What Paul Endured

Why Paul wrote this list

Paul did not volunteer this list. There were men at Corinth who wanted “to be regarded just as we are” (2 Cor. 11:12), and he names them: “For such men are false apostles, deceitful workers, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ” (2 Cor. 11:13). He answers them on their own ground, and he says plainly what kind of speech it is: “What I am saying, I am not saying as the Lord would, but as in foolishness, in this confidence of boasting” (2 Cor. 11:17).

So when the list begins, it begins with a question and a disclaimer: “Are they servants of Christ?—I speak as if insane—I more so” (2 Cor. 11:23). Afterward he tells them why he wrote it at all: “I have become foolish; you yourselves compelled me” (2 Cor. 12:11). And at the end of the list he says what kind of boasting it was: “If I have to boast, I will boast of what pertains to my weakness” (2 Cor. 11:30).

He wrote it from Macedonia. He had gone there from Troas (2 Cor. 2:12–13; 7:5), and in this letter he says, “I boast about you to the Macedonians” and “if any Macedonians come with me” (2 Cor. 9:2, 4). The collection for the poor saints in Jerusalem was still being gathered (2 Cor. 9:1–5), and he had not yet made the visit he announces at the end: “This is the third time I am coming to you” (2 Cor. 13:1). He was writing “to the church of God which is at Corinth” (2 Cor. 1:1), a church that began while he “settled there a year and six months, teaching the word of God among them” (Acts 18:11). After that stay, the only time Acts brings Paul into Macedonia is after the riot at Ephesus: “he left to go to Macedonia” (Acts 20:1). So the list belongs at that point in the record of Acts, before Paul came into Greece (Acts 20:2) and before his arrest in Jerusalem (Acts 21:33). Later, before Felix, he said he had come to Jerusalem “to bring alms to my nation” (Acts 24:17), and only after that did he sail for Italy (Acts 27:1).

The list beside the record

Here is each thing Paul names, and what the Book of Acts records of it up to the time he wrote.

“in far more labors” (2 Cor. 11:23). Acts records that at Corinth he worked at his trade: “by trade they were tent-makers” (Acts 18:3). He reminded the Thessalonians of the same thing: “working night and day so as not to be a burden to any of you” (1 Thess. 2:9), and the Corinthians: “we toil, working with our own hands” (1 Cor. 4:12). At Miletus he said, “these hands ministered to my own needs and to the men who were with me” (Acts 20:34).

“in far more imprisonments” (2 Cor. 11:23). Up to this point Acts records one: at Philippi the jailer “threw them into the inner prison and fastened their feet in the stocks” (Acts 16:24). His imprisonments in Jerusalem, Caesarea and Rome all came after this letter. In his letter to the Romans he greets “Andronicus and Junias, my kinsmen and my fellow prisoners” (Rom. 16:7), an imprisonment Acts does not record.

“beaten times without number, often in danger of death” (2 Cor. 11:23). Earlier in the same letter he had already written “in beatings, in imprisonments, in tumults” (2 Cor. 6:5), and of a time in Asia when “we despaired even of life; indeed, we had the sentence of death within ourselves” (2 Cor. 1:8–9). Acts records attempts on his life: at Damascus “they were also watching the gates day and night so that they might put him to death” (Acts 9:24). At Jerusalem the Hellenistic Jews “were attempting to put him to death” (Acts 9:29).

“Five times I received from the Jews thirty-nine lashes” (2 Cor. 11:24). Acts records none of the five. The Law of Moses set the limit: “He may beat him forty times but no more” (Deut. 25:3).

“Three times I was beaten with rods” (2 Cor. 11:25). Acts records one, at Philippi, in the same words: the magistrates “proceeded to order them to be beaten with rods” (Acts 16:22). Paul protested it afterward: “They have beaten us in public without trial, men who are Romans” (Acts 16:37). He reminded the Thessalonians of it: “we had already suffered and been mistreated in Philippi” (1 Thess. 2:2).

“once I was stoned” (2 Cor. 11:25). Acts records it, at Lystra: “they stoned Paul and dragged him out of the city, supposing him to be dead” (Acts 14:19). Years later he wrote to Timothy of “sufferings, such as happened to me at Antioch, at Iconium and at Lystra; what persecutions I endured, and out of them all the Lord rescued me!” (2 Tim. 3:11).

“three times I was shipwrecked, a night and a day I have spent in the deep” (2 Cor. 11:25). Acts records none of these three. The shipwreck Acts does record, at Malta (Acts 27:41–44), came years after this letter was written. So when Paul was shipwrecked off Malta, it was at least the fourth time.

“on frequent journeys” (2 Cor. 11:26). Acts follows many of them, among them these: sent out from Antioch “by the Holy Spirit” (Acts 13:4), out again with Silas “through Syria and Cilicia” (Acts 15:40–41), and out again “through the Galatian region and Phrygia” (Acts 18:23).

“dangers from my countrymen” (2 Cor. 11:26). Acts records many: the plot at Damascus (Acts 9:23), the persecution at Pisidian Antioch (Acts 13:50), the attempt at Iconium “by both the Gentiles and the Jews with their rulers, to mistreat and to stone them” (Acts 14:5), the men from Antioch and Iconium who stoned him at Lystra (Acts 14:19), the mob at Thessalonica (Acts 17:5), the men who followed him to Berea (Acts 17:13), and the charge before Gallio at Corinth (Acts 18:12). At Miletus, after this letter, he looked back on his time in Asia (Acts 20:18) as a time of “trials which came upon me through the plots of the Jews” (Acts 20:19).

“dangers from the Gentiles” (2 Cor. 11:26). The Gentiles had a hand in the attempt at Iconium (Acts 14:5). At Philippi the slave girl’s masters “seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the market place” (Acts 16:19). At Ephesus “Demetrius, a silversmith” gathered the craftsmen against him, saying “this Paul has persuaded and turned away a considerable number of people” (Acts 19:24–26). When Paul wanted to go into the assembly, “the disciples would not let him” (Acts 19:30).

“dangers in the city” (2 Cor. 11:26). At Thessalonica a mob “set the city in an uproar” (Acts 17:5). At Ephesus “the city was filled with the confusion” (Acts 19:29).

“dangers from rivers, dangers from robbers” and “dangers in the wilderness, dangers on the sea” (2 Cor. 11:26). Acts records none of these.

“dangers among false brethren” (2 Cor. 11:26). Paul names them in another letter: “the false brethren secretly brought in, who had sneaked in to spy out our liberty which we have in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 2:4).

“in labor and hardship, through many sleepless nights, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure” (2 Cor. 11:27). Beyond his work with his own hands (Acts 18:3; 20:34), Acts does not describe these. Paul names some of them in his own letters: “To this present hour we are both hungry and thirsty, and are poorly clothed” (1 Cor. 4:11), and to the Thessalonians, “our labor and hardship” (1 Thess. 2:9).

“the daily pressure on me of concern for all the churches” (2 Cor. 11:28). This one is in the same letter. At Troas, “when a door was opened for me in the Lord,” he writes, “I had no rest for my spirit, not finding Titus my brother” (2 Cor. 2:12–13). In Macedonia: “conflicts without, fears within” (2 Cor. 7:5).

The basket at Damascus (2 Cor. 11:32–33). Acts records it too, and the two accounts name different men watching for him. Paul writes, “the ethnarch under Aretas the king was guarding the city of the Damascenes in order to seize me, and I was let down in a basket through a window in the wall” (2 Cor. 11:32–33). Acts records that “the Jews plotted together to do away with him,” that “they were also watching the gates day and night,” and that “his disciples took him by night and let him down through an opening in the wall, lowering him in a large basket” (Acts 9:23–25). Both name the wall and the basket. Paul also wrote that after his conversion “I went away to Arabia, and returned once more to Damascus” (Gal. 1:17).

What the comparison shows

Acts is not a complete record of Paul’s sufferings. Acts records one beating with rods; Paul says there were three (2 Cor. 11:25). It records none of the five lashings from the Jews, none of the three shipwrecks, none of the rivers, robbers or wilderness. Acts tells the true account of the spread of the gospel. It does not claim to tell everything that happened to the men who carried it, and the list in 2 Corinthians 11 shows how much it leaves out.

Paul ends the list with an escape, not a victory. After the lashes, the rods, the stoning and the sea, the last thing he names is being let down a wall in a basket. He had just said what he was doing: “If I have to boast, I will boast of what pertains to my weakness” (2 Cor. 11:30). In the next chapter he gives the reason, in the Lord’s own words to him: “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9).

Paul sets one burden apart from the rest. He calls the beatings and dangers “external things,” and then names what came on him every day: “Apart from such external things, there is the daily pressure on me of concern for all the churches. Who is weak without my being weak? Who is led into sin without my intense concern?” (2 Cor. 11:28–29).

Questions for study

1. Paul calls this list foolish boasting (2 Cor. 11:17). Why did he write it anyway? What did the Corinthians need to see?
2. Acts records one beating with rods and Paul names three. What does that tell you about how to read Acts, and about what Scripture does not record?
3. Why would Paul end a list of sufferings with an escape in a basket?
4. Paul sets “the daily pressure on me of concern for all the churches” apart from the beatings and shipwrecks (2 Cor. 11:28). Why does he set it apart?