2 Corinthians 13:1

1. This Literal Greek, A third this I am coming to you. The obvious meaning is, This is a third intentional coming. The contingency of its becoming a real coming is repeated next verse in the phrase if I come again. The word time is not in the Greek, and the word this can, we think, have strictly no proper reference but to the present writing. St. Paul does not affirm, therefore, three actual comings, or that the completion of his present purpose would make a third coming. That it is only as yet an intentional coming is evinced not only by the present words, but by the parallel passage, 2 Corinthians 12:14, where see note. That there had not been a second actual coming, so as to make the next one a third, is plain from 2 Corinthians 1:15. Then 1 Corinthians 16:5 is quite to the point, where the same Greek word, I do pass, or, I am coming through, expresses an intentional coming only, whether fulfilled or not.

Kling, in Lange, maintains three actual visits, and pronounces the other view “not plausible.” Albert Barnes calls it “trifling and childish in the extreme.” But such peremptory expressions will weigh little against such authorities as Grotius, Wetstein, Bloomfield, Stanley, and Wordsworth.

Two or three witnesses It is impossible for us to imagine that St. Paul was blind to a parallelism between his two or three comings and this two or three witnesses. And if he were not blind to it, he would have avoided it had he not intended it. The parallelism is: Let my three warnings be to you like the three witnesses of the Mosaic law, establishing every word.