. . .Paul, as an active observer
of his contemporary context, presupposes Claudius’s triumphal procession in the
imagery of 2 Cor 2:14—even though this Roman dimension does not feature as
prominently in the secondary literature as it should, based on the evidence. .
. .Paul writes his letter in the autumn of 55 CE, approximately one year after
Emperor Claudius’s death on October 13, 54 CE—probably as the result of being
poisoned by his wife Agrippina, who thereby successfully installed Nero as the
new emperor. This change in Rome would also have affected Corinth, especially
if the establishment of the imperial cult of the Achaean League, stationed in
Corinth, falls into this exact period. As I will seek to demonstrate in what follows,
I think that Paul’s metaphor in 2 Cor 2:14 picks up elements of the variegated
discourses surrounding the triumph of Claudius, creating dissonances between
the picture pained b the apostle and the public transcript of the Claudian
reign. (Christoph Heilig, The Apostle and the Empire: Paul's Implicit and
Explicit Criticism of Rome [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2022], 71-72)
Years later, Paul spent just one
day on the island of Kos, according to Acts 21:1. If he had a chance to read
some of the inscriptions there, he might very well have encountered Claudius’s
triumph again. The Greek word θριαμβος does not occur in inscriptions very often. But there
is a notable cumulation on Kos, where it occurs in honorary inscriptions for
Gaius Stertinius Xenophon, who had served as the physician of the emperor Claudius
and who had received honors connected with Claudius’s triumph (IG XII
4.2.952 and 11.43; Iscr. di Cos EV 219; IRhodM 475; IKosPH
345). Ironically, tradition has it that before Xenophon returned to Kos as a
respected citizen under Nero, he was the one who actually carried out the
assassination of Claudius (Tacitus, Ann. 12.67). (71
n. 1)
Some scholars in the past have mistakenly
concluded that since the triumphal procession was a rather brief event, θριαμβευω must mean something else in 2 Cor
2:14, where the event in question seems to be portrayed specially as being permanent.
This correctly recognizes the tension created by Paul’s metaphor but draws the
wrong conclusion. Paul is very obviously playing with this temporal aspect. . .
. In the imperfective (grammatical) aspect—which is used by Paul in 2
Cor 2:14—such (lexically implied) endpoints are excluded. Accordingly, these
telic verbs usually receive a “liner” reinterpretation as activities, that is,
durative events with no inherent endpoints. This way an “unbounded” situation
emerges, as it is required by this aspect, which excludes endpoints from its
focus. Of the six times the transitive verb appears in the imperfective aspect
in the time frame that I have analyzed, three times such a liner
re-interpretation seems plausible (Plutarch, Cor. 35.6, Ant.
84.7, and Acts Paul 9.22). In these cases we seem to get an internal perspective
of the procession. (We can note in passing that now the crowd too is
conceptualized differently. In the perfective aspect, the end point is reached
when the whole crowd has witnessed the vent. In the imperfective aspect,
it is the sight by individuals that now constitutes the repeated event.)
(Ibid., 87, 88)