too far to suggest that it was these floggings which caused his near-death experience (though they could well have done so, or at least made him more susceptible to other forms of illness or maltreatment). But if they were in his mind when he used the word ‘penalized’ it would be less surprising that his thought should have moved on to ‘sharing Christ’s sufferings’. The important point to notice, at any rate, is that this sharing of Christ’s sufferings is part of what Paul explicitly calls his ‘gain’