2 Corinthians 1:8

a. His affliction in Asia, and his purpose to visit them, 2 Corinthians 1:8-14 .

8. Have you ignorant St. Paul’s frequent phrase in introducing a new information. Romans 1:13; 1Co 10:1 ; 1 Corinthians 12:1; 1 Thessalonians 4:13, and other passages.

Trouble What this trouble, or rather, affliction, even to despair of life, was, is variously decided by commentators. Some identify it with his danger at Ephesus in Demetrius’s riot; but in that affair he was clearly not allowed to encounter as much danger as he wished. Some refer it to his fighting with wild beasts at Ephesus; but the literal reality of such an event is improbable. We identify it without doubt with the “thorn in the flesh” in 2 Corinthians 12:7, where see our note.

Alford, who identifies that “thorn” as sore eyes, nevertheless starts here on the right track: “The expression,” he says, “seems rather to regard a deadly sickness than a persecution.” St. Paul does not say that the trouble was at Ephesus, but in Asia. Assuming that his anxiety about the effect of his epistle on the Corinthians, joined with the excitements of the riot, affected his nervous system before leaving Ephesus, the paroxysm by which life was in despair doubtless took place at Troas.

Pressed out of measure Literally, we were overwhelmingly, above our strength, borne down. He was prostrated by epilepsy, and his life was despaired of. To identifying this trouble as a sickness Meyer objects 1. That 2 Corinthians 1:5 speaks of sufferings of Christ; 2. 2 Corinthians 1:7 makes the Corinthians partakers; and, 3. Paul speaks in the plural, as if others shared. But, 1. Paul’s being overwhelmed with an almost fatal anxiety for the Corinthian Church was eminently identical with the sufferings of Christ. 2. The Corinthians being partakers can only mean that they had their share in the great mass of sufferings for Christ, not that they nearly died with him in Asia. 3. Paul’s use of the plural is counterbalanced by his use of the singular life, death, sentence of death all of which certainly must be held as individual. 4. We make a fuller break between 2 Corinthians 1:7-8 than Meyer, which isolates Paul’s trouble from the sufferings of which the Corinthians were partakers.