2 Corinthians 11:27

In weariness and painfullness... — The same combination meets us in 2 Thessalonians 3:8, where the English version has “labour and travail,” as Tyndale and Cranmer have in this passage. “Weariness and painfulness” appear first in the Geneva version; toil and trouble is, perhaps, the best English equivalent. From the use of the phrase in 2 Thessalonians 3:8, it probably refers chiefly to St. Paul’s daily labour as a tent-maker. The “watchings” indicate the sleepless nights spent in anxiety, or pain, or prayer. “Hunger and thirst” are named as privations incident to his journeys or his labours. “Fastings,” as distinguished from these, can hardly mean anything but times of self-chosen abstinence, of which we have at least two instances in Acts 13:2, and which would be natural in St. Paul both as a Pharisee (see Notes on Matthew 6:16, and Luke 18:12) and as a disciple of Christ (see Note on Matthew 9:15). “Cold and nakedness” seem to speak not only of lonely journeys, thinly clad and thinly shod, on the high passes from Syria into Asia Minor, but also of lodgings without fire, and of threadbare garments. The whole passage reminds us of the narrative given by an old chronicler of the first appearance of the disciples of Francis of Assisi in England, walking with naked and bleeding feet through ice and snow, clothed only with their one friar’s cloak, shivering and frost-bitten (Eccleston, De Adventu Minorum). He obviously contrasts this picture of his sufferings with what the Corinthians knew of the life of his rivals, who, if they were like their brethren of Judæa, walked in long robes, and loved the uppermost places at feasts (Matthew 23:6). It had become a Jewish proverb that “the disciples of the wise had a right to a goodly house, a fair wife, and a soft couch” (Ursini. Antiqq. Hebr. c. 5, in Ugolini’s Thesaurus, vol. xxi.).