7:9 (NABRE): "I rejoice now, not because you were saddened, but because you were saddened into repentance." On the offender's discipline, 2 Cor 2:6, "This punishment by the majority is enough for such a person."

8. 8. Introduction to 2 Corinthians, NABRE: "The letter, or at least some sections of it, appears to have been composed in Macedonia (2 Cor 2:12–13; 7:5–6; 8:1–4; 9:2–4). It is generally dated about the autumn of A.D. 57; if it is a compilation, of course, the various parts may have been separated by intervals of at least some months." Many critical scholars place the letter a little earlier, c. A.D. 55–56; the NABRE's figure is 57.

9. 9. The anchor is the Delphi (Gallio) inscription, a rescript of the emperor Claudius that fixes the proconsulship of L. Junius Gallio — before whom Paul was tried at Corinth (Acts 18:12–17) — to c. A.D. 51–52. Paul's eighteen-month founding stay at Corinth (Acts 18:1–11) thus falls c. A.D. 50–52, 1 Corinthians c. 54–55, and 2 Corinthians roughly a year later.

10. 10. 1 Corinthians 5:9 (NABRE). The Introduction to 1 Corinthians, NABRE, draws the inference: "We know that Paul wrote at least two other letters to Corinth (see 1 Cor 5:9; 2 Cor 2:3–4) in addition to the two that we now have."

11. 11. 2 Corinthians 2:3–4 and 7:8 (NABRE). The NABRE note on 2:3–4 canvasses the guesses about where, if anywhere, the "tearful letter" survives — "either in 1 Cor 5 . . . or in 1 Corinthians as a whole, or in 2 Cor 2:10–13" — and concludes: "None of these hypotheses is entirely convincing." See note on 2 Cor 13:1.

12. 12. 2 Corinthians 13:1 (NABRE); cf. 2 Cor 12:14, "Now I am ready to come to you this third time."

13. 13. 2 Corinthians 2:7 (NABRE); cf. 2:8, "I urge you to reaffirm your love for him," and 2:10, "Whomever you forgive anything, so do I."

14. 14. Introduction to 2 Corinthians, NABRE.

15. 15. 2 Corinthians 11:5 (NABRE): "I think that I am not in any way inferior to these 'superapostles.'" The NABRE note explains that these intruders "consider themselves superior to Paul as apostles" and that Paul judges them "false apostles" (11:13); the Greek is hyperlian ("superlatively," ironically applied).

16. 16. Introduction to 2 Corinthians, NABRE, which lists the great autobiographical passages (2 Cor 4:7–15; 6:3–10; 11:21–29; 12:5–10; 13:3–4) and describes the letter's rhetorical debt to the "diatribe."

17. 17. 2 Corinthians 3:6 (NABRE): "who has indeed qualified us as ministers of a new covenant, not of letter but of spirit; for the letter brings death, but the Spirit gives life." On the "letters of recommendation" that occasion the passage, see 2 Cor 3:1.

18. 18. NABRE note on 2 Cor 3:6: "Paul is living within a new covenant, characterized by the Spirit, which gives life. The usage of a new covenant is derived from Jer 31:31–33 a passage that also speaks of writing on the heart." Cf. 2 Cor 3:3, "written not in ink but by the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets that are hearts of flesh."

19. 19. 2 Corinthians 3:15–16 (NABRE); cf. 3:14, "to this present day the same veil remains unlifted when they read the old covenant, because through Christ it is taken away."

20. 20. 2 Corinthians 3:18 (NABRE); cf. 3:17, "Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom."

21. 21. 2 Corinthians 4:7 (NABRE). The NABRE note: "In earthen vessels: the instruments God uses are human and fragile; some imagine small terracotta lamps in which light is carried."

22. 22. Catechism of the Catholic Church (2nd ed.), §1420, quoting 2 Cor 4:7 ("in earthen vessels") and 2 Cor 5:1; vatican.va. The paragraph opens the treatise on the sacraments of healing (Penance and Anointing).

23. 23. 2 Corinthians 4:8–9 (NABRE); the catalogue continues through 4:10–11, "always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our body."

24. 24. 2 Corinthians 5:18–20 (NABRE).

25. 25. Catechism of the Catholic Church, §1442, quoting 2 Cor 5:18–20; vatican.va: Christ "entrusted the exercise of the power of absolution to the apostolic ministry which he charged with the 'ministry of reconciliation.'"

26. 26. Catechism of the Catholic Church, §1461, citing 2 Cor 5:18; vatican.va: "Since Christ entrusted to his apostles the ministry of reconciliation, bishops who are their successors, and priests, the bishops' collaborators, continue to exercise this ministry."

27. 27. Catechism of the Catholic Church, §859; vatican.va: the apostles "were called by God as 'ministers of a new covenant,' 'servants of God,' 'ambassadors for Christ,' 'servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God'" (citing 2 Cor 3:6; 6:4; 5:20; 1 Cor 4:1).

28. 28. 2 Corinthians 5:21 (NABRE).

29. 29. NABRE note on 2 Cor 5:21: "This is a statement of God's purpose, expressed paradoxically in terms of sharing and exchange of attributes. As Christ became our righteousness (1 Cor 1:30), we become God's righteousness (cf. 2 Cor 5:14–15)."

30. 30. Council of Trent, Session VI (13 January 1547), Decree on Justification, defined justification as a true interior renewal — "not only a remission of sins, but also the sanctification and renewal of the interior man" (ch. 7) — against the view that the sinner is merely reckoned righteous while remaining unchanged. For the broader Catholic case on this letter's justification texts, see the discussion of Trent in The Council of Trent and the Doctrine of Justification.

31. 31. 2 Corinthians 5:10 (NABRE): "For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive recompense, according to what he did in the body, whether good or evil."

32. 32. On the collection, see 2 Corinthians 8–9, with 1 Cor 16:1–4 and Rom 15:25–28. The NABRE note on 2 Cor 8:1–9:15: Paul "gives us his fullest exposition of the meaning he sees in the enterprise, presenting it as an act of Christian charity and as an expression of the unity of the church."

33. 33. 2 Corinthians 8:9 (NABRE).

34. 34. Catechism of the Catholic Church, §517, citing 2 Cor 8:9; vatican.va: Christ's redemption is at work "already in his Incarnation through which by becoming poor he enriches us with his poverty."

35. 35. 2 Corinthians 9:6–7 (NABRE). The note on 9:1–15 observes that this chapter "quite possibly . . . was originally an independent letter" — one strand of the integrity question discussed below.

36. 36. 2 Corinthians 10:10 (NABRE), which Paul quotes as the complaint of his critics; cf. the NABRE note on 10:9–10 on the "threat of a personal parousia . . . that will be forceful."

37. 37. 2 Corinthians 11:24–28 (NABRE). The "forty lashes minus one" is the synagogue penalty of Deuteronomy 25:3, reduced by one to avoid any accidental excess.

38. 38. 2 Corinthians 12:2–4 (NABRE). The NABRE note: Paul refers to himself indirectly, and the "third heaven" and "Paradise" reflect the multitiered cosmology of Jewish intertestamental literature (cf. Testament of Levi 2–3).

39. 39. 2 Corinthians 12:7 (NABRE).

40. 40. NABRE note on 2 Cor 12:7: the thorn is "variously interpreted as a sickness or physical disability, a temptation, or a handicap connected with his apostolic activity," though because "thorn in the flesh" can denote persons (cf. Nm 33:55; Ez 28:24) Paul "may be referring to some especially persistent and obnoxious opponent."

41. 41. 2 Corinthians 12:9–10 (NABRE). The NABRE note on 12:9: "My grace is sufficient for you: this is not a statement about the sufficiency of grace in general. Jesus speaks directly to Paul's situation."

42. 42. Catechism of the Catholic Church, §268 (citing 2 Cor 12:9) and §273 (citing 2 Cor 12:9; Phil 4:13); vatican.va. Both paragraphs treat God's omnipotence, "made perfect in weakness."

43. 43. 2 Corinthians 7:4 (NABRE).

44. 44. 2 Corinthians 10:1–2 (NABRE). The NABRE note on 10:1–2: "A strong opening plunges us straight into the conflict. Contrasts dominate here: presence versus absence, gentleness-clemency-humility versus boldness-confidence-bravery."

45. 45. 2 Corinthians 13:2 (NABRE).

46. 46. NABRE note on 2 Cor 10:1–13:10: "These final chapters have their own unity of structure and theme and could well have formed the body of a separate letter. They constitute an apologia on Paul's part, i.e., a legal defense of his behavior and his ministry."

47. 47. Johann Salomo Semler, Paraphrasis II. Epistolae ad Corinthios (Halle, 1776), is generally credited with the first partition proposal for 2 Corinthians. See the survey of scholarship in Frederick J. Long, Ancient Rhetoric and Paul's Apology: The Compositional Unity of 2 Corinthians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004): "Ever since Johann S. Semler's commentary on 2 Corinthians in 1776, scholars have debated its compositional unity."

48. 48. Adolf Hausrath, Der Vier-Capitel-Brief des Paulus an die Korinther (Heidelberg, 1870), argued that 2 Cor 10–13 (the "four-chapter letter") is a separate and earlier letter, commonly identified with the lost "letter of tears." J. H. Kennedy later advanced a similar view independently in England.

49. 49. Günther Bornkamm, Die Vorgeschichte des sogenannten Zweiten Korintherbriefes, Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften (Heidelberg, 1961), reconstructed 2 Corinthians as a compilation of five Pauline letter-fragments (1:1–2:13 with 7:5–16; 2:14–7:4, less 6:14–7:1; chapter 8; chapter 9; and chapters 10–13), gathered by a later editor; the non-Pauline 6:14–7:1 would be a sixth piece if counted separately.

50. 50. Walter Schmithals, Gnosticism in Corinth (Eng. trans. 1971) and later studies, reconstructed the whole Corinthian correspondence (1 and 2 Corinthians together) as a compilation of six letters or more, repeatedly revising the scheme.

51. 51. Hans Dieter Betz, 2 Corinthians 8 and 9: A Commentary on Two Administrative Letters of the Apostle Paul, Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985), argued that chapters 8 and 9 are two originally independent administrative letters concerning the collection.

52. 52. NABRE note on 2 Cor 6:14–7:1: "Language and thought shift noticeably here. Suddenly we are in a different atmosphere, dealing with a quite different problem. Both the vocabulary and the thought, with their contrast between good and evil, are more characteristic of Qumran documents or the Book of Revelation than they are of Paul. Hence, critics suspect that this section was inserted by another hand." The NABRE note on 7:2–4 confirms the surrounding continuity: those verses "continue the thought of 2 Cor 6:11–13, before the interruption of 2 Cor 6:14–7:1."

53. 53. Papyrus 46 (𝔓46, the Chester Beatty codex of the Pauline letters), copied c. A.D. 200, preserves 2 Corinthians virtually complete and in canonical order, with chapters 10–13 following 8–9. The physical break in the codex at 2 Cor 9:7 is a modern library division — folios 41–69 are held at the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, folios 70–85 at the University of Michigan — not an ancient lacuna. See Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament, 4th ed. (Oxford University Press, 2005).

54. 54. Introduction to 2 Corinthians, NABRE: "Others continue to regard it as a single letter, attributing its inconsistencies to changes of perspective in Paul that may have been occasioned by the arrival of fresh news from Corinth during its composition."

55. 55. Among the modern defenders of the letter's integrity are Murray J. Harris, The Second Epistle to the Corinthians, NIGTC (Eerdmans, 2005); Paul Barnett, The Second Epistle to the Corinthians, NICNT (Eerdmans, 1997); and Frank J. Matera, II Corinthians: A Commentary, New Testament Library (Westminster John Knox, 2003). A rhetorical-unity school (e.g., Frances Young and David Ford, Ben Witherington, and Frederick Long) argues for unity on Greco-Roman rhetorical grounds. By contrast, the standard reference commentaries of Victor Paul Furnish and Margaret Thrall adopt partition positions.

56. 56. Introduction to 2 Corinthians, NABRE. The introduction gives the compilation case first and at greater length ("Many judge, therefore, that this letter as it stands incorporates several briefer letters"), then preserves the unity option, declining to decide.

57. 57. On 𝔓46, see note 53 above. The leaves have lost one or two lines at the bottom through deterioration, so the text is virtually — not absolutely — complete; no verse block is missing by design, and the order is canonical throughout.

58. 58. Codex Sinaiticus (4th c.) contains the entire New Testament; Codex Vaticanus (4th c.) preserves the Pauline letters intact until it breaks off at Hebrews 9:14, so 2 Corinthians is complete in it.

59. 59. Codex Alexandrinus (5th c.) is missing three leaves containing 2 Corinthians 4:13–12:6; it is the only one of Paul's letters in which Alexandrinus has a lacuna. (Some careless sources misreport the gap as falling in 1 Corinthians; it is 2 Corinthians.)

60. 60. Clement of Rome (c. 96) explicitly directs the Corinthians to Paul's first letter (1 Clement 47); no comparable early attestation exists for the second. Ignatius of Antioch (c. 107) shows no clear citation of 2 Corinthians, and the earliest reasonably clear echo of the letter appears in Polycarp of Smyrna, To the Philippians — as an allusion, not a citation by name. On the pattern, see Frederick J. Long, Ancient Rhetoric and Paul's Apology (Cambridge, 2004), noting that 2 Corinthians is "not explicitly cited" by the earliest fathers and "first mentioned in the mid second century in Marcion's canon."

61. 61. Marcion's Apostolikon (c. 144) placed Galatians first, then the two Corinthian letters. Tertullian's whole charge in Against Marcion, Book V, is that Marcion mutilated an existing collection rather than assembling a new one.

62. 62. Tertullian, Against Marcion, Book V, ch. 11, headed "The Second Epistle to the Corinthians," which engages 2 Cor 4:4 ("the god of this world") and 2 Cor 4:7 ("the treasure in earthen vessels"), in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 3, trans. Peter Holmes; newadvent.org/fathers/03125.htm.

63. 63. Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies 3.7.1, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1, trans. Roberts and Rambaut; newadvent.org/fathers/0103307.htm: "Paul said plainly in the Second [Epistle] to the Corinthians, 'In whom the god of this world has blinded the minds of them that believe not'" (2 Cor 4:4). The NABRE renders the same phrase "the god of this age."

64. 64. The Muratorian Fragment, in Bruce M. Metzger's translation, The Canon of the New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987): Paul "writes once more to the Corinthians and to the Thessalonians for the sake of admonition"; bible-researcher.com/muratorian.html. Usual date c. 170–200.

65. 65. Eusebius of Caesarea, Ecclesiastical History 3.3.5 (NPNF, 2nd Series, vol. 1, trans. A. C. McGiffert): "Paul's fourteen epistles are well known and undisputed. It is not indeed right to overlook the fact that some have rejected the Epistle to the Hebrews"; newadvent.org/fathers/250103.htm. At 3.25 he files the Pauline letters among the acknowledged books (homologoumena).

66. 66. Athanasius of Alexandria, Thirty-Ninth Festal Letter (A.D. 367), §5 (NPNF, 2nd Series, vol. 4): "there are fourteen epistles of Paul the apostle, written in this order: the first, to the Romans; then, two to the Corinthians." This is the first surviving document to list exactly the twenty-seven books of the New Testament.

67. 67. Council of Florence, Bull Cantate Domino (Bull of Union with the Copts, 4 February 1442), in Norman P. Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990): "fourteen letters of Paul, to the Romans, two to the Corinthians." This was the first enumeration of the full canon by an ecumenical council reckoned in the Latin Church.

68. 68. Council of Trent, Session IV (8 April 1546), Decree Concerning the Canonical Scriptures (trans. J. Waterworth): "fourteen epistles of Paul the apostle, (one) to the Romans, two to the Corinthians"; and "if any one receive not, as sacred and canonical, the said books entire with all their parts . . . let him be anathema"; bible-researcher.com/trent1.html.

69. 69. 2 Corinthians 13:13 (NABRE): "The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the holy Spirit be with all of you." The NABRE calls it "one of the clearest trinitarian passages in the New Testament"; the Catechism quotes it as a formula "taken up in the Eucharistic liturgy" at §249 and, on the epiclesis, at §1109. The Roman Missal offers it as the first option for the greeting at the start of Mass, in the slightly different rendering "The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all."

70. 70. Jan Lambrecht, Second Corinthians, Sacra Pagina 8 (Liturgical Press, 1999); Frederick J. Long, Ancient Rhetoric and Paul's Apology: The Compositional Unity of 2 Corinthians (Cambridge University Press, 2004); Victor Paul Furnish, II Corinthians, Anchor Yale Bible 32A (Yale University Press, 1984); Margaret E. Thrall, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, 2 vols., International Critical Commentary (T&T Clark, 1994–2000).