2 Corinthians 5:3

2 Corinthians 5:3. seeing that we shall indeed be found clothed, not naked. This rendering, though not so literal as the Authorised Version, seems necessary to convey in our language what is certainly meant; Rendered as in our Authorised Version, a shade of doubt is undoubtedly conveyed to every English ear; while full certainty as to his eternal future is, in every varied form, conveyed here in almost every verse down to the ninth. And though competent scholars question whether in Biblical Greek the same certainty is conveyed by the particle here used as in classical Greek, vet, since this is only doubted, while it is admitted that the context must be our chief guide, we seem shut up by the present context in order to exclude that shade of doubt which the Authorised Version suggests to render the words as we have done. As to the word “naked” here, it would be a mistake to refer it, as some do, to the spiritual ‘defencelessness' in which the wicked will be found at the great day an idea foreign to the passage, and particularly incongruous just after an assurance of the very opposite had just been expressed. Bengel's idea, too, is equally alien from the manifest sense ‘if so be we shall be found not in the disembodied state of the deceased' when Christ comes. The next verse points to the real allusion to that notion (so natural to all thoughtful Pagans, who were strangers to the doctrine of a resurrection) that the body, in its very nature, is nothing better than a clog to the only real part of man, his soul, which will never be capable of full development till disengaged by death from that encumbrance. (In this the best interpreters agree.)