2 Corinthians 12:2,3 - Joseph Benson’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

I knew a man in Christ That is, a Christian. He must undoubtedly have meant himself, or the whole article had been quite foreign to his purpose. Indeed, that he meant himself is plain from 2 Corinthians 12:6-7. Fourteen years ago So long, it seems, the apostle had concealed this extraordinary event; a circumstance which shows how little disposed he was to speak vauntingly of himself. Whether in the body And by the intervention of its senses; or out of the body And without any such intervention, the things which I saw and heard were communicated to me; I know not It is equally possible with God to present distant things to the imagination in the body, as if the soul were absent from it, and present with them, as seems to have been the case with Ezekiel in the visions mentioned Ezekiel 11:24, and Ezekiel 37:1; and with John in those recorded Revelation 17:3; Revelation 21:10; or, as the Spirit caught away Philip, (Acts 8:39,) to transport both soul and body for what time he pleases to heaven; or to transport the soul only thither for a season, and in the mean time to preserve the body fit for its re-entrance. But since the apostle himself did not know whether his soul was in his body when he had these visions, &c.; or whether one or both were actually in heaven; for us to inquire into that matter would be vain curiosity, and extreme folly. “It is of more importance to observe, that he supposed his spirit might be carried into the third heaven, and into paradise, without his body. For, from his making such a supposition, it is plain he believed his spirit could exist out of his body; and that, by the operation of God, it could be made to hear and see, without the intervention of his bodily organs.” Such a one caught up into the third heaven The habitation of the divine glory, far above the aerial and the starry heavens. For, “in the language of the Jews, the first heaven is the region of the air, where the birds fly, which therefore are called the fowls of heaven. The second heaven is that part of space in which the stars are. This was called, by the Jews, the heaven of heavens. See 1 Kings 8:27. The third heaven is the seat of God, and of the holy angels, into which Christ ascended after his resurrection, but which is not the object of men's senses, as the other heavens are.”