2 Corinthians 3:14

ἀλλʼ ἐπωρώθη τὰ νοήματα αὐτῶν : but their minds were blinded, sc., in reference to what they saw (cf. Romans 11:25); they took the brightness for an abiding glory (cf. Deuteronomy 29:4). πῶρος, which primarily means a kind of marble, came to mean, in medical writers, a hardening of the tissues; and hence we have πωρός, (1) to petrify, (2) to become insensible or obtuse, and so (3) it comes to be used of insensibility of the organs of vision, to blind. (See J. A. Robinson in Journal of Theological Studies, Oct., 1901, and cf. reff. above.) ἄχρι γὰρ τῆς σήμερον ἡμέρας κ. f1τ. λ.: for until this very day at the reading of the Old Covenant the same veil remaineth unlifted (for it is only done away in Christ). (1) Some commentators take μὴ ἀνακαλυπτόμενον as a nominative absolute, and translate “the same veil remaineth, it not being revealed that it (sc., either the veil or the Old Covenant) is done away in Christ”. But the order of the words seems to force us to take the present participle with μένει it having a merely explanatory force and being almost redundant. (2) Again both A.V. and R.V. (text), while translating the first part of the clause as we have done, render ὅ τι ἐν Χρ. καταργεῖται “which veil is done away in Christ”. But it seems indefensible thus to take ὅ τι as equivalent to ὅ. (3) Field arrives at yet another rendering by taking κάλυμμα per synecdochem for the thing veiled, which is here declared to be the fact that the Old Covenant is done away in Christ. He renders “the same mystery remaineth unrevealed, namely, that it is done away in Christ”. But it is a grave objection to this that τὸ κάλυμμα has to be taken in a sense different from that which it has all through the rest of the passage. (4) We prefer, therefore (with Schmiedel and Schnedermann), to read ὅ τι as ὅτι, for, and to regard the phrase ὅτι ἐν χρ. καταργεῖται. as parenthetical: “until this day the veil remains unlifted (for it is only in Christ that it is done away)”; i.e., the Jews do not recognise the vanishing away of the glory of the Law, which yet is going on before their eyes. How completely Judaism was dissociated in St. Paul's mind from Christianity is plain from the striking phrase ἡ παλαιὰ διαθήκη (here only found; but cf. 2 Corinthians 3:6), by which he describes the religious system of his own early manhood, which had only been superseded by ἡ καινὴ διαθήκη thirty years before he wrote this letter. ἀνάγνωσις is (see reff.) the public reading of the Law in the synagogues; it seems, however, unnecessarily ingenious to see here, with Schmiedel, an allusion in τὸ κάλυμμα to the covers in which the Synagogue Rolls were preserved.