And I, brethren, when I came to you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of God.
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Ambrosiaster
AD 400
What Paul calls the testimony here is God the Word incarnate, hidden from all ages with God. Heretics played fast and loose with these things. They preached their wicked doctrine with great eloquence, following the wisdom of the world. They emptied Christ’s cross of its power. They were embarrassed to be ridiculed by the world. Commentary on Paul’s Epistles.
And I, brethren, when I came to you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom. The Apostle here descends from the general to the particular. In other words: I said in the preceding chapter that God in preaching the Gospel willed not to use the wisdom of the wise in this world, but rejected it and scorned it, but willed by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe; and therefore He chose not many noble or wise to spread the Gospel, but the low-born and untaught Apostles. From this I infer and say "And I" i.e, and so I as one of the number of the Apostles, who, according to the election and will of God, did not use eloquence and worldly Wisdom of Solomon , was unwilling to use those means, and I came to you not in excellency but in simplicity of speech and wisdom.
SYNOPSIS OF THE CHAPTER
He proceeds to exalt the spiritual wisdom of Christ above all natural and animal wisdom. Therefore he says:—
i. That he knew and preached nothing but Christ crucified; and that not with enticing words of man"s Wisdom of Solomon , but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power.
ii. Nevertheless in ver5 he says that he speaks wisdom among them that are perfect, wisdom hidden from the world, which eye hath not seen nor ear heard, but which the Spirit of God alone has revealed.
iii. He shows in ver14that the natural man does not perceive the things which are of God, but the spiritual man perceives and judges all things.
Nothing was ever more prepared for combat than the spirit of Paul; or rather, I should say, not his spirit, (for he was not himself the inventor of these things,) but, nothing was ever equal to the grace working within him, which overcomes all things. For sufficient indeed is what had been said before to cast down the pride of the boasters about wisdom; nay, even a part of it had been enough. But to enhance the splendor of the victory, he contends anew for the points which he had been affirming; trampling upon the prostrate foe. Look at it in this way. He had brought forward the prophecy which says, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise. He had shown the wisdom of God, in that by means of what seemed to be foolishness, He destroyed the philosophy of the Gentiles; he had shown that the foolishness of God is wiser than men; he had shown that not only did He teach by untaught persons, but also chose untaught persons to learn of Him. Now he shows that both the thing itself which was preach...
