2 Corinthians 11:5

2 Corinthians 11:5. For I reckon that I am not a whit behind the very chiefest apostles or (according to others, and the margin of the Revised Version) ‘those pre-eminent apostles.' In this last case, pretended but false apostles (those of 2 Corinthians 11:13-15) are meant; but to us it appears pretty clear that the reference is to the real apostles, as Peter, James, and John (see Galatians 2:9). That disparaging comparisons between them and our apostle had been made at Corinth, is beyond doubt; and those who were doing this were the same party that were holding up “James, Cephas, and John” as “pillars” to the disparagement of Paul among the Galatians. We cannot doubt that it is these “very chiefest apostles” whom he here reckons himself not behind. Indeed it is a known fact, that the extreme zealots of this Jewish party who eventually left the Church and formed a sect of their own considered our apostle as the great corrupter of the pure, primitive Jewish type of Christianity, by letting in upon it a flood of uncircumcised Gentiles (see Stanley's introduction to this Epistle). And if the language here used still seems too strong to be applied to real apostles, the language applied to them in speaking to these same Corinthians in his First Epistle (1 Corinthians 15:10) will be found sufficiently similar.

[1] The Revised Version renders it “espoused,” because another word for “betrothed” is commonly used in the New Testament. But since two acts are here clearly distingushed, and “espousal” certainly answer to the second the “presenting of the Church to Christ,” as remaining true to Him here below, the first must correspond to the formal “betrothal” and all the more as the word here used (ἀ ρμόζω) undoubtedly means to bring together, which may apply to the one act as well as the other.