What is the third heaven Paul was caught up to?

What the text says

• Why he tells it at all 2 Corinthians 10-13 is the fool’s speech. Paul’s authority was under attack at Corinth by men who traded on credentials and spiritual experiences, so he boasts back — and strips the boast of everything that would make it one. No date, no description, no explanation, and the whole thing in the third person. Then he drops the subject and never returns to it.
• The man is Paul Verse 7 gives it away: the thorn was given to keep me from becoming conceited by the surpassing greatness of the revelations. The third person is embarrassment, not mystery.
• Fourteen years of silence 2 Corinthians was written around AD 55-56, which puts the vision near AD 41-42 — years after the Damascus road, during the quiet stretch in Syria and Cilicia (Galatians 1:21). Acts never mentions it. The greatest revelation given to any apostle went unreported for fourteen years and surfaced only under pressure.
• Three heavens, on the Bible’s own count Scripture speaks of the heaven where birds fly and clouds gather (Genesis 1:20; Jeremiah 4:25); the heavens where God set the sun, moon and stars (Genesis 1:14-17; Psalm 8:3); and God’s own dwelling, the heaven of heavens, which cannot contain Him (Deuteronomy 10:14; 1 Kings 8:27; Nehemiah 9:6). Count upward and the third is the presence of God. Nothing has to be borrowed from anywhere else to read it.
• Third heaven and paradise are the same place Verses 2 and 4 are one event told twice, not two stages of a climb — the same catching up, the same not-knowing, said again with a different name. Paradise appears three times in the New Testament: to the thief (Luke 23:43), here, and the tree of life in the paradise of God (Revelation 2:7). It is where Christ is, not a waiting room short of Him.
• The phrase occurs once in all of Scripture This verse is the only place the third heaven is used. A tiered geography of heaven cannot be built on one phrase, used once, by a man who says in the same breath that he does not know what happened to him.
• The first silence: he does not know how Whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows — and he says it twice. The apostle who could have settled the mechanics of the experience refuses to, and hands the question back to God.
• The second silence: he is not allowed to say He heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter. That is two claims at once — the words could not be put into speech, and it was not permitted to try. The content of the vision was never given for publication.
• What came next was a thorn Immediately, and by design: so to keep me from becoming conceited a thorn was given, and three prayers to be rid of it were refused (2 Corinthians 12:7-9). The vision is not the point of the passage. The thorn is.

How others have answered

Named only where the words were written about this passage. Quoted phrases are theirs; the summary around them is ours.

• John Calvin (Commentary on 2 Corinthians) Answers this question directly, and briefly: the number three is made use of by way of eminence, to denote what is highest and most complete — heaven here denotes the blessed and glorious kingdom of God, which is above all the spheres. To those who want the layout he gives no quarter: some enquire, also, as to the place, but it does not belong to us to satisfy their curiosity; we should seek the knowledge of those things only that are necessary to be known, and leave other things to God. On the not-knowing, he thinks it increases the wonder rather than weakening the account: God dealt with Paul in such a way, that he did not himself understand the manner of it.
• Albert Barnes (1798–1870) States the threefold usage plainly, and contrasts it with the speculation of the period: the Jews sometimes speak of seven heavens — but the Bible speaks of but three heavens, the aerial, the starry, and the region beyond the stars where God dwells.
• Matthew Henry (1662–1714) Leaves the mode open — whether heavenly things were brought down to Paul while his body was in a trance, or whether his soul was dislodged from the body for a time, and taken up into heaven, or whether he was taken up, body and soul together, he knew not. On the silence afterward Henry is exact, and it is the whole application in a sentence: he did not attempt to publish to the world what he had heard there, but he set forth the doctrine of Christ.
• The Pulpit Commentary Doubts that Paul is drawing on the Jewish traditions of seven heavens at all, judging that the expression is purely general — that is, the reading above, from the other direction.
• The Expositor’s Greek Testament Puts the case for the background: a plurality of heavens is recognised through the Old Testament, and the pseudepigraphical literature of the period develops a scheme of seven heavens which places paradise in the third. Worth knowing, and worth weighing — but it is extra-biblical, and this passage does not require it.
• D. A. Carson (From Triumphalism to Maturity) Expounds precisely these four chapters, and reads them as an attack on triumphalism in Christian leadership — the sin of boasting, the nature of maturity, and the responsibility churches bear for the leaders they admire. We cite the book for that frame rather than quoting it on this verse, not having the text in hand.

Where it lands

Notice what the man who actually saw it did with it. He waited fourteen years. He gave no description, no geography, no tour. He would not even say whether his body went. Matthew Henry’s summary is exact: he did not attempt to publish to the world what he had heard there, but he set forth the doctrine of Christ. A revelation that may not be repeated adds nothing to the Scriptures that may be — which is why the church has always been able to be sure of what it has, without knowing what Paul heard.

And look at the direction of travel, because it is the gospel in one line. Paul was caught up — passive, by grace, not knowing how, a visitor with no claim on the place. There is one of whom that could never be said: no one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man (John 3:13). Christ did not visit the third heaven. He came from it, and went home to it, by right.

So the apostle who had been to the highest heaven ends the story on his knees, told no three times, with a thorn he was not rid of — and calls that the better gift: my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9). If you want to know what a man who has seen heaven sounds like, that is it. Not a description of the place. A boast about weakness.