If his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness. — The words seem to point to one of the special characteristics of the Apostle’s rivals. They represented themselves as the preachers of a righteousness which was, they asserted, neglected in St. Paul’s teaching. They claimed the authority of one who was known as James the Just, or Righteous, and who had insisted emphatically on the necessity of a righteousness showing itself in act. They presented themselves as a kind of revival of the Chasidim, or righteous ones. (See Note on Acts 9:13.) It may be noted that the latter developments of the same school, as seen in the Clementine Homilies and Recognitions, present, in the midst of much that is both false and malignant, an almost ostentatiously high standard of morality.
Whose end shall be according to their works. — What the works were is stated, or implied, in 2 Corinthians 11:20. Hero he is content to rest on the eternal law of God’s government, that what a man sows that shall he also reap. The abruptness with which the next verse opens indicates that here again there was a pause in the dictation of the letter. After an interval — during which, led by the last words he had spoken, his thoughts had travelled to the contrast between their works, of which they boasted so loudly, and his own — he begins again, half-indignant at the necessity for self-assertion which they have forced upon him, aware that all that had been said of his “insane” habit of “commending himself” was likely to be said again, and yet feeling that he must once for all remind the Corinthians of what he had done and suffered, and then leave them to judge between the rival claims.