2 Corinthians 11:5 Commentary and Bible Study

This really refers back to the charge that the apostle Paul was not an apostle, one of the things the false teachers said about him. Our translation is perhaps not quite strong enough. In the times of the King James translation, this ‘for I suppose’ had much more bite. What he is saying is something like this: ‘I carefully estimate and conclude.’ The Greek actually is a word which comes from making an inventory, a list of things, which must be accurate for accounting purposes. So the word here has changed its sense. He doesn’t just ‘suppose’ or imagine or suggest; he says, ‘I can tell you, it can be most carefully calculated and observed that I was not one tiny bit behind the chiefest of the apostles.’ Some people say that by chiefest of apostles he is referring to the false teachers, who only claimed to be apostles, but, in fact were not. We go with the vast majority of traditional commentators. I calculate or affirm that I was not a whit behind the very chiefest of the twelve.Like them, Paul was called personally by Christ. There are no apostles today. There were the twelve – eleven, we should say – and then there was Paul, who was called by the special revelation and appearance of Christ to him. He was the last apostle, the one born out of due time but he was called just as the twelve were called. They were taught by Christ directly and then Christ, you remember, in John 14 and 15 says the Holy Spirit is going to come, who will lead them into all the truth, would remind them of everything and inspire them accurately in their apostolic teaching. But the apostle Paul was taught – as he will tell us later in this book – by special revelation, when he was, as it were, in a mysterious way, taken up into heaven, and God revealed everything to him that is in these epistles and more beside.Then, of course, they were authenticated by signs and wonders and so was Paul able to do these remarkable things and miraculous healings, wonderful things. These (as he will say in this epistle) were signs of apostles. Not everybody could do them. The charismatics will tell you, quite mistakenly, that in the New Testament all Christians could do these things but that is not in the data in the New Testament. You can read most carefully and you will find only apostles healed with the exception of Ananias, or members of the apostolic band, when Ananias was especially empowered of God to heal Paul’s blindness. Ordinary people didn’t do those things, contrary to what is claimed. So he is able to say in verse 5, ‘I was not a whit behind the very chiefest apostles.’ I think he has in mind, of course, Peter and John.