H. About the Coming of Apollos (16:12)
12Now about our brother Apollos: I strongly urged him to go to you with the brothers. He was quite unwilling to go now, but he will go when he has the opportunity.
Following these personal matters relating to his and Timothy’s travel plans, one might well expect Paul now to bring the letter to its conclusion, which in fact he will begin to do in what follows immediately. But before that, he needs to address one final item from their letter. Apparently they have requested him to ask Apollos to return and minister among them. The fact that he did so probably says as much about his self-understanding as an apostle as anything in this letter. Although it is a brief sentence, and is easily overlooked in light of some of the thundering moments in this Epistle, here indeed is a chunk of Paul’s life that puts a considerable number of things in this letter into their proper perspective.
12 The sixth and final “now about” with which this sentence begins implies that this passage is also in response to their letter. Its content further supports such a view. Given the nature of the problem addressed at the beginning of the letter (1:10–4:21), it is difficult to imagine any circumstances in which Paul himself would have initiated a request for Apollos to return to Corinth! What this means, therefore, is that in their letter to Paul the Corinthians have requested Apollos’s return. What is remarkable is that Paul acceded to it: “I strongly urged him to go to you with the brothers.” The “brothers” in this case are almost certainly the three mentioned a bit later (v. 17), who presumably brought the Corinthian letter to Paul and are now returning with his letter to them. Since they are going, and since Apollos is obviously well-loved by many in the congregation, Paul urges him to go along as well, perhaps as a display on his part of the complete harmony between the two of them.
But for the present Apollos resists the imploring, both of Paul and of the church. But what is not as clear as the NIV suggests is whose “will” is involved in this rejection, Apollos’s or God’s. The Greek sentence is quite ambiguous, reading literally, “And not at all was the will that now he come.” Although a good case can be made for this to refer to God’s will, the lack of qualifiers suggests that it should be understood within its immediate context. Since Apollos is the subject of the final clause, “when he has the opportunity,” one may rightly assume that he is the one who has also determined not to come now, which accounts for the choice of the NIV translators. If so, then this refusal probably says as much about Apollos’s own character as it does of Paul’s in asking him in the first place. Most likely he would have turned it down precisely because with Paul he resisted any implication that either of them was party to the internal strife being carried on in the church in their names.
Two things about this request are especially significant for this letter. First, this is sure evidence that Paul did not consider Apollos himself responsible for the trouble addressed at the beginning of the letter (chaps. 1–4). Furthermore, both the request itself and the designation “our brother” indicate that Paul’s view of their unity in ministry also expressed in that passage (3:5–9) paints the picture as Paul really sees it, not as he would say it in some idealistic fashion. They are co-workers in God’s service; from Paul’s point of view there is no rivalry between them.
Second, this is a particularly important text in our piecing together Paul’s view both of his own ministry and his true relationship to the church. There can be little question that for him several of the issues spoken to in this letter in various ways pose threats to his apostolic authority in this community. At times he takes up this challenge in such vigorous ways (e.g., 4:18–21; 9:1–27) that one could get the impression that Paul, as so often happens in the church, had so identified the gospel and the church with his own ministry that a threat to the one (his ministry) is a threat to the other (the gospel). At times this seems to be precisely what he says. But in two earlier passages (3:5–23; 4:1–13), he puts all of this into perspective. The gospel is God’s thing, and God’s alone, and so too, therefore, is the church. The church, Paul argues strenuously, belongs neither to himself, nor to Apollos, nor to them. The church belongs to God through Christ, and all of its ministers, including the founders(!), are merely servants. This final word about Apollos is living evidence that Paul is as good as his word. If the church in Corinth were Paul’s, the last person in the world he would want to return would be Apollos. Indeed, the real pressure would be to keep him away for some time while things cooled off. But not so Paul. Apollos watered what Paul had planted (3:6); and “all things are theirs” in Christ Jesus, including Apollos (3:21–22). So for the sake of the growth of the community he can urge Apollos to return, despite some of the inherent difficulties that would entail. Here is another piece of clear evidence, along with another, later moment (Phil. 1:12–18), of the incredible bigness of the apostle to the Gentiles—far greater than that of many of his later detractors, one is wont to add.