Charles Ellicott Commentary 2 Corinthians 11:6

"But though [I be] rude in speech, yet [am I] not in knowledge; nay, in every way have we made [this] manifest unto you in all things." — 2 Corinthians 11:6 (ASV)

But though I be rude in speech.—The word for “rude” is the same as that translated as “unlearned” in 1 Corinthians 14:23–24. This, then, had also been said about him by some at Corinth. It might seem at first as if the contemptuous criticism was likely to have come from the Hellenic or paganizing party of culture, who despised the Apostle because he was without the polish and eloquence of the rhetoric in which they delighted.

The context, however, makes it clear that the opponents now under the lash are the Judaizing teachers, the “apostles-extraordinary.” They apparently affected to despise him because he had abandoned, or had never mastered, the subtleties of Rabbinic casuistry, the wild allegories of Rabbinic interpretation. “He talks,” we hear them saying, “of others as ‘laymen,’ or ‘unlearned.’ What right has he to speak so, who is practically just a ‘layman’ himself? How can a man who is cutting and stitching all day be a ‘doctor of the law’? Ne sutor ultra crepidam.”

Side by side with the recognition of the dignity of labor in some Jewish proverbs (such, e.g., as that the father who did not teach his son to work taught him to be a thief), there was among the later Rabbis something like the feeling of an aristocracy of scholarship.

Even the Son of Sirach, after describing the work of the plowman and the carpenter and the potter, excludes them from the higher life of wisdom: They shall not be sought for in public counsel... they cannot declare justice and judgment; and they shall not be found where parables are spoken . The word for “rude” was probably used as the equivalent for the Hebrew term by which the Pharisees held up the working classes to contempt as “the people of the earth.”

But we have been throughly made manifest among you in all things.—The readings vary, some of the better manuscripts giving the active form of the verb, having made (it) manifest in everything among all men. The apparent awkwardness of having a transitive verb without an object probably led to the substitution of the passive participle.