What Was Paul’s Thorn in the Flesh? (9 of 12)

Almost every treatment assumes a medical condition and then argues about which one.

The phrase Paul uses has an Old Testament history, and in that history it never once refers to an illness. It refers to people.

What Does Paul Actually Say?

Less than we want and more than is usually noticed.

2 Cor 12:7. Because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, a thorn was given him in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to buffet him, so that he would not become conceited. Three times he asked for it to be removed. The answer was that grace is sufficient and power is perfected in weakness.

Two details in that are load-bearing and routinely passed over.

It was given, which is a divine passive, so God is behind the giving even though the agent is described as belonging to the adversary.

And it is a messenger, angelos, the ordinary word for a messenger or angel. Not a condition, not an affliction, not a weakness. An agent.

What Are the Medical Theories?

Four main ones, and each has something going for it.

Eye trouble. Gal 4:15 has the Galatians willing to tear out their own eyes and give them to him, and 6:11 notes the large letters in his own hand. Both fit a man with failing sight.

Malaria or recurrent fever. Common in the coastal regions he travelled, debilitating, and recurring in attacks rather than continuously.

A speech impediment. His opponents at Corinth said his bodily presence was weak and his speech contemptible, which he quotes rather than denies.

Epilepsy. An old proposal, largely on the strength of the Damascus road account and the recurring nature of the affliction.

Augustine leaned toward a physical reading and the Reformers generally followed.

There is a further proposal that ties the eye version directly to Paul’s calling rather than leaving it a random affliction. Acts 9 has something like scales falling from his eyes when Ananias restores his sight. If the trauma left permanent damage, then the thorn is a physical consequence of the Damascus encounter itself, carried for life. I have not found a major scholar arguing that, and it is elegant enough to be worth stating as speculation rather than losing.

None of these is impossible. All of them require reading flesh as body and thorn as ailment, which is the assumption worth examining.

What Are the Other Proposals?

Three more, running from serious to fringe.

A literal demonic agent. B. J. Oropeza, M. David Litwa and Paula Gooder read the messenger of Satan as an actual being. One version places the attack during the third-heaven vision itself rather than as an ongoing affliction, so the thorn ends when the vision does. A minority position and a seriously argued one.

Psychological or emotional affliction. Depression, insecurity, or the weight of having persecuted the church. Modern, less historically rooted, and it has some traction.

Sexual temptation. A Roman Catholic reading resting largely on the Vulgate’s rendering, stimulis carnis, the stimulus of the flesh. Widely rejected now, and for good reasons: it sits badly against 1 Cor 7, where Paul claims the gift of celibacy, and it is difficult to imagine him boasting gladly in that particular weakness or being told to stop asking for deliverance from it.

Where Does the Phrase Come From?

The conquest narratives, and it means the same thing every time.

Num 33:55 warns that if Israel does not drive out the inhabitants of the land, those who remain will be as barbs in their eyes and thorns in their sides.

Josh 23:13 repeats it. The nations left among them will be a snare and a trap, a scourge on their sides and thorns in their eyes.

Judg 2:3 has God declaring he will not drive them out, and they shall become adversaries.

Ezek 28:24 promises that Israel will no longer have a brier to prick or a thorn to hurt from any of those around them who treated them with contempt.

Four uses. In every one the thorn is a hostile population living alongside Israel, resisting, harassing and refusing to go away.

This is not a novel reading. John Chrysostom held it, and among the fathers he held it primarily.

Why Read the Thorn as a Human Adversary?

That Paul, a man saturated in those texts, used their image and meant what they meant.

A thorn in the flesh, in the vocabulary he had, is a person or a group who will not leave you alone. Not an illness. An opponent.

That reading also accounts for the word angelos better than the medical readings do. A messenger of Satan is naturally a someone rather than a something, and the New Testament uses that word of persons throughout.

And it fits the letter it appears in. 2 Corinthians is Paul’s most personal and most wounded letter, and the wound is inflicted by people. Opponents at Corinth who questioned his apostleship, undermined his authority, mocked his presence and speech, and would not stop.

Read that way, the thorn is the sustained, personal, humiliating opposition that followed him for years, and the three requests for removal are requests for it to end.

What Are the Objections to the Adversary Reading?

Two, and they should be stated rather than waved off.

Flesh normally means body. The phrase is a thorn in the flesh rather than a thorn in the side, and sarx usually points at the physical person. The Old Testament passages say sides and eyes.

The context is weakness. Paul’s list of what he glories in includes weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions and calamities. Persecutions in that list are already opposition, which might suggest the thorn is something else.

The reply to the second is that the list is not a set of distinct categories but an accumulation, and the thorn is introduced separately as the specific instance behind the general boast.

Can Paul’s Thorn Be Identified at All?

Unresolved, and the honest position is to say which way the evidence leans.

Philip Hughes, F. F. Bruce and Ralph Martin all conclude that definitive identification is impossible on the available evidence, and they are right about that.

Paul deliberately does not identify it, which is itself worth noticing. A named condition or a named opponent would let readers file it under someone else’s problem. An unnamed thorn stays available to anyone.

But the phrase has a history and the history is unanimous. Every Old Testament use means people. And Paul calls it a messenger, which is what you call an agent rather than an ailment.

That is where I land. It is a reading rather than a certainty, and anyone teaching it should say so.

Part of a series on the apostle Paul. See also the third journey, where 2 Corinthians was written.

Footnotes2

1. The divine passive in was given is worth pausing on whoever is right about the identification. Whatever the thorn was, Paul describes it as given, which places God behind an agent explicitly described as belonging to the adversary. That is the same shape as the opening of Job.
2. That Paul never names it has often been read as reticence. It reads better as design. A named affliction becomes a case study rather than an example, and every reader with a different affliction is let off.

Sources

Philip Edgcumbe Hughes, F. F. Bruce and Ralph P. Martin, each concluding that the thorn cannot be definitively identified from the available evidence.

John Chrysostom, who held the human-opposition reading. Augustine and the Reformers, who favoured a physical ailment.

B. J. Oropeza, M. David Litwa and Paula R. Gooder, for the reading of the messenger of Satan as an actual being encountered during the third-heaven experience.

The biblical texts cited: 2 Cor 12:1-10, 2 Cor 10:10, Num 33:55, Josh 23:13, Judg 2:3, Ezek 28:24, Acts 9:17-18, Gal 4:13-15, Gal 6:11, and 1 Cor 7:7.

Where the sourcing stops: Paul does not identify the thorn and no reading is demonstrable. The medical proposals are the majority position across the history of interpretation, and the adversarial reading argued here is a minority one with a strong lexical basis. The distinction between the Old Testament phrasing, thorns in your sides and eyes, and Paul's phrasing, a thorn in the flesh, is real and is the strongest objection to the reading this post prefers.