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2Co_4:12. An inference from 2Co_4:11; hence the meaning can be no other than: Accordingly, since we are continually exposed to death, it is death whose working clings to us; but since the revelation of the life of Jesus in us goes to benefit you through our work in our vocation, the power opposed to death, life, is that which exercises its working on you. ὁ θάνατος and ἡ ζωή can, according to 2Co_4:10-11, be nothing else than the bodily death and the bodily life, both conceived of as personal powers, and consequently the life not as existent in Jesus (Hofmann). It was death to which Paul and those like him were ever given up, and it was life which, in spite of all deadly perils, retained the victory and remained preserved. And this victorious power of life, presenting in His servants the life of the risen Lord, was active (comp. Php_1:22; Php_1:24) through the continuance thereby rendered possible of the apostolic working among the Christians, and especially among the Corinthians ( ἐν ὑμῖν ), although they were not affected in like manner by that working of death. Estius (following Lombard) and Grotius (comp. Olshausen) take ἐνεργ . passively: “in nobis … mors agitur et exercetur … ut vicissim … per nostra pericula nostramque quotidianam mortem vobis gignitur, augetur, perficitur vita spiritualis” (Estius). But in the N. T. ἐνεργ . never occurs in a passive sense (see on 2Co_1:6), and according to 2Co_4:10-11, ἡ ζωή cannot be vita spiritualis, as even Osiander (comp. Ewald) here again interprets it. Calvin, Menochius, and Michaelis find in it something ironical: we are in continual deadly peril, while you are in comfort. Comp. Chrysostom, who, however, does not expressly signalize the ironical character of the passage. On ζῆν , vita frui, see Jacobs, ad Anthol. X. p. 70; comp. ζῆν καὶ εἶναι , Dissen, ad Dem. de Cor. p. 239. But the context gives no suggestion whatever of irony or of any such reference of ἡ ζωή ( ὑμεῖς δὲ ἐν ἀνέσει , τὴν ἐκ τούτων τῶν κινδύνων καρπούμενοι ζωήν , Chrysostom). As foreign to it is Rückert’s view, which refers the first half of the verse to Paul’s alleged sickness, and the second half to the state of health of the Corinthians, which, as Paul had recently learned through Titus, had considerably improved after a sickness that had been prevalent (1Co_11:30).
We may add that the first clause is set down without μέν , because Paul purposely avoids paving the way for the contrast, in order thereupon to bring it forward by way of surprise. “Infert particula δέ novam rem cum aliqua oppositione,” Klotz, ad Devar. p. 356.