2 Corinthians 5:16

ὥστε ἡμεῖς ἀπὸ τοῦ νῦν κ. τ. λ.: so that, sc., because of our conviction, that we should not live unto ourselves but unto Christ (2 Corinthians 5:15), we, sc., Paul as contrasted with his opponents at Corinth, from henceforth, sc., this conviction having mastered us, know no man after the flesh, i.e., are quite indifferent as to his mere external qualifications as a preacher of the Gospel, his eloquence, Jewish birth, etc.: we are not like those who glory ἐν προσώπῳ and not ἐν καρδίᾳ (2 Corinthians 5:12); cf. Galatians 2:6. f1εἰ καὶ ἐγνώκαμεν κ. τ. λ.: even though we have known (the distinction between οἴδαμεν and ἐγνώκαμεν is hardly to be pressed) Christ after the flesh, i.e., though there was a time in my life when I, like my Judaising opponents now, laid great stress on the local and hereditary, and, so to speak, fleshly “notes” of the Messiah who was to come, yet now we know Him so no more, i.e., I know better now, for I have learnt since my conversion that the national Messiah of the Jews is Himself the Incarnate Word, to whom every race of men is alike related, for He is the Christ of the Catholic Church of God. In personal religion the merely historical must yield precedence to the mystical element; it is of great interest and of real value to learn all that can be known about the Birth, Life, Death and Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, but it is the present Life of Christ, “in whom” we may be found if we will, that is of religious import, as is further explained in 2 Corinthians 5:17. This “is the same feeling which appears in the fact … that no authentic or even pretended likeness of Christ should have been handed down from the first century; that the very site of His dwelling place at Capernaum should have been entirely obliterated from human memory; that the very notion of seeking for relics of His life and death, though afterwards so abundant, first began in the age of Constantine. It is the same feeling which, in the Gospel narratives themselves, is expressed in the almost entire absence of precision as to time and place” (Stanley). Beyschlag and others (see Knowling, Witness of the Epistles, p. 2) conclude from the words εἰ καὶ ἐγνώκαμεν κατὰ σὰρκα Χριστόν that St. Paul had seen, and possibly heard, Jesus during His public ministry at Jerusalem (cf. 1 Corinthians 9:1); on this interpretation the words would be introduced at this point to indicate that, however much stress the other Apostles and their adherents might lay on such outward knowledge, yet to St. Paul, though he could lay claim to it as well as they, this did not seem the essential matter. But (a) the words do not necessarily imply this; it is noteworthy that he says Χριστόν, not Ἰησοῦν, which we should expect on Beyschlag's hypothesis. (b) The explanation given above is quite in accordance with the usage of κατὰ σάρκα with a verb (see reff.), and the order of the words here and in the preceding clause does not allow us to take κατὰ σάρκα with οὐδένα in the one case and with Χριστόν in the other. (c) As Schmiedel points out, if St. Paul really had had personal experience of the public ministry of Jesus, he would hardly have failed to mention it in the great apologetic passage, chap. 2 Corinthians 11:22-33. Other writers, e.g., Jowett, explain the latter clause of this verse by supposing that the Apostle is contrasting his more mature preaching with his preaching at an earlier stage of his Christian ministry when he had not yet emancipated himself from Jewish prejudices. But of his consciousness of such a “development” in his views, subsequently to his conversion, there is no trace in the Epistles. The contrast is really between Saul the Pharisee and Paul the Apostle of the Gentiles.