Charles Ellicott Commentary 2 Corinthians 11:27

"[in] labor and travail, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness." — 2 Corinthians 11:27 (ASV)

In weariness and painfulness...—This same combination appears 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 Saint Paul’s daily labor as a tent-maker.

The “watchings” indicate the sleepless nights spent in anxiety, pain, or prayer. “Hunger and thirst” are named as privations that occurred during his journeys or his labors. “Fastings,” as distinguished from these, can hardly mean anything other than times of self-chosen abstinence, of which we have at least two instances in Acts 13:2-3, and which would be natural in Saint 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 in Judea, 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 good house, a beautiful wife, and a soft couch” (Ursini, Antiqq. Hebr. c. 5, in Ugolini’s Thesaurus, vol. xxi.).