Chapter XV
2 Ye are saved, if ye hold fast - Your salvation is begun, and
will be perfected, if ye continue in the faith. Unless ye have believed
in vain - Unless indeed your faith was only a delusion.
3 I received - From Christ himself. It was not a fiction of my
own. Isaiah 53:8,9.
4 According to the scriptures - He proves it first from scripture,
then from the testimony of a cloud of witnesses. Psalm 16:10.
5 By the twelve - This was their standing appellation; but their
full number was not then present.
6 Above five hundred - Probably in Galilee. A glorious and incontestable
proof! The greater part remain - Alive.
7 Then by all the apostles - The twelve were mentioned 1Cor 15:5.
This title here, therefore, seems to include the seventy; if not all those,
likewise, whom God afterwards sent to plant the gospel in heathen nations.
8 An untimely birth - It was impossible to abase himself more
than he does by this single appellation. As an abortion is not worthy the
name of a man, so he affirms himself to be not worthy the name of an apostle.
9 I persecuted the church - True believers are humbled all their
lives, even for the sins they committed before they believed.
10 I laboured more than they all - That is, more than any of them,
from a deep sense of the peculiar love God had shown me. Yet, to speak
more properly, it is not I, but the grace of God that is with me - This
it is which at first qualified me for the work, and still excites me to
zeal and diligence in it.
11 Whether I or they, so we preach - All of us speak the same
thing.
