<p>5:16 <i>Therefore we, from this time forward, know no one after the flesh. Even though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now we know him so no more</i>- In the context, Paul has written of how baptism into Christ makes us totally identified with Him. His death and resurrection, and His ongoing life, are all to become ours. Paul is determined to perceive his fellow believers as in Christ; which would explain why he can criticize and perceive so clearly their serious failures, and yet write and feel so positively about them. He would not know them after the flesh, but by implication after the Spirit. And although Paul had met Christ in the flesh, perhaps during the Lord's ministry at which time Paul was living in Jerusalem or certainly on the Damascus road- that literal meeting with the Lord was now irrelevant to Paul. For knowing the Lord Jesus after the Spirit was and is the true way to achieve and perceive His presence near and real. The promised Comforter, the Holy Spirit, was to make the presence of the Lord Jesus as real as when He was literally on earth- and in a more profound and personal sense. Paul had previously gloried in his having physically met the Lord Jesus- but he says that now he knows Him like that no more. All is of the Spirit, and having the Lord's presence in the heart through the Comforter.</p>