“Leads us triumphantly as captives... the fragrance of the knowledge of Him”
But thanks be to God, who always leads us triumphantly as captives in Christ and through us spreads everywhere the fragrance of the knowledge of Him… To the one, we are an odor of death and demise; to the other, a fragrance that brings life. (2 Corinthians 2:14–16 BSB)
What it sounds like today
A victory parade with perfume.
The cultural key
The picture is the Roman triumph: the empire's grandest spectacle, a victorious general parading through Rome with incense smoking along the route and captives marched in chains, the notable ones to execution at the parade's end. The verb (thriambeuo) most naturally means 'lead as a captive in one's triumph,' which makes Paul not the general but the prisoner in God's procession, a reading that fits the letter's whole argument about strength in weakness (some take it as 'lead in victory'; the captive sense has the stronger lexical case). The incense explains the double aroma: to the crowd it smelled like glory, to the condemned it smelled like the end of the route.
Recovered meaning
God parades his apostle as a willing captive, and the same fragrance of the gospel reads as life to some and death to others, exactly as triumph-incense did depending on where you stood in the parade. Paul turns the empire's proudest ritual into a portrait of being conquered by grace.