This is what we are led to by ver. 4, one of the most vexed passages in the New Testament. The text of the last word is uncertain: some read the imperfect ἀνείχεσθε; others, including our Revisers, the present ἀνέχεσθε. The last is the better attested, and suits best the connexion of thought. The interpretations may be divided into two classes. First, there are those which assume that the suppositions made in this verse are not true. This is evidently the intention in our Authorised Version. It renders, "For if he that cometh preacheth another Jesus, whom we have not preached, or if ye receive another spirit, which ye have not received, or another gospel, which ye have not accepted, _ye might well bear with him_." But--we must interpolate--nothing of this sort has really taken place; for Paul counts himself not a whit inferior to the very chiefest Apostles. No one--not even Peter or James or John--could have imparted anything to the Corinthians which Paul had failed to impart; and hence their spiritual seduction, no matter how or by whom accomplished, was perfectly unreasonable and gratuitous. This interpretation, with variations in detail which need not be pursued, is represented by many of the best expositors, from Chrysostom to Meyer. "If," says Chrysostom in his paraphrase, "if we had omitted anything that should have been said, and they had made up the omission, we do not forbid you to attend to them. But if everything has been perfectly done on our part, and no blank left, how did they [the Apostle's adversaries] get hold of you?" This is the broad result of many discussions; and it is usual--though not invariable--for those who read the passage thus to take τῶν ὑπερλίαν ἀποστόλων in a complimentary, not a contemptuous, sense, and to refer it, as Chrysostom expressly does, to the three pillars of the primitive Church.
The objections to this interpretation are obvious enough. There is first the grammatical objection, that a hypothetical sentence, with the present indicative in the protasis (εἰ ... κηρύσσει, εἰ ... λαμβάνετε), and the present indicative in the apodosis (ἀνέχεσθε), can by no plausibility of argument be made to mean, "If the interloper _were_ preaching another Jesus ... you _would_ be right to bear with him." Even if the imperfect is the true reading, which is improbable, this translation is unjustified.[90] But there is a logical as well as a grammatical objection. The use of γὰρ ("for") surely implies that in the sentence which it introduces we are to find the reason for what precedes. Paul is afraid, he has told us, lest the Church should be seduced from the one husband to whom he has betrothed her. But he can never mean to explain a _real_ fear by making a number of _imaginary_ suppositions; and so we must find in the hypothetical clauses here the _real_ grounds of his alarm. People had come to Corinth--ὁ ἐρχόμενος is no doubt collective, and characterises the troublers of the Church as intruders, not native to it, but separable from it--doing all the things here supposed. Paul has espoused the Church to _One_ Husband; they preach _another_ Jesus. Not, of course, a distinct Person, but certainly a distinct conception of the same Person. Paul's Christ was the Son of God, the Lord of Glory, He who by His death on the cross became Universal Redeemer, and by His ascension Universal Lord--the end of the law, the giver of the Spirit; it would be another Jesus if the intruders preached only the Son of David, or the Carpenter of Nazareth, or the King of Israel. According to the conception of Christ, too, would be "the spirit" which accompanied this preaching, the characteristic temper and power of the religion it proclaimed. The spirit ministered by Paul in his apostolic work was one of power, and love, and, above all things, liberty; it emancipated the soul from weakness, from scruples, from moral inability, from slavery to sin and law; but the spirit generated by the Judaising ministry, the characteristic temper of the religion it proclaimed, was servile and cowardly. It was a spirit of bondage tending always to fear (Rom. viii. 15). Their whole gospel--to give their preaching a name it did not deserve (Gal. i. 6-9)--was something entirely unlike Paul's both in its ideas and in its spiritual fruits. Unlike--yes, and immeasurably inferior, and yet in spite of this the Corinthians put up with it well enough. This is the plain fact (ἀνέχεσθε) which the Apostle plainly states. _He_ had to plead for their toleration, but they had no difficulty in tolerating men who by a spurious gospel, an unspiritual conception of Christ, and an unworthy incapacity for understanding freedom, were undermining his work, and seducing their souls. No wonder he was jealous, and angry, and scornful, when he saw the true Christian religion, which has all time and all nations for its inheritance, in danger of being degraded into a narrow Jewish sectarianism; the kingdom of the Spirit lost in a society in which race gave a prerogative, and carnal ordinances were revived; and, worse still, Christ the Son of God, the Universal Reconciler, known only "after the flesh," and appropriated to a race, instead of being exalted as Lord of all, in whom there is no room for Greek or Jew, barbarian or Scythian, bond or free. The Corinthians bore with this nobly (καλῶς); but he who had begotten them in the true Gospel had to beg them to bear with him.