vthers, possibly Luke and Barnabas, but of their names we cannot be certain (2 Cor. viii. 18, 22, where see notes). The Epistle being despatched, St. Paul travelled slowly through Macedonia, arriving at Corinth in due course as he had promised (1 Cor. xvi. 5, 6), and staying there three months (Acts xx. 3). This period probably covered December, 55, and January and February, 56. In consequence of a Jewish plot he then returned through Macedonia instead of sailing direct for Syria as he had intended to do (Acts xx. 3); and starting from Philippi “after the days of unleavened bread” (Acts xx. 6), t.e., March 18-25, he arrived in Jerusalem in time for the Pentecost festival of the year 56.
14. The account which has been given above of the sequence of events during St. Paul’s sojourn at Ephesus assumes that the First Canonical Epistle to the Corinthians is the “ Painful Letter ” to which the Apostle alludes in 2 Cor. ii. 4, vii. 8, 12; and it has been urged by several critics that it does not answer to the de- scription there given.! The two allusions are as follows: “ For out of much affliction and anguish of heart 1 wrote unto you with many tears; not that ye should be made sorry, but that ye might know the love which I have more abundantly unto you” (2 Cor. ii. 4) ; and “ For though I made you sorry with my epistle, I do not regret it although I did regret; for I see that that epistle made you sorry, though but for a season. . . . So although I wrote unto you, I wrote not for his cause that did the wrong nor for his cause that suffered the wrong, but that your zeal on our behalf might be made manifest unto you in the sight of God” (2 Cor. vii. 8, 12). It is said that “ from beginning to end of 1 Corinthians there are no traces of anguish of heart and much affliction, either in utterances expressing these feelings or in the style of the Epistle itself’’.2 I believe that the passages which have been quoted in § 8 demonstrate the inaccuracy of any such assertion. Critics have strangely overlooked in this connexion the fact that chaps. vii.-xvi. of 1 Corinthiansare mainly taken up with answering the queries which his correspondents had put to St. Paul; and that the body of the letter proper is contained in chaps. i.-vi. It isin these earlier chapters that we are to look for traces of mental anguish and depression, and I hold that they are plainly there to be found, and that the note of identi- fication afforded by 2 Cor. ii. 4 is answered by such passages
1 E.g., this objection was raised by Klépper (1870) and has been repeated by Waite in the Speaker's Commentary, by Robertson (Hastings’ Bible Dictionary, vol. i., p. 494) and by Kennedy (2 and 3 Corinthians, p. 64 f.), as well as by others,
2 Kennedy, loc. cit., p. 65.