Charles Ellicott Commentary 2 Corinthians 12:11

"I am become foolish: ye compelled me; for I ought to have been commended of you: for in nothing was I behind the very chiefest apostles, though I am nothing." — 2 Corinthians 12:11 (ASV)

I am become a fool in glorying.—The last two words are missing in the better manuscripts, and the verse opens with a somewhat striking abruptness: I am become insane—it was you (emphatic) who compelled me. These words are partly ironical and partly express an impatient awareness that what he had been saying would seem to lend credence to the reproachful epithets that had been thrown at him.

The passage on which we now enter, and which we may consider as beginning after a pause, is remarkable for the reproduction, in a compressed form, of most of the topics, each with its characteristic phrase, on which he had previously dwelled. The violence of the storm is over, but the sky is not yet clear, and we still hear the mutterings of the receding thunder.

He remembers once more that he has been called “insane”; that he has been taunted with “commending himself”; that he has been treated as “nothing” in comparison with those “apostles-extraordinary” who were setting themselves up as his rivals. “I,” he says, with an emphatic stress on the pronoun, “ought to have had no need for this painful self-assertion. You ought to have acknowledged my labor and my love for you.”