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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.comVincent Word Studies - 2 Corinthians 10:10 - 10:10
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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
They say (φασίν)
The correct reading is φησί says he. The Revisers retain they say, but read φησί he says in their text. The reference is to some well-known opponent. Compare one, any one in 2Co 10:7; 2Co 11:20. The only instance of the very words used by Paul's adversaries.
Weighty (βαρεῖαι)
In classical Greek, besides the physical sense of heavy, the word very generally implies something painful or oppressive. As applied to persons, severe, stern. In later Greek it has sometimes the meaning of grave or dignified, and by the later Greek rhetoricians it was applied to oratory, in the sense of impressive, as here.
Weak
“No one can even cursorily read St. Paul's epistles without observing that he was aware of something in his aspect or his personality which distressed him with an agony of humiliation - something which seems to force him, against every natural instinct of his disposition, into language which sounds to himself like a boastfulness which was abhorrent to him, but which he finds to be more necessary to himself than to other men. It is as though he felt that his appearance was against him.... His language leaves on us the impression of one who was acutely sensitive, and whose sensitiveness of temperament has been aggravated by a meanness of presence which is indeed forgotten by the friends who know him, but which raises in strangers a prejudice not always overcome” (Farrar).
Bodily presence
All the traditions as to Paul's personal appearance are late. A bronze medal discovered in the cemetery of St. Domitilla at Rome, and ascribed to the first or second century, represents the apostle with a bald, round, well-developed head; rather long, curling beard; high forehead; prominent nose; and open, staring eye. The intellectual character of the face is emphasized by the contrast with the portrait of Peter, which faces Paul's. Peter's forehead is flat, the head not so finely developed, the face commonplace, the cheek bones high, the eye small, and the hair and beard short, thick, and curling. An ivory diptych of the fourth century, reproduced in Mr. Lewin's “Life of Paul,” contains two portraits. In the one he is sitting in an official chair, with uplifted hand and two fingers raised, apparently in the act of ordination. The face is oval, the beard long and pointed, the moustache full, the forehead high, the head bald, and the eyes small and weak. The other portrait represents him in the act of throwing off the viper. A forgery of the fourth century, under the name of Lucian, alludes to him as “the bald-headed, hooknosed Galilean.” In the “Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles” mention is made of one Dioscorus, the bald shipmaster, who followed Paul to Rome, and was mistaken for him and beheaded in his stead. In the “Acts of Paul and Thekla,” a third-century romance, he is described as “short, bald, bowlegged, with meeting eyebrows, hook-nosed, full of grace.” John of Antioch, in the sixth century, says that he was round-shouldered, with aquiline nose, greyish eyes, meeting eyebrows, and ample beard.
Contemptible (ἐξουθενημένος)
Lit., made nothing of. Rev., of no account.