A travel report stops in the middle of itself at 2:13 and does not start again until 7:5. Into the gap Paul puts four and a half chapters on what a minister of the new covenant actually is — the veil of Moses, the treasure in jars of clay, the tent and the building, the ministry of reconciliation. This study measures all 132 verses of that half-letter, word for word, against 23,061 verse units of the Greek Old Testament. Exactly one row runs past five: 6:2, ten consecutive words of Isaiah 49:8, tie band one — and it is the only verse in the seven chapters that says “for he says.” Meanwhile chapter 3, the New Testament’s long exposition of Exodus 34, never reaches five against the whole of Greek Exodus. Both facts are printed here. See the method →
2 Corinthians 1:1–7:16 (selections)
Greek New Testament (SBLGNT / MorphGNT) · ESV★ And one verse of these seven chapters is unlike all the rest. Screened against 30,637 verse units of the Greek Old Testament held here, exactly one of the 132 rows runs past five: 6:2, at ten, with a tie band of one. The next deepest is 6:18 at five. Nine rows reach four. And 2 Corinthians 3, the New Testament’s long exposition of the veil of Moses, never reaches five against the whole of Greek Exodus — its deepest contact with Exodus 34 is four words at 3:13. Stage 4 gives the whole table.
The Shape of the Passage
Interruption and resumption — a sentence broken off, and what was put inside itA church that had heard Paul preach, taken offence at a letter he sent, and begun listening to teachers who carried references. He answers by explaining what a minister of the new covenant actually looks like — and the explanation runs four and a half chapters long in the middle of a travel report he never finished.
Author
Paul, with Timothy (1:1) — and the eleven words that open this letter open exactly one other, Colossians. He is writing from Macedonia, after a crisis in Asia so severe that he says he received the sentence of death (1:9), and after a letter to Corinth that caused grief he did not enjoy causing (2:4; 7:8).
What he is defending is not himself but a job description. Something at Corinth has made apostolic weakness look like apostolic failure. So the letter does the opposite of what a defence usually does: it concedes the weakness and makes it the argument. The treasure is in jars of clay — fired earth, the cheapest container there was — precisely so that the surpassing power should be seen to be God’s (4:7). The competence is not his; God made him competent (3:5–6). Even the comfort he offers is second-hand: he passes on the comfort he was given (1:4).
And he is careful about what he claims. Five times in these chapters he points at something said — God, who said (4:6), as it is written (4:13), for he says (6:2), as God said (6:16), says the Lord (6:17–18). Measured, only one of the five carries a deep verbal run. That is stage 4, and it is the spine of this page.
Audience
Corinth — a Roman colony, a port with two harbours, a city where public speaking was a competitive sport and a speaker was judged on presence and polish. Rivals had arrived with letters of recommendation (3:1), the ordinary Greco-Roman credential. Paul’s answer is that his letter of recommendation is the congregation itself, written on our hearts… with the Spirit of the living God (3:2–3).
The pastoral situation is nearer than the polemic. A man had wronged Paul and been disciplined by the church; Paul now asks them to forgive and comfort him, lest he be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow (2:7). Titus has come back with news that the painful letter worked (7:6–16). Behind the whole half-letter is a relationship being repaired, and the last word of chapter 7 is confidence, not rebuke.
The invitation is put in the present tense. The one quotation this page can measure deeply, Isaiah 49:8, is turned into a now: behold, now is the favourable time; behold, now is the day of salvation (6:2). The prophet’s promise to a servant becomes an appeal to a church — and to anyone reading over their shoulder.
Orient on Corinth, on the letter’s unity, on the new covenant and reconciliation.
Search by topic: Corinth, 2 Corinthians (composition and integrity), new covenant, veil, reconciliation, apostleship, Roman triumph, letters of recommendation.
Which articles are relevant?
- Anchor Bible Dictionary — “Corinth,” “Corinthians, Second Letter to the,” “Reconciliation,” “Covenant, New.”
- Dictionary of Paul and His Letters — “Corinthians, Letters to the,” “Opponents of Paul,” “Reconciliation,” “Sufferings of Christ,” “Triumph.”
- NIDNTTE / TDNT — παράκλησις (paraklēsis), καταλλαγή (katallagē), κάλυμμα (kalymma), ἀρραβών (arrabōn), θριαμβεύω (thriambeuō).
- Dictionary of New Testament Background — “Rhetoric,” “Letters, Greco-Roman,” “Triumph,” “Benefactor.”
Bibliography surfaced:
- Margaret Thrall (ICC, 2 vols.), Murray J. Harris (NIGTC), Victor Paul Furnish (Anchor), Ralph P. Martin (WBC), Paul Barnett (NICNT), George Guthrie (BECNT) on 2 Corinthians.
- Scott Hafemann, Paul, Moses, and the History of Israel (on 2 Cor 3); Carol Kern Stockhausen, Moses’ Veil and the Glory of the New Covenant.
- G. K. Beale & D. A. Carson, eds., Commentary on the NT Use of the OT (the 2 Corinthians chapter).
A triumph, a veil, a down payment, and a colony that judged speakers.
Read the Roman procession behind 2:14, the Exodus 34 scene behind chapter 3, the commercial word behind 1:22, and the recommendation letter behind 3:1.
Which parallels shed light on religion and worldview?
The triumph. θριαμβεύω (2:14) is the verb of the Roman triumphus: a victorious general processing through the city, incense burning along the route, his troops behind him and his prisoners in front. The word stands twice in the Greek New Testament, here and Colossians 2:15 — and in Colossians the ones being led are the defeated powers. Paul does not say which end of the procession he is at, and the Greek allows both: led in triumph with the victor, or led as the spoil. Given that the next paragraphs are about dying daily, the ambiguity may be the point. The incense supplies the next image: the same smoke is victory to one line of the procession and death to the other (2:15–16).
The veil. Chapter 3 works on Exodus 34:29–35: Moses comes down with his face shining, the people are afraid, he speaks, and then he puts a veil on — taking it off again whenever he goes back in. Exodus never says the shine was fading; that reading is Paul’s addition, and he builds it into an argument about what ends and what remains. What is measurable is how little of Exodus he repeats. Greek Exodus and Greek Leviticus were fetched and screened for this page (they are not part of the shelf’s standing corpus), and against all 2,024 of their verse rows the eighteen verses of 2 Corinthians 3 reach four at the very most — κάλυμμα ἐπὶ τὸ πρόσωπον at 3:13, matching Exodus 34:35. This is exposition, not quotation, and the run screen can barely see it.
The down payment. ἀρραβών (1:22, 5:5) is not a religious word at all. It is a commercial one, borrowed into Greek from Semitic, used in papyrus contracts for the deposit that both guarantees a sale and forms part of the price. It stands three times in the Greek New Testament — twice in these seven chapters and once at Ephesians 1:14 — and every time it is the Spirit. The claim is commercial in force: what has been given is not a token of something different but the first instalment of the same thing.
The letter of recommendation. συστατικός (3:1) is a New Testament hapax legomenon and an entirely ordinary word outside it: Greco-Roman letters of introduction were the standard credential for a travelling teacher, and Corinth expected them. Paul’s reply is that his credential is a congregation, and that it was written by the Spirit — not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts (3:3).
- Exodus 34:29–35 — the shining face and the veil: the scene chapter 3 expounds (see Exodus 33–34).
- Isaiah 49:8 — in a time of favour I have answered you: the one quotation in these chapters that measures deep (see the Servant).
- Jeremiah 31:31–34 — the new covenant written on hearts: the promise behind 3:3–6 (see Jeremiah 31).
- Ezekiel 36:26–27; 37:27 — the heart of flesh, the Spirit, I will be their God: the promises behind 3:3 and 6:16 (see Ezekiel 36).
There is a temptation, once a measuring tool is in hand, to let it decide which connections are real. That would be a serious mistake, and 2 Corinthians is the book that proves it. Chapter 3 is the most sustained piece of Old Testament exposition Paul ever wrote: eighteen verses on a single scene in Exodus, with the veil taken up, turned over, and applied four separate times. Anyone who has read Exodus 34 recognises it instantly. And yet, screened word by word against the whole of Greek Exodus, the chapter never reaches five consecutive shared words. Its deepest contact with Exodus 34 is four, at 3:13. Meanwhile a single verse in chapter 6, which most readers pass over, carries ten consecutive words of Isaiah 49:8 with nothing else in 30,637 verses coming near it. The lesson is not that chapter 3 is somehow less connected to Exodus than 6:2 is to Isaiah. The lesson is that a contiguous-run screen measures one specific thing — verbatim reuse of word forms — and that a writer expounding a passage in his own words is doing something the instrument was never built to detect. So this page uses the screen for what it can do: it finds the quotations, it tells you how distinctive each one is by giving you the tie band, and it keeps the page honest by refusing to inflate an echo into a citation. Where the screen is blind, the page says so rather than pretending the silence means something. A measurement that only ever confirms is not a measurement.
Comfort, a deposit, a veil, a clay pot, and the word that enters the New Testament once.
Every count below was taken from the MorphGNT lemma column across all 27 books of the Greek New Testament — 137,554 word tokens — not from a concordance.
Comfort, encouragement; to comfort, to urge. 138 occurrences in the Greek New Testament, 29 of them in 2 Corinthians — ten in the five verses 1:3–7 and seven in 7:4–13. The word-group frames the whole half-letter and does not occur once between 2:9 and 5:19. It is not soothing: it is the strengthening one person hands to another, and 1:4 says Paul can only pass on what he was given.
Down payment, deposit. Three occurrences in the Greek New Testament — 1:22, 5:5, Ephesians 1:14 — and all three are the Spirit. A commercial word from ordinary contracts: not a pledge of something else, but the first instalment of the same thing.
Veil. Four occurrences in the Greek New Testament and all four are in this chapter. Its verb ἀνακαλύπτω occurs twice, both also here (3:14, 3:18). The image is Exodus 34’s; the vocabulary belongs, in the New Testament, to 2 Corinthians 3 alone.
Beholding — or reflecting — as in a mirror. A New Testament hapax legomenon. The middle voice will carry both senses, and the commentaries are genuinely divided. This page does not resolve it; it records that the ESV renders beholding and that the alternative is live.
Made of baked clay. Twice in the Greek New Testament, here and 2 Timothy 2:20. The root is ostrakon, a potsherd — the throwaway writing material of the ancient world. The cheapness is the argument.
To reconcile; reconciliation. Six and four occurrences in the Greek New Testament respectively, and five of the ten stand in 5:18–20. τὸν λόγον τῆς καταλλαγῆς and τὴν διακονίαν τῆς καταλλαγῆς each occur once in the whole New Testament. God is always the reconciler and never the reconciled.
I listened to, I heeded. A New Testament hapax legomenon — and it is one of the ten words Paul quotes from Isaiah 49:8. The word enters the New Testament exactly once, inside a quotation, and never appears in Paul’s own voice.
Well-accepted, welcome. Isaiah’s Greek has δεκτῷ; when Paul repeats the line in his own words he writes εὐπρόσδεκτος. Both words occur five times each in the Greek New Testament, and 6:2 is the only verse that uses one and then the other.
Relief, a letting-up. Five occurrences in the Greek New Testament — Acts 24:23, 2 Corinthians 2:13, 7:5 and 8:13, and 2 Thessalonians 1:7 — and two of the five are the two ends of the digression. At 2:13 the spirit has none; at 7:5 the flesh has none. The literary seam is built on this word.
The hapax legomena of these seven chapters, and where they cluster
Twenty-six lemmas in 2 Corinthians 1–7 occur nowhere else in the Greek New Testament. By chapter they fall: 1 → 3 · 2 → 2 · 3 → 4 · 4 → 4 · 5 → 0 · 6 → 11 · 7 → 2.
Chapter 5 — the new creation, the judgement seat, the ministry of reconciliation, he made him to be sin — contains not a single one. The most quoted chapter in the half-letter is written entirely in words the rest of the New Testament also uses.
⚠️ And eight of the twenty-six stand in the six verses 6:14–7:1 — ἑτεροζυγέω, μετοχή, συμφώνησις, Βελιάρ, ἐμπεριπατέω, συγκατάθεσις, εἰσδέχομαι, μολυσμός. That passage is the one stretch of the letter whose authorship and placement have been argued over for two centuries, and this is one of the counts the argument runs on. The count is a fact; what it means is not. A nine-verse passage on a subject nobody else in the New Testament addresses in these terms will naturally carry unusual words, and the shelf does not treat a vocabulary spike as evidence of a different hand. Stage 5 says plainly what this page did not check.
How the rest of the New Testament fills these words out:
- Romans 5:1–11 — while we were enemies we were reconciled to God: the other Pauline home of καταλλάσσω (see Romans 5).
- Ephesians 1:13–14 — the Spirit as ἀρραβών, the guarantee of the inheritance: the third and last occurrence (see Ephesians 2).
- Colossians 2:15 — the only other θριαμβεύω, where the ones led in the procession are the powers (see Colossians 1).
- 1 Corinthians 15:50–57 — the body that must be changed: read beside the tent and the building of 2 Corinthians 5:1–5 (see 1 Corinthians 15).
The measurement: 132 verses against 30,637, and the one row that runs past five.
Greek against Greek. Every verse of 2 Corinthians 1–7, normalised the same way as the target corpus, against every verse of the Greek Old Testament held here and then against the rest of the Greek New Testament. Contiguous runs of whole word forms, never lemmas. The tie band is printed beside every run.
Against the Greek Old Testament — the whole distribution
Across the 132 rows against 30,637 verse units of the 64 CATSS files held here: 130 reach two or more, 76 reach three or more, 15 reach four or more, 2 reach five or more, exactly one reaches ten, and nothing reaches eleven.
Read that shape carefully. There is a cliff between five and ten with nothing in it. One verse stands on the far side of it.
⚠️ The corpus grew by a third on 30 August 2026 and the cliff did not move. The page prints both columns rather than the newer one alone.
| rows reaching | 44 files · 23,061 units | 64 files · 30,637 units |
|---|---|---|
| 2 or more | 129 of 132 | 130 of 132 |
| 3 or more | 71 | 76 |
| 4 or more | 11 | 15 |
| 5 or more | 2 | 2 |
| 10 | 1 — 6:2 | 1 — 6:2 |
| 11 or more | none | none |
The letter’s one deep row is still its one deep row. Twenty CATSS files arrived — Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Joshua and the deuterocanon — and 6:2 against Isaiah 49:8 is still ten words with a tie band of one, with nothing between five and ten. Wisdom, Tobit, Judith, Maccabees and the rest are witnesses, not Scripture, and are named as such wherever a hit lands in one.
| row | run | tie band | best match | what it is |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 6:2 | 10 | 1 | Isaiah 49:8 | An explicit citation. λέγει γάρ — for he says. |
| 6:18 | 5 | 1 | Jeremiah 7:23 | Inside the 6:16–18 catena. Not 2 Samuel 7:14, which measures three. |
| 1:9 | 4 | 2 | Habakkuk 3:18 · Micah 7:7 | ἐπὶ τῷ θεῷ τῷ — a formula of trust. |
| 3:7 | 4 | 3 | Deuteronomy 31:23 and two others | τοὺς υἱοὺς Ἰσραὴλ εἰς — ordinary words. |
| 3:13 | 4 | 7 | 4 Kingdoms 8:15 · Isaiah 38:2 · Deuteronomy 31:23 and four others | ⚠️ This row’s footnote has collapsed into the measurement. It used to read: in the standing corpus the four is an accident — ἐπὶ τὸ πρόσωπον αὐτοῦ and τοὺς υἱοὺς Ἰσραὴλ εἰς, seven ties — but against the separately fetched Greek Exodus the same row reaches four with a band of two, Exodus 34:35 and 34:33, and that is the real contact. Greek Exodus joined the standing corpus on 30 August 2026. The band is now nine and κάλυμμα ἐπὶ τὸ πρόσωπον at Exodus 34:35 is inside it — the real contact and the accidents now sit in one screen, and no separate fetch is needed to see it. The phrase κάλυμμα ἐπὶ τὸ πρόσωπον stands in exactly one verse of all 30,637: Exodus 34:35. |
| 4:3 | 4 | 1 | Job 6:6 | εἰ δὲ καὶ ἔστιν — a coincidence of function words. |
| 5:4 | 4 | 1 | Genesis 40:5 | οἱ ὄντες ἐν τῷ — a coincidence. |
| 6:17 | 4 | 3 | Isaiah 52:11 · Judges 10:16 (A and B) | The catena again. Two of the three ties are the A and B recensions of one verse, so the real band is two: Isaiah 52:11 (καὶ ἀκαθάρτου μὴ ἅπτεσθε) against Judges 10:16 (ἐκ μέσου αὐτῶν καί). |
| 7:6 | 4 | 4 | Genesis 2:2 and three others | ὁ θεὸς ἐν τῇ — a formula. |
Eight of the nine deepest rows are four or five. Six of those eight are coincidences of very ordinary words, which is exactly what a wide tie band is telling you. Print the band or do not print the run.
★ The finding: 6:2 and Isaiah 49:8, ten words, tie band one
“For he says, ‘In a favorable time I listened to you, and in a day of salvation I have helped you.’”2 Corinthians 6:2a · ten consecutive Greek words shared with Isaiah 49:8, tie band 1
Greek Isaiah 49:8: οὕτως λέγει κύριος· καιρῷ δεκτῷ ἐπήκουσά σου καὶ ἐν ἡμέρᾳ σωτηρίας ἐβοήθησά σοι…
2 Corinthians 6:2: λέγει γάρ· Καιρῷ δεκτῷ ἐπήκουσά σου καὶ ἐν ἡμέρᾳ σωτηρίας ἐβοήθησά σοι·
The run begins at καιρῷ and ends at σοι, and it ends there because that is where Paul stops. The tie band is one: no other verse in the 30,637 verse units held here reaches that depth against this row, so this is not a formula the corpus repeats. The Hebrew of Isaiah 49:8 supports the Greek here — בְּעֵת רָצוֹן עֲנִיתִיךָ וּבְיוֹם יְשׁוּעָה עֲזַרְתִּיךָ, in a time of favour I answered you, and in a day of salvation I helped you — so nothing in this row turns on a divergence between the Hebrew and the Greek. Isaiah has no chapter offset: Isaiah 49 is Isaiah 49 in the Masoretic text, in CATSS and in English, and both run 26 verses.
And then Paul does something the screen cannot measure but any reader can see. Having quoted the promise, he re-says it in his own words with the tense moved: ἰδοὺ νῦν καιρὸς εὐπρόσδεκτος, ἰδοὺ νῦν ἡμέρα σωτηρίας — behold, NOW is the favourable time; behold, NOW is the day of salvation. He upgrades Isaiah’s δεκτῷ to εὐπρόσδεκτος as he goes. 2 Corinthians 6:2 is the only verse in the Greek New Testament containing ἡμέρᾳ σωτηρίας — and, once accents are dropped, it contains it twice, the second time in the nominative ἡμέρα.
⚠️ The counter-examples this page prints against itself
1. The chapter that expounds Exodus 34 never reaches five against Exodus. 2 Corinthians 3:7–18 is the New Testament’s longest treatment of a single Pentateuch scene. Greek Exodus and Greek Leviticus were fetched from CATSS and screened for this page — 2,024 verse rows — and across all 132 rows of 2 Corinthians 1–7 118 reach two, 31 reach three, 2 reach four, and nothing reaches five. The two fours are 3:13 (Exodus 34:35 and 34:33, band 2) and 6:16 (Exodus 29:45, band 1). Verse by verse inside Exodus 34, the best 2 Corinthians 3 can do is: 3:13 → 4, 3:7 → 3, 3:15 → 3, everything else two or less. The connection is beyond dispute and the screen is nearly blind to it.
2. An explicit ‘God, who said’ over a sentence the corpus does not have. 2 Corinthians 4:6 attributes a sentence to God: Let light shine out of darkness. The word-pair ἐκ σκότους φῶς occurs zero times in all 64 CATSS files and 30,637 verse units, Exodus and Leviticus now included in that total rather than searched alongside it. Genesis 1:3 measures two against this row, and the two words are ὁ θεός. ⚠️ One count here was wrong and is corrected. This paragraph said the single Greek Old Testament verse holding the form λάμψει is Isaiah 9:1. On 64 files there are two: Isaiah 9:1 (CATSS and Hebrew numbering; the English editions print it as 9:2) and Tobit 13:13 in the Sinaiticus text — a witness, not Scripture. Isaiah 9:1 is still the only verse where φῶς λάμψει stands as a pair, so the argument holds and only the count was overstated. Paul is summarising, not quoting, and no amount of measurement will turn the summary into a citation.
3. A formula-marked quotation that measures three. 2 Corinthians 4:13 says κατὰ τὸ γεγραμμένον, as it is written, and quotes Ἐπίστευσα, διὸ ἐλάλησα. The row’s maximum against the whole Greek Old Testament is three, with a tie band of three — and two of the three ties are 2 Esdras rows that merely carry the formula κατὰ τὸ γεγραμμένον itself. The actual quotation and a piece of temple bookkeeping score the same. And the verse quoted carries both a numbering offset and a difference of sense: it is Psalm 115:1 in the Greek numbering and Psalm 116:10 in the Hebrew and English, and where the Masoretic text has כִּי — for, or when — the Greek has διό, therefore. Paul’s sentence is built on the Greek’s therefore: we also believe, and so we also speak. The page prints the divergence rather than arguing from one text while quoting the other.
4. The catena’s deepest run is on a verse nobody lists. 6:16–18 strings promises together. Its deepest row, 6:18 at five, matches Jeremiah 7:23, tie band one. 2 Samuel 7:14 — the verse every commentary names — measures three, and Ezekiel 37:27, named behind 6:16, measures three as well. The pronouns are what decide it: Greek 2 Samuel is singular and third-person where Paul is plural and second-person. And εἰς υἱοὺς καὶ θυγατέρας occurs in none of them — zero occurrences in 30,637 verse units.
Against the rest of the Greek New Testament
Across the 132 rows against the 7,671 New Testament verses outside 2 Corinthians: 130 reach two, 91 reach three, 25 reach four, 10 reach five, 6 reach six, 5 reach seven, 3 reach eleven, 1 reaches twelve, and nothing reaches thirteen. There is a hole at eight, nine and ten — nothing lands there.
| row | run | tie band | matches | what it is |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1:2 | 12 | 5 | Romans 1:7 · 1 Corinthians 1:3 · Ephesians 1:2 · Philippians 1:2 · Philemon 3 | A formula. The wide band is the whole point: this is how Paul greets everyone. |
| 1:1 | 11 | 1 | Colossians 1:1 | Two letters, the same eleven-word opening, and nothing else near it. |
| 1:3 | 11 | 2 | Ephesians 1:3 · 1 Peter 1:3 | The blessing formula, in three letters by (at least) two writers. |
| 1:14 | 7 | 1 | 1 Corinthians 1:8 | ἐν τῇ ἡμέρᾳ τοῦ κυρίου ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ. |
| 1:17 | 7 | 1 | James 5:12 | τὸ Ναὶ ναὶ καὶ τὸ Οὒ οὔ — and the two letters use it for opposite purposes. |
| 5:18 | 6 | 1 | 1 Corinthians 11:12 | τὰ δὲ πάντα ἐκ τοῦ θεοῦ. |
| 4:4 | 5 | 1 | Colossians 1:15 | ὅς ἐστιν εἰκὼν τοῦ θεοῦ — see Colossians 1:15–20. |
Against 1 Corinthians alone (437 verses) the deepest row is again 1:2, at twelve with a band of one; strip the greeting and nothing between the two letters reaches eight. Against 2 Corinthians 8–13 — the second half of the same letter, 124 verses — nothing at all reaches seven, and the two sixes are 1:3 against 11:31 and 2:12 against 9:13. A letter does not repeat itself verbatim, and that is worth knowing before anyone reads a low number as a sign of different authorship.
Which cross-references matter?
- Isaiah 49:8 — the ten words of 6:2, tie band one: the only deep Old Testament contact in these seven chapters.
- Exodus 34:29–35 — the veil: expounded through eighteen verses of chapter 3 and measuring four at its deepest (see Exodus 33–34).
- Jeremiah 31:31–34; Ezekiel 36:26–27 — the covenant written on hearts and the heart of flesh: the promises behind 3:3–6 (see Jeremiah 31, Ezekiel 36).
- Romans 5:1–11 — reconciliation while enemies: the doctrine of 5:18–21 stated the other way round (see Romans 5).
- Isaiah 52:11; Jeremiah 7:23; 2 Samuel 7:14; Ezekiel 37:27 — the four sources usually listed behind the 6:16–18 catena, measuring 4, 5, 3 and 3 respectively.
It would be a poor study of these chapters that ended at a table of run lengths. Three sentences here are load-bearing for the whole Christian faith, and not one of them is a quotation. 'In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them' (5:19) — the initiative is entirely God's, the enmity is entirely ours, and the not-counting is the whole of forgiveness in three Greek words. 'For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God' (5:21) — a sentence with two occurrences of one word four words apart, and an exchange in the middle of it that the church has never stopped trying to state precisely. 'If anyone is in Christ — new creation' (5:17), where the Greek supplies no verb and no subject at all, so that the reader must decide whether the new thing is the person or the world, and the honest answer is that Paul does not say. Chapter 5 contains no rare vocabulary, no deep verbal run, and nothing a screen can flag. It is written in the plainest words in the letter. That is worth sitting with: the sentences the church has built on are not the ones that light up an instrument. The instrument finds where Paul reused someone else's words. It cannot find where he said something no one had said before.
The scholarship, and an honest account of what this page did not check.
The commentators on 2 Corinthians; the literature on the letter’s composition, on chapter 3 and Exodus 34, and on 6:14–7:1.
Commentaries & studies:
- Margaret E. Thrall, 2 Corinthians (ICC, 2 vols.); Murray J. Harris (NIGTC); Victor Paul Furnish (Anchor Yale); Ralph P. Martin (WBC); Paul Barnett (NICNT); George H. Guthrie (BECNT); Frank Matera (NTL).
- Scott J. Hafemann, Paul, Moses, and the History of Israel: The Letter/Spirit Contrast and the Argument from Scripture in 2 Corinthians 3; Carol Kern Stockhausen, Moses’ Veil and the Glory of the New Covenant; Linda Belleville, Reflections of Glory.
- G. K. Beale & D. A. Carson, eds., Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament — its 2 Corinthians chapter.
- On 6:14–7:1: Joseph Fitzmyer’s Qumran-parallels article; Hans Dieter Betz; and the replies of Murray Harris and William Webb — a debate that is more than two centuries old and is not settled.
⚠️ What this page did NOT check, and where it is weakest
- No manuscript apparatus was consulted. The Greek here is the SBL Greek New Testament as digitized by MorphGNT, and the SBLGNT’s apparatus sigla were stripped before measuring. Where the SBLGNT differs from NA28 or from the Byzantine text, this page is silent. It has not checked a single variant reading in 2 Corinthians.
- Greek Exodus and Leviticus ARE part of this shelf’s standing corpus, as of 30 August 2026. This limit used to read: the 44 CATSS files held here do not include them; for this page they were fetched from CATSS and screened separately — 1,165 Exodus rows and 859 Leviticus rows — and the 23,061-verse figures do not include them. A reader reproducing this page from the standing corpus alone will not get the Exodus numbers. Both books, with eighteen more CATSS files, joined the standing corpus on 30 August 2026: 64 files, 30,637 verse units. Every figure on this page has been re-run over all of them, and a reader reproducing it from the standing corpus now gets the Exodus numbers. The separate-screen caveat is retired; what replaced it is in stage 4, where the whole distribution is printed in both columns. Twenty of the sixty-four files are deuterocanonical — witnesses, not Scripture — and are labelled so wherever this page names one.
- The Septuagint held here is Rahlfs as digitized by CATSS, and it is a critical reconstruction. No Gottingen edition was consulted, and no attempt was made to ask which Greek text-form Paul actually had. The page says “the CATSS row reads…” and never says “the Septuagint says.”
- Direction of influence is never asserted, anywhere. Not for 6:2 and Isaiah 49:8, where a citation formula makes a quotation obvious; not for 1:1 and Colossians 1:1, where eleven words coincide; not for 1:17 and James 5:12. The page reports contact. It does not report who read whom.
- Nothing here bears on the composition of 2 Corinthians. The structure diagram records a seam at 2:13/7:5 that everyone sees, and the word counts record a hapax spike at 6:14–7:1. Neither is offered as evidence for a partition theory or against one. A contiguous-run screen and a lemma count are the wrong instruments for that question, and a page that used them for it would be overreaching.
- No Hebrew screen was run for this page. The Hebrew of Isaiah 49:8 is printed above and was read from the Masoretic corpus, but no systematic Hebrew measurement was made, because the source text of this study is Greek throughout.
- The acrostic and letter screens do not apply. They are Hebrew-alphabet instruments; there is nothing for them to do in a Greek epistle, and the page ran none.
- The English verse count was checked against a public-domain English text held on disk, not against a machine-readable ESV. No ESV data file for 2 Corinthians exists on this disk and no Crossway API key was available, so the chapter-13 divergence was verified against that public-domain file — which prints fourteen verses in chapter 13 against the SBLGNT’s thirteen — and the ESV is reported as agreeing with it there from the printed edition rather than from a file this page could screen. The ESV wording in the codex above was typed and proofread, not extracted.
- Only seventeen of the 132 verses are printed. A codex is a selection and this one is chosen to give every chapter a voice and to show the measurement’s best and worst cases side by side. Chapters 8–13 — the collection, the fool’s speech, the thorn — are outside this study entirely.
Interpretation notes worth keeping:
- Chapter 3 is not anti-Old-Testament. Paul calls the Sinai ministry glorious (3:7, 3:9, 3:11) and argues from the lesser glory to the greater. The letter kills (3:6) is a statement about what the law does to sinners, not a verdict on Scripture — the same Paul calls the commandment holy and just and good (Rom 7:12).
- ‘He made him to be sin’ (5:21) is not ‘he made him a sinner.’ The Greek says ἁμαρτίαν ἐποίησεν of the one μὴ γνόντα ἁμαρτίαν; the sinlessness is asserted in the same sentence. Read as substitution, with Isaiah 53 in the background — not as a change in Christ’s character.
- ‘Now is the day of salvation’ (6:2) is an appeal, not a deadline. Paul takes a promise made to the Servant and applies it to a church that already believes, urging them not to receive the grace of God in vain (6:1). It is a call to respond today, and this page does not turn it into a proof-text about the limits of God’s patience.
- The veil in 3:14–16 lies on the reader, not on the text. When one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed — the problem is located in hearts, and the remedy is a turning. The page does not read the passage as a statement about any people group’s permanent condition.
- 2 Corinthians 6:14 is about alliance, not isolation. ἑτεροζυγέω is a farming image — two unlike animals under one yoke — and Paul had already refused a total separation from unbelievers in 1 Corinthians 5:9–10. Read it as a warning against binding partnership, not as a rule against contact.
One verse on the far side of a cliff, and one chapter the instrument could not see.
What the measurement found, in one paragraph
Screened against 30,637 verse units of the Greek Old Testament, 132 verses of 2 Corinthians produced exactly one run past five. It is 6:2, ten consecutive words of Isaiah 49:8, tie band one — and it is the only verse in the seven chapters that says for he says. The next deepest is five. Nine rows reach four and most of those are accidents of ordinary words.
“For he says, ‘In a favorable time I listened to you, and in a day of salvation I have helped you.’ Behold, now is the favorable time; behold, now is the day of salvation.”2 Corinthians 6:2 · ten words of Isaiah 49:8, tie band 1 — the deepest Old Testament contact in 132 verses
And the same screen was nearly blind to chapter 3. The New Testament’s longest exposition of Exodus 34 — the shining face, the veil, the turning to the Lord — never reaches five consecutive shared words against the whole of Greek Exodus. Its best is four, at 3:13. Both facts are true at once, and a page that printed only the first would be lying by omission.
Three things a reader can check without any tools
1. Read 2:13, then jump to 7:5. The sentence runs straight on. Then go back and read what Paul put in the gap. Ask why a man in the middle of telling you about a journey stops for four and a half chapters to explain what his job is.
2. Count the comfort words in 1:3–7. There are ten in five verses, and English translations use several different words for them. Then notice that 1:4 says Paul comforts with the comfort he himself received — the supply chain is the point.
3. Read 5:17 in a translation that shows the missing words. The Greek is if anyone in Christ — new creation. No verb, no ‘he is.’ Ask what changes if the new creation is the world rather than the individual, and notice that Paul goes straight on to say God was reconciling the world.
Step in response: take 6:1–2 at its word. Do not receive the grace of God in vain. Whatever has been put off — a reconciliation, a confession, an obedience — the sentence Paul quoted from Isaiah and then said twice in his own voice is about today: behold, NOW is the day of salvation.
Whole-half-letter study, 132 verses in scope, all seven chapters represented in the codex above. Greek New Testament and ESV.
2 Corinthians 6:2 · to share
Greek New Testament + ESVEvery Deep Research page traces its passage across the whole sweep — the Old Testament, the Second-Temple world between the testaments (historical witnesses, not Scripture), and the New Testament. Follow the thread:
Pleasant Springs Church — Deep Research
Research method after Michael S. Heiser’s Bible Research Method (examine dictionaries → ancient literature → important words → textual connections → academic publications → share), with the Pleasant Springs “Author & Audience” foundation. Scripture set in the Hebrew, the Greek editions named on each page and the ESV (Old Testament), and the Greek New Testament and the ESV (New Testament), per the practice of Pleasant Springs Church. 2 Corinthians research grounded in Thrall (ICC), Harris (NIGTC), Furnish (Anchor Yale), Martin (WBC), Barnett (NICNT) and Guthrie (BECNT), with Hafemann, Stockhausen and Belleville on chapter 3 and Beale & Carson on the Old Testament use. Text: Greek New Testament from the SBL Greek New Testament as digitized by MorphGNT; Greek Old Testament from Rahlfs’ Septuaginta as digitized by CATSS; Hebrew from the Masoretic text as printed in Sefaria’s Miqra according to the Masorah; English from the ESV. ⚠️ VERSE NUMBERING — there is no offset in the seven chapters this page studies, and the page says so rather than leaving it unsaid. 2 Corinthians 1–7 runs 24 / 17 / 18 / 18 / 21 / 18 / 16 = 132 verses in the SBLGNT as digitized by MorphGNT and 132 in the English editions checked here, so every reference on this page means the same verse in both columns. The letter’s one divergence lies outside this scope: the SBLGNT prints chapter 13 as thirteen verses and the English as fourteen, English 13:12–13 standing as Greek 13:12; totals 256 against 257. Two of the verses quoted from carry offsets of their own. Psalm 115:1 in the Greek numbering is Psalm 116:10 in the Hebrew and English — the verse 2 Corinthians 4:13 quotes — and there the Hebrew and Greek also differ in sense: the Masoretic text has כִּי, for or when, where the Greek has διό, therefore, and Paul’s argument in 4:13 rests on the Greek’s διό. The page prints that rather than hiding it. Isaiah 49 is chapter 49 with 26 verses in the Masoretic text, in CATSS and in English alike. Greek Jeremiah 7 is not verse-for-verse with the Hebrew: CATSS prints 32 rows against the Hebrew’s 34, having no verse 1 and conflating 27 and 28 into one row — but verse 23, the one this page uses, is verse 23 in both. ⚠️ The measurement, in full. Greek against Greek. MorphGNT field 6, the normalised word — the column that already resolves elision and the movable nu — on both sides for New Testament comparisons; CATSS FORM column (cols 0–24), beta-code transliterated first, for the Greek Old Testament. Both sides lowercased, accents and breathings dropped, final sigma folded, then filtered to Greek letters — the same filter applied to every corpus. Word forms, never lemmas. The SBLGNT apparatus sigla were stripped from the printed Greek before measuring. Corpora: the 132 verses of 2 Corinthians 1–7 against 30,637 verse units across 64 CATSS files (23,061 across 44 until 30 August 2026; every figure was re-run on the larger corpus and the ones that moved are printed beside what they replaced), against the 7,671 New Testament verses outside 2 Corinthians, against the 437 verses of 1 Corinthians, and against the 124 verses of 2 Corinthians 8–13. Lemma counts were taken from the MorphGNT lemma column over all 137,554 word tokens of the Greek New Testament. Exhaustive and deterministic; nothing sampled, so no seed applies. ⚠️ Greek Exodus and Leviticus ARE in the standing corpus now. This note used to say they were not, that they had been fetched and screened separately for this page — 1,165 and 859 verse rows — and that the 23,061-verse totals excluded them. They were folded into the standing corpus on 30 August 2026, with Numbers, Joshua in both recensions and the deuterocanonical books: 64 files, 30,637 verse units. Every Exodus and Leviticus figure on this page is now a figure from the standing screen, and the totals include them. ⚠️ What a reported 1 or 2 means here. This page uses the shelf’s Greek-side convention, with unigram fallback ON: a row reported as 1 shares single words but no two consecutive words. It does not mean the row shares nothing. The Hebrew-side pages on this shelf use the opposite convention, where 0 carries that meaning, and the two must not be read across. ⚠️ Tie bands are printed beside every run, because a run without its band is misleading: 2 Corinthians 1:2 reaches twelve into five other letters at once, and that band of five is the whole reason the page calls it a formula rather than a finding. ⚠️ Direction of influence is never asserted. Nothing here says that 2 Corinthians 1:1 copies Colossians 1:1 or the reverse; nothing says 1:17 and James 5:12 are related; nothing settles the composition of this letter, and the hapax spike at 6:14–7:1 is reported as a count and explicitly not as evidence of a second hand. Typology is handled per the house position: what the text says, what the New Testament itself draws, and what we see from this side of the cross — with the seeing left to the reader.
Scripture quotations marked ESV are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. ESV Text Edition: 2016. Used by permission. All rights reserved. The ESV text may not be quoted in any publication made available to the public by a Creative Commons license, and the ESV may not be translated in whole or in part into any other language. www.esv.org
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