2 Corinthians 12:2

I knew a man That this is the Apostle is proved by 2 Corinthians 12:7. The word knewshould, both here and in 2 Corinthians 12:3, be rendered know.

in Christ i.e. after his conversion, when he had become united to Christ.

above fourteen years ago And yet, as Chrysostom and Calvin remark, he had kept silence about it all this time. The secret raptures of the soul should be matters between it and God, not subjects of boasting save where necessity compels it. After all the main point (2 Corinthians 12:6) is what a man is, not what he has seen, even of things beyond the sphere of sense. Whether this were the -revelation" spoken of in Galatians 1:12; Galatians 2:2, we cannot tell. St Paul had many such revelations (see note on 1 Corinthians 9:1), and he gives here no distinct intimation of the time at which the vision occurred.

whether out of the body "The Apostle here by implication acknowledges the possibility of consciousness and receptivity in a disembodied state." Alford.

I cannot tell The factof the vision was certain enough. He saw clearly what God gave him permission to see, but whether the soul was rapt from his body left without life, or whether body and soul were caught up together to the third heaven and to Paradise, was known only to God.

the third heaven Some commentators have explained this passage by the Jewish tradition (see Dean Stanley in loc.) of sevenheavens. But if St Paul had this in his mind, he here meant the clouds, a notion combated by Irenaeus, who (see next note) had unusually good opportunities of knowing the Apostle's meaning. He says distinctly (Adv. Haer. ii. 30) that the third heaven is regarded by St Paul as a place preeminently exalted, and he rejects the idea of the seven heavens as taught by the Valentinian heretics, regarding it as absurd to suppose that four heavens remained as yet unexplored by St Paul. Some of the Jewish teachers held that there were two, others that there were sevenheavens. So in Chagigahf. 12 b, "R. Jehuda said there are two heavens, as it is said in Deuteronomy 10:14, -the heavens and the heaven of heavens." Rish Lakish said there were seven, &c." See also Debarim Rabba, § 2, fol. 253. 1. Rashi on Isaiah 44:8 says, "ye are my witnesses because I have opened to you the seven heavens (firmaments)," i.e. I have disclosed to you all that pertains to the knowledge of God.