Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 2 Corinthians · About this commentary
The Signs of an Apostle
2 Corinthians 12:11-13
11 I have become foolish in boasting. You compelled me, for I ought to have been commended by you, for I am in no way inferior to the very best apostles, though I am nothing. · WEB
The boasting is blamed on the people who forced it, and the only injury Corinth suffered turns out to be that nobody charged them.
I have become foolish in boasting. You compelled me.
The two chapters of self-praise are handed back to their cause. He has flagged the foolishness three times 2 Corinthians 11:1 2 Corinthians 11:17 2 Corinthians 11:21, and here he assigns responsibility for it: they made him do this, by failing to do it themselves.
What they should have done is stated as an obligation: I ought to have been commended by you. The letters of commendation his rivals carried 2 Corinthians 3:1 were the ordinary currency, and the congregation he founded was the natural body to issue his. Their silence is what left the field to men who wrote their own.
Then the claim, immediately followed by its own undercutting: I am in no way inferior to the very best apostles, though I am nothing.
Both halves are meant. The first is a statement about standing, the second about the man holding it, and putting them in one sentence is the only way he will allow the first to be said. He has done the same thing throughout — an ambassador who begs 2 Corinthians 5:20, a treasure in a clay vessel 2 Corinthians 4:7.
Verse 12 produces the credential the argument has been avoiding: truly the signs of an apostle were worked among you in all perseverance, in signs and wonders and mighty works.
The order is worth noticing. Perseverance comes first, before the miracles, and the miracles are reported in the passive — they were worked, with no claim about who worked them. Corinth had seen the evidence, which is why it can be mentioned in one verse and dropped.
And verse 13 closes with the letter's most bitter irony: what is there in which you were made inferior to the rest of the assemblies, unless it is that I myself was not a burden to you? Forgive me this wrong!
He surveys every possible way Corinth might have been shortchanged relative to other churches and finds exactly one — he never took their money. Then he asks pardon for it, using the word for a genuine injury.
The sarcasm is doing real work rather than venting. It states the accusation in its own terms so the congregation has to hear how it sounds: the single measurable difference between them and everyone else was a kindness.
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