(11) Such will we be also.--As a verb of some kind must be supplied, it would be better to give the present: Such are we. It is not so much a threat of what will happen in a particular instance as a statement of the general consistent character of his life.

Verse 11. - Such a one. A formula used to avoid mentioning a special name (see note on 2 Corinthians 2:7). Such will we be; rather, such are we. The verb is not expressed, but it would have been if the future tense had been intended. In this verse St. Paul is not saying what he would do hereafter, but is rebutting with calmness and dignity the false charge that he was in any way different when absent from what he was when present.

10:7-11 In outward appearance, Paul was mean and despised in the eyes of some, but this was a false rule to judge by. We must not think that none outward appearance, as if the want of such things proved a man not to be a real Christian, or an able, faithful minister of the lowly Saviour.Let such an one think this,.... The apostle seems to have in view some one particular person, though he does not choose to name him, who had more especially reproached him after this manner; and who was either one of the members of this church, or rather one of the false apostles: and so in the foregoing verse, instead of "say they", in which way both the Syriac and Vulgate Latin read, and is followed in our version, it is in the original text "says he", or "he says"; and so a certain particular person seems designed in 2 Corinthians 11:4 whom the apostle would have to know and conclude with himself, and of which he might fully assure himself, that such as we are in word by letters, when we are absent, such will be also in deed, when we are present: he threatens the calumniator, that he should find him, to his sorrow, the same man present as absent; that what he sent by letters, should be found to be fact, when he came again; whose coming would not be with all that tenderness and gentleness, as when he first preached the Gospel to them, for which there was then a reason; since he and others had swerved from the truths of the Gospel, and the right ways of God, which would require the severity he threatened them with, and the execution of which might be depended upon.