2 Corinthians 2:5

But if any hath caused sorrow, he hath caused sorrow, not to me, but in part (that I press not too heavily) to you all.

The traditional interpretation of this makes it a reference to the incestuous person of 1 Corinthians 5:1-8. McGarvey saw in 2 Corinthians 2:3-5 above a plain hint of the connection between the two passages, since, he said, "By referring to 1 Corinthians 4:21; 5:1, it will be seen that the threat of correction at his coming and the case of the incestuous person were twin thoughts in his mind."[10] Although this writer began these studies in 2Corinthians with the firm conviction that the offender mentioned in this passage is not the same as the incestuous person of 1 Corinthians 5:1ff, extensive study of the question has inclined more and more to the traditional view that they are one and the same.

For nineteen centuries, the almost unanimous position of scholars was that of accepting the two offenders as the same person; and no hard evidence of any kind has been discovered that could refute it. Some made the deduction that "deliverance to Satan" in 1Corinthians likely caused the death of the incestuous person, but such a deduction cannot be proved. In the light of this passage in 2Corinthians, if applied to him, he did not die. As was pointed out in the comment on 1 Corinthians 5:1ff, there are many things about that episode which are simply unknown and unknowable.

In all history, until very recent times, only one voice was ever raised in denial of the identity of the two offenders as one; and that was that of Tertullian who lived only about a hundred years after the times of Paul. Yet, even in his case, it appears that the universally held conviction of that time was denied by nobody except Tertullian; and he was able to offer no proof whatever to support it. As Hughes reasoned:

If Tertullian had had any knowledge of a tradition or even hypothesis that a scandalous affront had been offered either to Paul or his deputy Timothy after the delivery of First Corinthians, or that Paul had paid an intermediate visit to Corinth during which his authority had been treated with contempt, and that he had afterward written an intermediate letter demanding the punishment of the offender, it is incredible that he should not have welcomed it as a corroboration of his own view that Paul did not here refer to the incestuous man.[11]

How strange it is that Tertullian's denial of the identity of these two offenders as being the same person should itself have become the most positive evidence of the very thing he denied. The ways of the Lord are not the ways of human beings. After considering this ancient voice from the sub-apostolic age, this writer feels the utmost confidence in receiving the long sustained opinion that the same offender appears in both passages. A corollary of this is the rejection of the notion that Paul's second visit occurred between the Corinthian letters, and also that of "the severe letter" being anything other than a reference to the canonical 1Corinthians.

He hath caused sorrow, not to me ... Paul could not possibly have said this about some buffoon's contemptuously insulting him in the public assembly at Corinth, which is the gist of most of the speculative descriptions of that alleged meeting.

But in part ... to you all ... The scandalous conduct of the incestuous person was a public disgrace to the whole church; and to suppose that such an affront to Christian morality had not caused deep sorrow to the whole church is to suppose an impossibility. Paul too was sorry; but the scandal was not an affront to him, but a public calamity to the whole church. Every minister can recall incidents of great moral failure in a congregation and the heartache that inevitably came upon the whole congregation as a result.

In part ... indicates that not all of the congregation grieved; some "puffed up" libertarians did not have enough sense of Christian morality to cause them any grief whatever.

[10] J. W. McGarvey, Second Epistle to the Corinthians (Cincinnati, Ohio: Standard Publishing Company, 1916), p. 177.

[11] Philip E. Hughes, op. cit., p. 62.