ourselves what is the purpose of exegesis. Presumably it offers a commentary on the text which would explain it for readers who were not able to understand it; one can imagine that people in Corinth might well have asked the messenger who brought Paul’s letters to them, ‘What does Paul mean by this statement?’ What we would then get would be in effect a paraphrase of the text which would remove the obscurity. Indeed a commentary might be said to be a very expanded paraphrase of the text with an explanation