I THINK PHILIPPIANS was the first of the Prison Letters to be written (perhaps in 55?), and this is why. In the first chapter Paul is still quite uncertain how his trial is going to go. The Messiah is going to be honored one way or another, he says. He “is going to gain a great reputation through my body, whether in life or in death.”1 Paul has thus turned the tables on his accusers and judges. He declares that his imprisonment is itself serving the purposes of the gospel, since people are talking about him and his message. Even those who are trying to make extra trouble for him (who are they? It isn’t clear) are simply drawing attention to the message of the crucified and risen Lord Jesus. He writes as if it is now up to him to choose whether he will live or die, and he has learned how to face both options with equanimity—though he believes he will in fact be released, since there is still so much work for him to do, even though he “would really love to leave all this and be with the king, because that would be far better.”2
The occasion for the letter is that Paul wants to thank the church in Philippi for a gift of money. The distance from Philippi to Ephesus is about three hundred miles as the crow flies; Epaphroditus, the Philippian messenger who had brought it, would have come a somewhat longer distance, whether by sea or by land. But then there was a problem. Epaphroditus got sick, seriously ill. The Philippians must have wondered what had happened. When you entrust a significant sum of money to someone and the person never reappears, you start to ask questions. Paul is answering those implicit questions, and more. He explains that Epaphroditus, who is now going to take the return message back to Philippi, has been a faithful fellow worker who has risked his life in the royal service.3
But the heart of this short letter is Jesus himself. Paul urges the Philippians to let their public behavior match up to the gospel, which will mean sharing the Messiah’s suffering—as Paul himself has done and is doing. In particular, he urges them to cherish and guard their unity and their holiness. He knows only too well (if he had not already, the recent experience with Corinth would have taught him) that a community composed of people from very different social, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds will find all sorts of interesting reasons for divisions, perhaps over seemingly unrelated issues. Every such impulse must be resisted. And he knows too well, again with all too many Corinthian examples, that the behavior of Jesus’s followers can pick up inappropriate coloring from the pagan world around them. That too must be resisted.
But how? The central appeal of the first half of the letter explains. Unity and holiness will come, and will only come, as the mind of the community and of the individuals within it are transformed to reflect the mind of the Messiah himself.4
The “mind of the Messiah” is then the subject of one of the greatest Jesus-focused poems of all time. Echoing Genesis, the Psalms, and Isaiah in particular, it tells the story of Jesus going down to the lowest depths and then being exalted as Lord of the whole world. The poem works at several levels. It expresses many things Paul believed about Jesus himself—the truly human one, the ultimate Israelite, the Servant of the Lord, the embodiment of Israel’s God in person, the reality of which Caesar was a shallow parody:
Who, though in God’s form, did not
Regard his equality with God
As something he ought to exploit.
Instead, he emptied himself,
And received the form of a slave,
Being born in the likeness of humans.
And then, having human appearance,
He humbled himself, and became
Obedient even to death,
Yes, even the death of the cross.
And so God has greatly exalted him,
And to him in his favor has given
The name which is over all names:
That now at the name of Jesus
Every knee within heaven shall bow—
On earth, too, and under the earth;
And every tongue shall confess
That Jesus, Messiah, is Lord,
To the glory of God, the father.5
This is the story of Adam (everyone), of Israel, of the One God—all in the form of a perfectly balanced poem about Jesus. The poem is cast in the idiom of a Hellenistic paean of praise for a great man, but the content is of course deeply Jewish and scriptural. It is, in fact, a poem that sums up a great deal of what Paul believed: that Jesus is the messianic fulfillment of Israel’s story, the embodiment of Israel’s One God, and hence the appointed Lord of the whole world. Its careful structure, giving full weight to the cross in the very center, encapsulates exactly what Paul most deeply believed about the gospel. It is because of the cross—the defeat of the powers—that Jesus has been exalted as Lord and that every knee shall bow at his name.
This poem, I suggest, grows directly out of Paul’s much earlier belief (already in Galatians and presumably before that as well) about who Jesus was. But, shaped by his own sustained scriptural reflection and teaching, it now draws many different elements of that biblical material into a tight structure. By celebrating the ultimate victory and power of Jesus over all other powers in the universe, Paul has meditated deeply on the fact that even at his own lowest moment “the God who raises the dead” had come down to that same point. The poem may thus have functioned as one of the ladders out of Paul’s own pit of despair long before it then functioned as the model to teach the Philippians, and the church ever since, how to think.
The poem suggests, above all, a radical redefinition of power. This was the very theme that had concerned Paul so much in Ephesus and in his first letter to Corinth. It was the subject he found himself rethinking from the ground up as he discovered that the power of the gospel belonged utterly to God and not at all to himself. Learning how to think as the Messiah had thought, Paul insisted, was the only way to radical unity in the church, and it was also the secret of how to live as “pure and spotless children of God in the middle of a twisted and depraved generation.”6
Once again, Paul is using letters to teach his churches not just what to think, but how to think. He cannot tell them everything he would like to tell them. He would run out of papyrus scrolls long before he got to the end. But that wasn’t his job. His job was to inculcate in them the mind of the Messiah. If that happened, then it would show that he had not after all been wasting his time 7 (that old worry again; Paul never seems to have shaken it off). And Paul, I suggest, came to this extraordinary expression of the Messiah’s mind not least through the combination of his Jesus-focused scriptural meditation, on the one hand, and his own involuntary imitation of the Jesus pattern, on the other. He too had been humbled under the weight of suffering. He had pondered the fact that this was the means by which Jesus had attained his exaltation as Lord.
There is an awkward break at the end of the second chapter of Philippians. This is perhaps a sign that Paul, writing from prison, had intended to stop there, but that then, deciding to carry on after all, he had not had the opportunity to smooth out the transition.
The second half, though, is modeled closely on the first, particularly the poem in chapter 2. The exhortation reaches a climax at the end of chapter 3, where Paul declares that “the savior, the Lord, King Jesus” will come from heaven to transform our present body to be “like his glorious body,” since, as Psalm 8 declares, he has the power “to bring everything into line under his authority.”8 As in the similar passage in 1 Corinthians 15:20–28, this is part of Paul’s belief in Jesus as the truly human one. We who live on the other side of centuries of puzzlement about “humanity” and “divinity” may sometimes be startled at how easily someone like Paul, believing that humans were made to reflect the divine image, could see the true human as the one who shared the glory that the One God had said he would not share with another.9 For Paul, this was a truth he could explore from several different angles, as we see again in Colossians. And it was, of course, a truth not simply to be gazed at in wonder, but to be used as the motivating power for a different kind of life—a life the Jewish traditions had claimed to be able to produce, but for which they turned out to be ineffective.
That is the key to the sharp polemic at the start of chapter 3. Paul is anxious about the backlash against his message from people who shared the agenda of the “agitators” or “troublemakers” in Galatia. Such people have not yet, it seems, arrived in Philippi, but it may only be a matter of time. This is probably a sign that they are already at work in Ephesus; perhaps their opposition to his mission there had itself contributed to the crisis he had suffered. (That may be the meaning too of the curious passage in 1:15–18, about people who are announcing the messianic message with the sole object of making life harder for him in prison.)
All this might explain the tone of voice in his opening warning:
Watch out for the dogs! Watch out for the “bad works” people! Watch out for the “incision” party, that is, the mutilators! We are the “circumcision,” you see—we who worship God by the spirit, and boast in King Jesus, and refuse to trust in the flesh.10
The point is clear. “Dogs” was what Jews often called Gentiles. “Bad works” is a parody for the “good works” advocated by zealous Torah teachers. “The incision” or “the mutilation” is a translator’s attempt to bring out the force of Paul’s pun: instead of peritomē, “circumcision,” he writes katatomē, the act of making a cut in something, perhaps as a matter of pagan religious ritual. That is what it has come to, he says; people who go around insisting that converts should get circumcised are no better than pagan cult members who want to make knife marks in people’s flesh.
“We are the ‘circumcision’ ” is a breathtaking claim, but utterly consistent with Paul’s whole stance, ever since the road to Damascus. Once again, this is not about comparative religion. He is not saying, “We Jesus-followers have found a better sort of religion than the old Jewish one.” It is about messianic eschatology. This was the ultimate fulfillment of Israel’s hope: Messiah and resurrection! He is not saying, “I’ve decided to move from my old house to a nicer one down the road.” He is saying that his own home has been taken over by the architect who built it in the first place and that it is now being rebuilt around him. He intends to stay and see the business through. If others are saying they prefer the old house the way it was, they are missing the point: if Israel’s Messiah has come and has been raised from the dead, then those who follow him are the true people of God. This is blunt, but consistent. The followers of other first-century Jewish leaders would have said the same. This is not disloyalty to Israel’s God. It is the contested messianic loyalty that has characterized Paul throughout.
Paul was himself in an excellent position to push this point home. He knew the Jewish world from the inside. His credentials there were impeccable, up to and including the “zeal” because of which he persecuted the church. But this is where his meeting with the Messiah fulfilled everything, and thereby changed everything. If we want to know what drove Paul on and what the Damascus Road event had done to him, this is perhaps the clearest statement we have:
Whatever I had written in on the profit side, I calculated it instead as a loss—because of the Messiah. Yes, I know that’s weird, but there’s more: I calculate everything as a loss, because knowing King Jesus as my Lord is worth far more than everything else put together! In fact, because of the Messiah I’ve suffered the loss of everything, and I now calculate it as trash, so that my profit may be the Messiah, and that I may be discovered in him, not having my own covenant status defined by the Torah, but the status which comes through the Messiah’s faithfulness: the covenant status from God which is given to faith. This means knowing him, knowing the power of his resurrection, and knowing the partnership of his sufferings. It means sharing the form and pattern of his death, so that somehow I may arrive at the final resurrection from the dead.11
Out of the many things one could say about this passage, there are three important points for our present purposes. First, Paul is following the messianic pattern set out in the poem of 2:6–11. The Messiah regarded his status (“equality with God”) not as something to exploit, but as committing him instead to the life and the shameful death of the “slave.” That is why he is now exalted as Lord over all. Paul knows that he must therefore regard his own privileged status as a fully fledged member of God’s people as something he must not exploit. Instead, he will discover the true status of covenant membership and the resurrection hope that goes with it not through the Torah, but through the Messiah’s faithfulness.
Second, this passage is focused not just on a belief or theory about the Messiah, but on personal knowledge. He speaks of “knowing King Jesus as my Lord,” of “knowing him, knowing the power of his resurrection, and knowing the partnership of his sufferings.”12 Paul knows the theory through and through. He can expound it all day and, if need be, all night. But it means nothing without the awareness of the person and presence of Jesus himself.
Third, he has learned—perhaps he has learned this in new ways in the weeks and months before writing this letter—that this personal “knowledge” of the Messiah finds intimate expression in suffering. He speaks of this as a “partnership,” “the partnership of his sufferings.” The word is koinōnia, “fellowship” or “sharing.” But, as we saw, for Paul this expressed a mutual belonging for which modern English does not provide exact words. Perhaps this, seen in the light of Paul’s terrible experience, on the one hand, and, on the other, the poem of 2:6–11, gets us as close as we can come to the way in which he was now learning to “rely on the God who raises the dead.”13 Paul had come to the point where he was content to share the Messiah’s death in order that he might arrive with him at the ultimate hope of Israel, “the resurrection from the dead.” The ancient story of Israel had been fulfilled—in the Messiah. All Paul’s previous zeal for God and the Torah had had to be counted as “trash” by contrast. This is an expanded version of what he had said in Galatians 2:19–20:
Through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with the Messiah. I am, however, alive—but it isn’t me any longer; it’s the Messiah who lives in me.
That is why he now forgets his past and, like an athlete with his eye on the finishing line, aims “to strain every nerve to go after what’s ahead.”14
Then comes the point of all this: the Philippians must learn to imitate him, as he is imitating the Messiah.15 But how can they imitate him? They have not been zealous Jews, eager for the Torah. No, but they all have their own status, their own personal or civic pride. And even if they don’t have any (because they are poor, or slaves, or women—though some women, like Lydia, were independent and free), they all have the standing temptation to lapse back into pagan lifestyles. So whether they are Romans reverting to proud colonial ways or simply people who find themselves lured back into sensual indulgence,16 all must resist and find instead the way of holiness and unity that is shaped by the Messiah himself, by his choice of the way of the cross, by his status as the truly human one, the true embodiment of the One God.
Writing all this, celebrating the victory of the Messiah, Paul has arrived at a very different place from the one he describes in 2 Corinthians 1. In one of many allusions in this letter to the great philosophies of his time, Paul declares that being the Messiah’s man has produced the “contentment” for which both Stoics and Epicureans aim:
I’m not talking about lacking anything. I’ve learned to be content with what I have. I know how to do without, and I know how to cope with plenty. In every possible situation I’ve learned the hidden secret of being full and hungry, of having plenty and going without, and it’s this: I have strength for everything in the one who gives me power.17
There it is again: power. But “the extraordinary quality of the power belongs to God, not to us.”18 Paul has learned this now. His meditation on the victory of Jesus, growing out of the scripturally rooted prayers of many years, with those roots going down into the dark of suffering and despair, have brought him to a new place. All power is vested by God in Jesus. Any power Jesus’s followers may have comes only through his work. He thanks the Philippians once more for the gift. He sends Epaphroditus on his way.
* * *
As the weeks turned into months during the dark prison days sometime in 55 or early 56, some of Paul’s friends were able to come and help take care of him, and he had a visitor, a frightened young man named Onesimus. Onesimus was a slave. He belonged to Philemon, a wealthy householder in the small city of Colossae, some 150 miles inland from Ephesus. He had run away, as slaves sometimes did, probably grabbing some money as he went. He knew the risk he was taking. Runaways were regularly punished with death; crucifixion (“to discourage the others,” of course) was common in such cases. Harboring or helping a runaway was also a serious crime. But Onesimus had come to Paul. Paul, having himself recently faced despair and death and having seen Onesimus’s master Philemon come to faith on a visit to Ephesus, found himself in a complex little situation that would have made a fascinating seminar in moral philosophy, had not so much immediate danger been riding on it. What to do?
The first thing was to share the gospel with Onesimus. The frightened slave, hearing the news of one who died the slave’s death out of sheer love—the same love that had made the world—was captivated by it. No doubt some converts, then as now, professed a quick faith in the hope of a quick reward, but Paul could see that the young man’s heart had truly been changed. He became like a son to Paul, eager to learn, eager to help (his name meant “useful,” and he was keen to live up to it). But the situation couldn’t last forever.
Paul could simply have helped the young man move away from trouble. He could have instructed one of his friends to take him to Greece or even farther afield. But what would Paul then say to Philemon the next time they met? And how would it be if word got out that this subversive jailbird, in addition to his other notorious antisocial behavior, had taken to sheltering runaway slaves? Moreover, when Paul reflected on the vocation he had been given, one of the best descriptions he could find was the word “reconciliation,” katallagē. The gospel was about the One God reconciling the world to himself, and also—as he had written to the Galatians less than a decade earlier—about Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female coming to be “all one in the Messiah, Jesus.” If this was real—if it wasn’t just a grandiose idea in his head—it had to work on the ground. Real Jews, real Greeks. Real men and women. Real slaves, real masters.
Slavery is of course revolting. We know this. We know only too well the terrible ways in which slavery was developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, until brave campaigners abolished it, often in the teeth of principled opposition that claimed, among other things, to be grounded in the Bible. In particular, we associate slavery with racism. And we know that, despite abolition, the practice has made its way back into the modern world. We wish Paul had said, “Free them all! It’s a wicked practice!”
That would have been a futile gesture. Slavery in the ancient world did, more or less, everything that is done in our world by oil, gas, or electricity, everything that we accomplish through our technology. Denouncing slavery would have been like denouncing electricity and the internal combustion engine. What’s more, we must remind ourselves that slavery in Paul’s world had nothing to do with ethnic origin. All you had to do to become a slave was to be on the losing side in battle or even to fail in business. Slaves were, of course, often exploited, abused, treated like trash, but they could also become respected, cherished, and valued members of a family. Cicero’s slave Tiro was his right-hand man. He even invented shorthand. Slavery was complex but omnipresent.
Paul knew that the God of Israel had defined himself in action as the slave-freeing God. That is what the story of the Exodus was all about. Paul believed (and he believed that God believed) in ultimate freedom, a freedom of creation itself from the “slavery to decay,” a freedom that would mean resurrection life for all God’s children.19 As always, Paul’s challenge was to bring this cosmic vision into the real world of compromised and perplexed humans. And he hit upon a plan to make Philemon and Onesimus a small working model of what Messiah-based freedom might look like.
He couldn’t just write to Philemon and say, “By the way, Onesimus has come to me. Please give him his freedom and let him stay here.” That was, we may suppose, what he wanted, but it wouldn’t address the real issue. It would merely encourage other slaves to come and try the same thing. Nor could he say, as the Roman letter writer Pliny had said when writing to a friend in similar circumstances, “I’ve given him a good talking-to, and I want you to let him off this time.”20
Paul’s aim is higher and deeper. He has been meditating in prison, as he worked through the shock and horror of his own plight, on the way in which God himself was present in the Messiah, reconciling the world to himself. Now, perhaps, God would be present in him, Paul, reconciling these two dear people through a high-risk pastoral strategy. Onesimus will go back to Philemon (accompanied, so it seems from Col. 4:7–9, by Paul’s friend Tychicus) with a letter from Paul. It is asking a lot of them both. It is dangerous for Onesimus and extremely awkward for Philemon. But perhaps the letter will not only explain what ought to happen, but actually help to bring it about.
It is a small masterpiece. Paul explains to Philemon that he is praying that their koinōnia will have its full, powerful effect, bringing them all together “into the king,” into the Messiah. From Paul’s other uses of this idea we see what he means: “the Messiah” is not only Jesus, but all those who are “in the Messiah.” It is an incorporative term, as it was in Galatians (“You are all one in the Messiah, Jesus”) and 1 Corinthians (“as the body is one, and has many members, . . . so also is the Messiah”).21 “We must,” he says in Ephesians, “speak the truth in love, and so grow up in everything into him”—that is, into the Messiah.22 This rich unity is one of Paul’s constant imperatives; the other is holiness. But how is it to be achieved?
“God was reconciling the world to himself in the Messiah,” Paul wrote later, “not counting their transgressions against them, and entrusting us with the message of reconciliation.”23 The message of reconciliation is then, at that point, reembodying God’s action. Paul stands between Philemon and Onesimus, joining them together in his own person and appeal. “Here,” he says (stretching out one arm), “is Onesimus, my son, my own heart, who has been looking after me here in prison, on your behalf as it were!” And (stretching out the other arm) to Philemon, he says, “Your love gives me so much comfort. You are my partner in the gospel. You owe me, after all, your own very self. You have the chance now to refresh me, even here in prison.” Paul stands metaphorically between the two men, reaching out in the shape of the cross. “Oh, and by the way,” he says (“not counting their transgressions against them”), “if he’s wronged you, put it down on my account. I’ll make it good.” And then he adds, “One more thing. Get a guest room ready for me. Keep praying, and I will be out of here soon. Then I’ll be coming to visit.”
This would demand humility and trust on both sides. Onesimus was not going to set off to Colossae with a spring in his step, imagining everything was going to be easy. There had been reasons why he ran away, and those reasons, whatever they were, would have to be confronted. Philemon would be astonished and quite possibly angry to see him return; he would also realize the delicate balance both of what Paul had said and of what he was being asked to do. As a policy statement about slavery, the letter falls short of what we would want. As an experiment in a one-off, down-to-earth pastoral strategy, it is brilliant. And it seems to have worked. Fifty years later the bishop of Ephesus is a man called Onesimus. The young slave, now an elderly Christian leader? Or a name already respected within the early community?
* * *
If Paul is going to send Onesimus and Tychicus all the way to Colossae, there are other things he wants to say to the church there as a whole. In any case, he has had in mind the possibility of writing a circular, a letter to all the churches in the area. He has it mapped out already in his head, and he will write the two, as it were, side by side, the general letter to all the churches and the particular one to Colossae. Both of them, probably written therefore in 55 or early 56, explain, in slightly different but convergent ways, why he is in prison and why the churches, hearing about this, ought not to worry as though it might mean that the gospel itself were at risk. Both of them address this by embodying his deep meditation on the power of Jesus over all the powers of the world, the theme that (I am suggesting) has helped Paul back into a position of trust after despair. Both of them, true to his whole worldview, are rooted in the world of ancient Jewish and biblical thought refashioned around Jesus and addressing the world of pagan power with the new and subversive message of the gospel.
Before we plunge into these two letters, Colossians and Ephesians, we need to say a word about Paul’s authorship. The present book is not the place to go into technical arguments, but a short explanation may be in order.
Most modern Western critics still express doubts about Paul’s authorship of one or both of these letters. These doubts are based partly on style, though in fact most of Paul’s letters exhibit different styles, and I have already explained that perhaps the sharpest stylistic difference among the Pauline letters is that between the first and second Corinthian letters, both of which are normally accepted as authentic. The questions of style mostly concern Ephesians rather than Colossians, but I have been impressed by the proposals of some scholars that in these letters, written from and to the heart of the province of Asia, Paul may well have been deliberately adopting the “Asiatic” style of writing, with its wordplay, florid sentences, and rhythm. This was well known (though controversial) at the time, not least among Roman orators, some of whom were imitating “Asiatic” Greek models and others of whom regarded this as degenerate.
In any case, three things have to be said about Pauline style. First, those who have done computer analysis of these things have tended to say that most of the letters come from him. Second, Paul’s surviving letters are in fact so short, by comparison with most literary products from the ancient world, that it is hard to be sure we have enough to make a valid comparison. Third, it is easy for critics to be too wooden in their view of how this or that person ought to write. It is perfectly possible for the same person to write, in the same week, a learned article for a journal, a speech for a political meeting, a children’s talk, and perhaps some scraps of poetry. Small variations in style—and that is all that they are in the case of the Pauline letters—are to be expected when the same person faces different situations. And, in the case of Ephesians, Paul is writing a general letter without a specific situation or audience in mind.
The real problem, of course, is that from the nineteenth century onward the leading edge of Pauline scholarship was located within German liberal Protestantism. In that world, the remarkably “high” view of the church in these letters was thought to contrast with the more “protestant” view of Romans, Galatians, and the Corinthian letters. This is in fact a straightforward mistake. Paul’s view of the church, though variously expressed, is consistent across the whole corpus, and it is only by shrinking what Paul says in Romans and Galatians that one can imagine Ephesians and Colossians as radically different. There are other related points, for instance, about the view of Jesus. But these too are based on a shrunken view of what Paul was saying in Romans and the other obviously authentic letters.
In any case, though this is something that has only become clear with more recent work on the Jewish world of the day, Ephesians and Colossians are both deeply Jewish in their orientation—rethought around Jesus, of course, but making the sense they make within that worldview. Nineteenth-century Protestantism didn’t favor Jewish thought either, and it certainly didn’t want Paul to be too Jewish. Much more recently, some people have taken exception to the “household codes” in Ephesians and Colossians, supposing them to be anathema to the liberal agenda they find in Galatians and elsewhere. This too is a mistake. As historians, we must not set up the artificial standards of contemporary moralizing and then construct a “Paul” to fit. Fashions come and go in the scholarly world. The fashion for rejecting Ephesians and Colossians—or perhaps we should say for helping the Protestant Paul to keep his distance from Judaism, on the one hand, and from Catholicism, on the other—has had a long run for its money. Because it appears “critical,” many are frightened to challenge it for fear of appearing “uncritical.” Once we place the letters in Ephesus, where I think they belong, these problems begin to look as though they are generated by ideology rather than historical study.
* * *
Colossians is written, it appears, to a young church. Paul has been informed of its existence by Epaphras, himself from Colossae, who seems to have been converted under Paul in Ephesus and to have returned home to spread the word. Paul is praying for the church to grow in faith, wisdom, and understanding and to be able—here is that theme again—to draw on the “power” of Jesus in living and working to his glory.24 In particular, Paul longs that they would develop and enrich the practice of giving thanks. To that end he supplies them with a poem that, like the poem in Philippians 2, celebrates the universal lordship of Jesus over all the powers of the world.
This, as I have suggested, was part of the tonic Paul himself had needed as he battled with the powers. Indeed, part of the meaning of this poem is precisely that it is written by someone in prison. It is, in other words, inviting those who read it or pray it to imagine a different world from the one they see all around them—a world with a different Lord, a world in which the One God rules and rescues, a world in which a new sort of wisdom has been unveiled, a world in which there is a different way to be human.
“Wisdom” is in fact the subtext of much of Colossians. As always, Paul wants people to learn to think—not simply to imbibe rules and principles to learn by heart, but to be able to grow up as genuine humans, experiencing “all the wealth of definite understanding” and coming to “the knowledge of God’s mystery.”25 All this will happen as they realize that it is Jesus himself who reveals that “mystery.” The Messiah himself is “the place” where they are to find “all the hidden treasures of wisdom and knowledge.”26
Paul is here drawing deeply upon two important strands of Jewish thinking. On the one hand, as we have seen, he knows very well the traditions of prayerful meditation through which devout Jews hoped for a vision of the heavenly realm, and perhaps even of the One God himself. These traditions seem to have been developed at a time when, with pagans still ruling even after the Babylonian exile itself had ended, there was a sense that the greatest prophetic promises, particularly those concerning the visible and powerful return of Israel’s God to the Temple in Zion, had not been realized. Perhaps this was a time of testing and patience, in which some might glimpse, in advance as it were, the reality that would one day fill the Temple and flood the whole creation . . .
That whole creation, second, was made by the One God through his wisdom. That was what Proverbs 8 had said, starting a line of thought that would be developed by Jewish thinkers down to Paul’s own day. It began, to be sure, as a metaphor; to speak of “Lady Wisdom” as God’s handmaid in creation was a poetic way of saying that when God made the world, his work was neither random nor muddled, but wise—coherent and well ordered; it made sense. And, of course—this is the point of the book of Proverbs as a whole and the later literature that echoes and develops it—if you want to be a genuine human being, reflecting God’s image, then you need to be wise as well. You need to get to know Lady Wisdom.
The “mystery” tradition and the “wisdom” tradition were both focused by some writers in the period on the Temple. That was where the One God had promised to dwell. If there was to be a display of the ultimate mystery, you might expect either that it would be in the Temple or that it would be as if you were in the Temple. The book known as Ecclesiasticus, or the Wisdom of Jesus ben Sirach, written around 200 BC, imagines Lady Wisdom wanting to come and live among humans and wondering where to establish her dwelling. There is no contest: the Temple, of course, is the answer.27 All this gets bound together in yet another strand of Jewish thinking: David’s son Solomon, the ultimate “wise man” in the Bible, is also the king who builds the Temple. When Solomon consecrates the newly built shrine, the divine glory comes to fill the house in such blazing brilliance that the priests cannot stand there to do their work.28
For us, living in a different culture entirely, all this feels like an odd combination of disparate ideas. In Paul’s world, and especially for a well-educated Jew, all these apparently separate notions belonged together like a single well-oiled machine—or, perhaps better, like a single human being, in this case Jesus. What does it mean to say that he is the place where you’ll find all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge?
This is what it means, Paul declares, as he lays out another astonishing poem in which all that I have just said comes not only to expression, but to beautiful expression. Here is the secret of creation, of wisdom, of mystery, of the Temple. Here is how it fits together.
The book of Genesis begins with “In the beginning,” which in Hebrew is a single word, bereshith. The particle be can mean “in” or “through” or “for”; the noun reshith can mean “beginning,” “head,” “sum total,” or “first fruits.” Proverbs 8 had Lady Wisdom declare that God created her “as the beginning of his work,” bereshith darkō. And the account of creation in Genesis 1 reaches its climax with the creation of the humans in the image of God. Creation as a whole is a Temple, the heaven-and-earth reality in which God wants to dwell, and the mode of his presence in that Temple (as anyone in the ancient world would have known perfectly well) was the “image,” the cult object that would represent the creator to the world and that wider world before the creator. Complicated? Yes, but it only seems that way to us, because our culture has done its best to unlearn this kind of thought. Complex but coherent, a bit like creation itself, in fact, or indeed like a human being.
Now imagine all that complex but coherent Jewish thought pondered and prayed by Paul as he travels, as he works in his hot little shop, as he stays in a wayside inn, as he teaches young Timothy the vast world of scripture, which is his natural habitat. Imagine him praying all that in the Temple itself as he visits Jerusalem after watching the gospel at work in Turkey and Greece. Imagine, particularly, Paul finding here fresh insight into the way in which, as the focal point of creation, of wisdom and mystery, and of the deep meaning of humanness itself, Jesus is now enthroned as Lord over all possible powers. And now imagine Paul in his moment of crisis, of despair, feeling that the “powers” had overcome him after all, reaching down into the depths of this fathomless well of truth to find, in a fresh way, what it might mean to trust in the God who raises the dead. This is what he comes up with:
He is the image of God, the invisible one,
The firstborn of all creation.
For in him all things were created,
In the heavens and here on the earth.
Things we can see and things we cannot—
Thrones and lordships and rulers and powers—
All things were created both through him and for him.
And he is ahead, prior to all else
And in him all things hold together;
And he himself is supreme, the head
Over the body, the church.
He is the start of it all,
Firstborn from realms of the dead;
So in all things he might be the chief.
For in him all the Fullness was glad to dwell
And through him to reconcile all to himself,
Making peace through the blood of his cross,
Through him—yes, things on the earth,
And also the things in the heavens.29
If this poem were less elegant, one might say that Paul was shaking his fist at the powers, the powers on earth and the powers in the dark realms beyond the earth, the powers that had put him in prison and crushed his spirit to the breaking point. But he is not. The theological effect is the same; he is invoking and celebrating a world in which Jesus, the one through whom all things were made, is now the one through whom, by means of his crucifixion, all things are reconciled. This is not, of course, the world that he and his friends can see with the naked eye. They see local officials giving allegiance to Caesar. They see bullying magistrates, threatening officers. They see prisons and torture. But they are now invited to see the world with the eye of faith, the eye that has learned to look through the lens of scripture and see Jesus.
Like an apocalyptic vision, this mystery-revealing poem offers a glimpse of another world, a truer world than the violent and brutish world of paganism then and now. It was a Jewish world, but with a difference—a Jewish world made sense of at last by the coming of the Messiah, the true son of David, the truly human one (the “image”), for whose reality and meaning even the Jerusalem Temple was the advance signpost. “All the Fullness”—the full divinity of the One God—“was glad to dwell” in him. This is Temple language. It offers the highest view of Jesus one could have, up there along with John’s simple but profound statement: “The Word became flesh, and lived among us.”30 And Jesus is the Image, the truly human one at the heart of the world temple, the one who straddles heaven and earth, holding them together at last, the one whose shameful death has reconciled all things to the Creator.
With this brief but breathtaking vision of Jesus, Paul puts the Colossians and himself into the picture. They have come to be part of it all, and Paul’s own sufferings too are part of the way in which Jesus’s lordship is implemented in the world. The Messiah, indeed, is living within them, just as Paul had said to the Galatians. The ancient Jewish hope that the glory of the One God would return and fill the world is thus starting to come true. It may not look like it in Colossae, as ten or twenty oddly assorted people crowd into Philemon’s house to pray, to invoke Jesus as they worship the One God, to break bread together, and to intercede for one another and the world; but actually the Messiah, there in their midst, is “the hope of glory.”31 One day the whole creation will be flooded with his presence. Then they will look back and realize that they, like the Temple itself, had been a small working model, an advance blueprint, of that renewed creation.
This leads to a warning that functions rather as Philippians 3:2–11 had. It is not so clear in this passage that Paul is warning the Colossians against a repeat of what had happened in Galatia, but when we read the whole passage, we get the point. “You are already,” he says, “the true monotheists, focused on the true Temple.32 You have already been ‘circumcised,’ not in the ordinary physical way, but through dying and rising with the Messiah.33 And the Torah, which might have stood in your way, has been set aside.34 Therefore, recognize that you are under no obligation to obey regulations regarding diet, festivals or Sabbaths, no matter what visions and revelations people may claim as they instruct you.”35 What does all this add up to? Monotheism, Temple, circumcision, Torah, food laws, Sabbaths, visions, and revelations . . . this sounds exactly like the Jewish world that Paul knows so well. The warnings are indeed similar to those in Philippians 3. We do not need to imagine, as many have done, that a strange syncretistic “philosophy” had invaded Colossae. This is a coded warning against being lured into the Jewish fold.
Why, then, does he speak of “philosophy and hollow trickery” that people might use to “take them captive”?36 As in Galatians 4, he is clear that, when a synagogue community rejects the message about the crucified Messiah, what is left is simply one philosophy among many. “Philosophy” in Paul’s world was a way of life; some Jewish writers referred to their own worldview that way. The key word, though, is “take you captive,” a single and very rare Greek word: sylagōgōn. Change one letter—a single pen stroke in the Greek—and it would become sylagōgōn, “lead you into the synagogue.” We remember how, in Philippians 3, Paul warned against the katatomē, “mutilation,” as a contemptuous pun on peritomē, “circumcision.” In the same way, he is here sweeping aside any possibility that Jewish (or Jewish Christian) teachers might come and persuade the Colossian Jesus-followers to get circumcised. That’s already happened, he says. They have already died and been raised with the Messiah.
That then forms the framework for his brief instructions that run from the end of chapter 2 to near the end of the letter. This is a longer application of Galatians 2:19–20: “Through the law I died to the law . . . I am, however, alive.” “Realize,” he says, “who you really are. The Messiah died and was raised; you are in him; therefore, you have died and been raised—and you must learn to live accordingly. The day is coming when the new creation, at present hidden, will be unveiled, and the king, the Messiah, will be revealed in glory. When that happens, the person you already are in him will be revealed as well. Believe it, and live accordingly.”37 The instructions that follow—emphasizing sexual purity; wise, kind, and truthful speech; and unity across traditional boundaries—are crisp and basic. All comes back to thanksgiving.38 That is the context for the brief “household code” of instructions for wives, husbands, and—strikingly—children and slaves, who are treated as real human beings with responsibilities.
Prayers and greetings conclude matters. As with Romans (the only other letter written to a church Paul hadn’t visited himself), these greetings are fuller than usual. The list of Paul’s companions corresponds closely to the list at the end of the letter to Philemon, but with more description: Aristarchus appears to be imprisoned alongside Paul; Mark (Barnabas’s nephew) is assisting Paul as well, having apparently gotten over whatever problems he had had seven or eight years earlier. In addition to the rise in Paul’s spirits, caused (I have suggested) by his prolonged meditation on the sovereignty of Jesus over all powers of whatever sort, these companions have clearly been a great encouragement to him, not least the three who are themselves Jewish (Aristarchus, Mark, and Jesus Justus, the only one not mentioned in Philemon). This is significant for a number of reasons. Paul was constantly aware of the danger that, well known as he was for insisting that the Gentiles should be full members of the church without circumcision, Jews, including Jewish Jesus-followers, would shun him. The fact that Mark in particular is working with him may well indicate that any rift between Paul and the family that included Peter as well as Barnabas has been properly patched up.
Paul tells the Colossians, intriguingly, that when they have had the letter read to them, they should pass it on to the church in Laodicea, and also that they should be sure to read the letter that will come on to them from Laodicea. There is clearly a circular coming around. Tychicus and Onesimus, it seems, will bring them both. It will, however, be an interesting and challenging trip for the two messengers. Tychicus will have his work cut out to keep Onesimus cheerful during the week that it will take them to walk to Colossae.
* * *
From where I sit I can see dozens of photographs, mixed in between piles of books and papers, coffee cups and candlesticks. Most of them are small, particular shots: family members, holiday scenery, a white pony by the seashore, a distant cityscape. There is even a picture of my wife taking a picture of the pope (don’t ask). But in the next room, just out of sight but clear in memory, there is a frame that contains fourteen photographs, cut and joined to make a complete panorama. It was taken on vacation in Switzerland, on the mountain ridge called Schynige Platte in the Bernese Oberland. The camera has swung through a full circle, so that the left end of the panorama actually joins up with the right end. In the center are the great peaks: the Eiger, the Mönch, and the glorious Jungfrau. All around are lesser but still dramatic mountains, snowy and tremendous, bathed in summer sunlight. It is a different kind of picture altogether from the ones in front of me, though it includes elements familiar from the smaller photos: a family member, holiday scenery, grazing animals (in this case cows), and even, in the far distance, a small town. They are all now in the one frame, and they mean all the more as a result. In a single glance, you can take in an entire world.
Ephesians is like that. It seems to be a circular; there are no personal greetings or mention of a specific church. The words “in Ephesus” in the first verse (“to the holy ones in Ephesus who are also loyal believers in King Jesus”) are not found in the earliest and best manuscripts, and it looks as though a scribe, perhaps sometime in the fourth or fifth century, puzzled by the absence of an address, added one. There might be a good reason for this. If the letter was indeed a circular, but if it was written from prison in Ephesus, it is very likely that a copy would have been kept by the church in Ephesus itself, or even that someone from Laodicea or Colossae made a copy that found its way back to where it started. So the scribe, finding no address but knowing that the letter was located in Ephesus itself, would seem to be doing the sensible thing by adding the words.
It isn’t only the absence of an address and greeting that make many people think the letter was a circular. Like the panoramic photograph, it covers a huge sweep of territory, with many different elements held together in a single view. There are stunning peaks and distant glimpses, but the point is that its author has stood back and tried to express it all at once. That is why some, even among those who are unsure whether Paul wrote it, have referred to it as “the crown of Paulinism,” the place where Paul’s ideas are put together in a single frame. A different kind of picture, indeed, but recognizable, I believe, as the work of the same man.
Ephesians has much in common with Colossians, so much so that some have thought that one letter was the model for the other. Equally likely in my view is that they were both composed at much the same time to serve slightly different purposes; Colossians has a specific focus for that particular community while Ephesians stands a bit farther back and lets the view speak for itself. Ephesians is where we can, I think, see Paul’s own situation and understand why this was what he wanted to say from his prison cell to the churches in the province of Asia. The letter combines two apparently quite different things, but when we think of Paul and his Ephesian crisis it makes sense.
First, there is the cosmic and global vision of the divine purpose and of the church as the agent and representative of that plan. This occupies the first three chapters, and they make a continuous flow of exalted prose (perhaps, indeed, “Asiatic” in their long sentences and florid expressions), a single stream of praise, worship, and prayer. It is all very Jewish. It offers a vision of Creator and cosmos, of heaven and earth joined together, of the powers of the world as subject to the creator God and to his exalted Messiah, the truly human being under whose feet the Creator has placed “all things.”39 As a result of his death and resurrection the new Exodus has occurred, the “inheritance” is assured by the down payment of the spirit, and “all rule and authority and power and lordship” is now subject to him, including—and everyone in Asia would know who was being referred to—“every name that is invoked, both in the present age and also in the age to come.”40
The second chapter speaks of the act of grace and rich mercy whereby God has rescued Jew and Gentile alike from sin and from the “powers” that feed off human idolatry. It speaks of the Messiah’s people as a new creation, God’s poiēma, the word from which we get “poem,” rescued in order to model and take forward God’s good purposes in the world. It speaks of the new Temple, long awaited by Jews of Paul’s day (especially those who knew perfectly well that Herod’s reconstruction of the Jerusalem Temple was an expensive sham); only now the Temple consists of the community of Jesus-followers, the place where the living God dwells by his spirit. Paul then explains in the third chapter where his own work and his present suffering belong on the map of God’s age-old purposes. The powers of the world are now, as always intended, being confronted by the power of God. On that basis, Paul prays that all those to whom he is writing would come to grasp “the breadth and length and height and depth”—this really is a panorama he is spreading out—and to know, in particular, the love of the Messiah himself, so that they may be filled with all the divine fullness.41
The first half of the letter is therefore all about power and unity—the power of God in the gospel and the unity of heaven and earth, of Jew and Gentile in the church.42 This will then give rise to the remarkable exhortations about the unity of the church through its many different gifts and not least the unity of man and woman in marriage.43 There are mysteries here, as Paul readily acknowledges. But the sense of the Creator’s plan for the whole creation coming to fruition and of the advance signs of that in Jew and Gentile and male and female is so clear—and for that matter so obviously Pauline, resonating with Galatians in particular—that the big picture, the panorama, ought not to be in doubt.
The second half of the letter is strongly and explicitly practical. The different gifts that God gives to the church are designed to bring it into a rich, variegated unity in which its members will be “growing up into the Messiah” as Paul had said to Philemon. And this gives rise to a sustained exhortation to live by the moral standards that diaspora Jews would recognize, particularly in matters of sexual ethics. That naturally leads to the delicate balance of relationship within marriage itself and so to another version of the “household codes.” But then there comes the surprise—though, in retrospect, we ought not to be so surprised.
One might have thought, reading the first three chapters of the letter, that everything in the garden was, if not already lovely, then heading that way. The grand vision of God’s redeeming purposes already accomplished in the Messiah; the church as the community that will now, by its life and unity, declare to the world that the One God is God, that Jesus is Lord, and that all other powers are in subjection to him—this might seem, and indeed has seemed to many in our own day, an impossibly grandiose, naive fantasy. But with the end of chapter 6 comes the reminder of the continuing reality. Believers are locked in a power struggle, and it is dangerous and unpleasant, calling for vigilance and for all the defensive equipment the gospel can provide.
This is exactly, we may suppose, the place Paul has come to after the terrible experience to which he refers in 2 Corinthians 1. His sustained meditation on the sovereignty of Jesus, rooted in his earlier prayer life, which, growing out of its deep Jewish roots, celebrated Jesus as the humble Servant, as the truly human Image, as the exalted Lord, as the place where “the full measure of divinity has taken up bodily residence”44—all this has helped him finally to climb out of the dark interior prison before he is released from the exterior one. But he has not forgotten the way in which the principalities and powers, so openly challenged in the early days of his work in Ephesus, were able to strike back. He sensed it, he smelled it, the whiff of sulfur surrounding the hard faces of the magistrates, the diabolical glee of the guards entrusted with whipping or beating their new prisoner, perhaps even the smug faces of people he had thought might be friends but turned out to be enemies. He knows, he has learned, that when you celebrate all the truths that he rehearses in chapters 1–3, particularly the truth that “God’s wisdom, in all its rich variety, was to be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places—through the church!”45 then the rulers and authorities are unlikely to take this kindly. As he explains in that same passage, his own suffering itself is making the point. The victory that was won by the cross must be implemented through the cross.
I think, in fact, that Ephesians 6:10–20, the passage on spiritual warfare, functions in relation to the whole of the rest of the letter much like 1 Corinthians 15, the long argument about the resurrection of the body, functions in relation to the earlier material in that letter. You might not have seen it coming, but when you get there it turns out not to be an appendix on an unrelated topic, but rather the deeper reality that makes sense of all that has gone before. In particular, everything Paul says in chapters 4–6 constitutes a rolling back of the frontiers in the world’s moral power struggles. To make widely differing gifts work for unity, not division, as in chapter 4, is hard enough. To retrain the imagination and the natural impulses to resist the murky short-term delights of the pagan world is harder still. To make and sustain marriages of genuine mutual submission is perhaps hardest of all. Compromises and second-best solutions are easy. To go for the full version of discipleship is to sign on for spiritual warfare.
So too with the first half of the letter. Paul knew, much better than many modern theoreticians, that there is no incompatibility, but rather an inevitable link between, on the one hand, the celebration of the One God and his work of creation and new creation, Exodus and new Exodus, and, on the other, the challenge to the powers of the world. It will not do to accuse Ephesians 1–3 of having too much of the “now” and not enough of the “not yet.” The “not yet” is there in chapters 4 and 5, and particularly 6, and it is there for a very good reason. Paul had come to Ephesus and had lived and taught the powerful victory of God. He had then discovered, first in Corinth and then back in Ephesus again, that as with the gospel itself the divine power could only be made known through human weakness. And so he offers this realistic warning and urgent appeal to the churches of Asia, not least the little communities in the Lycus valley, not to detract from what he has said earlier in the letter, but to give it its necessarily humble frame:
Be strong in the Lord, and in the strength of his power. Put on God’s complete armor. Then you’ll be able to stand firm against the devil’s trickery. The warfare we’re engaged in, you see, isn’t against flesh and blood. It’s against the leaders, against the authorities, against the powers that rule the world in this dark age, against the wicked spiritual elements in the heavenly places.
For this reason, you must take up God’s complete armor. Then, when wickedness grabs its moment, you’ll be able to withstand, to do what needs to be done, and still to be on your feet when it’s all over. So stand firm! Put the belt of truth around your waist; put on justice as your breastplate; for shoes on your feet, ready for battle, take the good news of peace. With it all, take the shield of faith; if you’ve got that, you’ll be able to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the spirit, which is God’s word.
Pray on every occasion in the spirit, with every type of prayer and intercession. You’ll need to keep awake and alert for this, with all perseverance and intercession for all God’s holy ones—and also for me! Please pray that God will give me his words to speak when I open my mouth, so that I can make known, loud and clear, the secret truth of the gospel. That, after all, is why I’m a chained-up ambassador! Pray that I may announce it boldly; that’s what I’m duty-bound to do.46
Paul has learned the hard way that the powers will strike back. Every line of this warning says, “This is what I’ve had to do.” And, though he has now come, through sustained meditation on the sovereignty of Jesus, to a fresh sense of trust in “the God who raises the dead,” he knows very well that there are at least two major challenges still ahead. Ultimately, he wants to go to Rome. Later, he will even think of Rome itself as a stopover on the way to Spain. But the two challenges mean that he can hardly be planning those journeys just yet.
First, he has to go to Corinth, without any idea of what sort of a reception will await him there. (Titus has still not returned; surely, Paul thinks, that is a bad sign right there . . . ) Then he hopes and intends to go to Jerusalem, and though he will be taking with him the collection that, he hopes, the largely Gentile churches have raised, that may simply make matters worse. What will the Jewish traditionalists think of this battered wreck of an apostle, coming with his pagan friends and his tainted money to taunt the traditionalists in the Holy City?