Boasting in Visions and Revelations

Most of Paul’s boasting thus far in his Fool’s Speech has consisted in his boasting in weakness and other things that people do not ordinarily find worth boasting in (see 2 Cor. 11:16–33). He has chosen this strategy with respect to boasting because the false “superapostles” who criticized him in Corinth were boasting in things that supposedly proved their strength and superiority to Paul (10:1–11:15). As we have seen, Paul is aiming to undercut their claims. He will not play their game, for servants of God are marked by weakness and not by their own strength.

This does not mean, however, that Paul has none of the spiritual experiences that apparently formed part of the ground for the boasting of the false apostles. We infer from today’s passage that the false apostles pointed to their own experiences of supernatural visions as a demonstration that they were better apostles than Paul, for there is no other reason that the Apostle would start speaking about visions. He here makes a concession to temporarily adopt the same grounds on which the false apostles boast, but this, too, he will use to show that the false apostles had a false conception of what makes for a faithful servant of the Lord. As he says in 2 Corinthians 12:1, he will boast in “visions and revelations of the Lord,” but at the same time he admits tHat there is nothing to be gained in doing so.

Paul then speaks of a man who was caught up to the third heaven, to paradise, where he heard things unutterable (vv. 2–4). The Apostle here, commentators agree, actually refers to himself. Probably he does not name himself to underscore that his vision was not worth mentioning as a proof of his Apostolic call. “The third heaven” likely refers to the highest heaven where the righteous dead go to be with the Lord as they wait for the resurrection of their bodies. Paul could not repeat what he heard in this third heaven (v. 4), which implies a certain uselessness of visions for proving one’s Apostolic credentials and the pointlessness of boasting in visions. If one cannot share what one hears in the third heaven, what does boasting in the vision gain?

In sum, we have Paul talking about his vision as a concession to prove that he, no less than the false apostles, could claim supernatural experiences. But his way of talking about it effectively undermines the false apostles’ use of visions to prove their authority. After all, supernatural experiences themselves prove nothing, for even false prophets claim to have heard from God (Deut. 13:1–5).