2 Corinthians 12:2
“I know a man in Christ, fourteen years ago (whether in the body, I don’t know, or whether out of the body, I don’t know; God knows), such a one caught up into the third heaven.”
What does 2 Corinthians 12:2 mean?
Paul is describing an extraordinary spiritual experience from his past, when he was taken up into the deepest presence of God in a way that left him unsure whether it happened physically or spiritually. He's speaking about himself in the third person, which was a modest way of talking about something so profound and personal. The "third heaven" was how ancient Jewish people described the ultimate dwelling place of God, beyond the visible sky and the heavens above earth. What matters most here isn't the mechanics of how it happened, but that Paul encountered God's presence so intensely that the normal boundaries between body and spirit became unclear to him, and he's simply testifying to its reality.