Verse 8
We cannot identify certainly the precise affliction to which Paul referred. This text and others in the New Testament do not give us enough information. The fact that Paul did not explain exactly what caused his affliction is significant. Evidently he wanted the Corinthians and us to focus on the intensity of the affliction as he felt it. This is what he emphasized here rather than the specific cause of his suffering. He spoke of his affliction as though the Corinthians knew about it, so probably they had more information about it than we do.
Commentators have conjectured what the specific problem may have been and have come up with many different possibilities. Perhaps Paul referred to fighting wild beasts at Ephesus, the uproar at Ephesus instigated by Demetrius, or a later outbreak of hostility against Paul at Ephesus. He may have had in mind various unspecified trials and plots against Paul’s life, a succession of persecutions in Asia, or an attempt to lynch Paul. Perhaps he referred to shipwreck followed by a night and a day in the sea, anxiety over the state of the Corinthian church, a deadly sickness, or Paul’s thorn in the flesh. [Note: See Hughes, pp. 17-18, for evaluation of some of these theories.] What we can say certainly about Paul’s affliction is that the Corinthians failed to appreciate its intensity.
"Hence Paul writes to tell them not what it was, but how it had oppressed him beyond endurance." [Note: Ibid., p. 16.]
It occurred in the Roman province of Asia (the western part of modern Turkey), and it would have been a fatal affliction had God not intervened. Furthermore it was a suffering "of Christ" (2 Corinthians 1:5), connected somehow with Paul’s ministry to the Corinthians (2 Corinthians 1:6).
"Whatever this thlipsis [affliction] may have been, he hints that it was far worse than what the Corinthians had to endure." [Note: Plummer, p. 17.]
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