Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 2 Corinthians · About this commentary
Letters Written on Hearts
2 Corinthians 3:1-6
1 Are we beginning again to commend ourselves? Or do we need, as do some, letters of commendation to you or from you? · WEB
Asked for credentials, Paul points at the congregation asking, and then attributes his fitness for the work to somebody else.
Are we beginning again to commend ourselves? Or do we need, as do some, letters of commendation to you or from you?
The rivals arrived with references, and Paul's problem is that he has none — he was the first Christian in Corinth, so there was nobody there to write him one. Instead of producing a document he reassigns the category: you are our letter, written in our hearts, known and read by all men.
The congregation demanding his credentials is his credential. That argument only works because it can be checked: their existence is public, and anyone can read it.
Verse 3 develops it with two contrasts, and both come from the same place. Written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; and not in tablets of stone, but in tablets that are hearts of flesh. Ink can be forged and stone can be broken; and the phrase about tablets is reaching back to Sinai, which the next paragraph will take up directly.
Then the confidence is immediately handed away. Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to account anything as from ourselves; but our sufficiency is from God — which answers the question left hanging at the end of chapter 2 2 Corinthians 2:16. He does claim sufficiency. He denies that it originates in him.
Verse 6 names the office and states the antithesis the rest of the chapter works out: servants of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit. For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.
What is being contrasted is two administrations, not a bad text and a good spirit. Letter here is the written code considered on its own — a standard with no power to produce what it requires. Such a standard can only certify failure, and certifying failure is what killing means in this sentence.
The next verses make that explicit by conceding the older covenant real glory 2 Corinthians 3:7, which no one would do who thought it was the problem. The fault is never located in the commandments. It is located in what a commandment can and cannot do to the person reading it.
settled What this mark means