Verse 17
17. Not after the Lord The great body of commentators we have consulted have interpreted Paul as confessing that the measurement that here follows was discordant with the spirit of Christ. Bloomfield alone asks: “Why, then, do we not understand Paul as sincerely and truly confessing that he was a fool? ” Certainly he means the reverse. And these hard sayings against himself are but his defiant re-echoings of the taunts, actual or expected, of his detractors. One of those taunts was, or would be, that his boasting was un-Christlike. But, first, whose denunciations of the wickedness of his adversaries were ever more terrible than the Lord’s? and, second, what is there un-Christlike in Paul’s magnificent measurement of himself with his adversaries that now soon follows? Paul’s meaning is:
What I now speak I speak, forsooth, not after the Lord, do I!
Be the first to react on this!
