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§17 Warning Against “Workers of Iniquity” (Phil. 3:2–3)

After “Finally” in verse 1, it comes as a surprise to find this warning which, together with the later warning of verses 18 and 19, forms a substantial part of the letter in its present form. It is by way of contrast with those against whom the warnings are given that Paul sets forth his own procedure and purpose in life (vv. 7–14).

3:2 / Who now are those men who do evil, the dogs against whom Paul puts his readers on their guard? They are certainly identical with the mutilators of the flesh (all three expressions denote the same people), and these last words provide the surest clue to their identity. In the original they represent a single noun, devised by Paul as a derogatory wordplay on “circumcision” (Gk. peritomē) and rendered in older English versions as “concision” (Gk. katatomē). Paul sometimes uses the word “circumcision” as a collective noun, as when Peter is called an apostle “to the circumcision,” meaning, as NIV puts it, “to the Jews” (Gal. 2:7–9). Here the word “concision” is similarly used, of those mutilators of the flesh—“the mutilation party,” we might say.

For Paul, circumcision is a sacral term, applied not only in its literal sense but also to the purification and dedication of the heart. There is OT precedent for this in Deuteronomy 10:16 (“Circumcise your hearts”) and Jeremiah 4:4 (“circumcise your hearts”), where emphasis is laid on the circumcision of the heart as what God really desires. Paul’s older contemporary, Philo of Alexandria, agrees that circumcision signifies “the cutting away of pleasure and all passions and the destruction of impious glory,” but disagrees with those who maintain that the external rite may be discontinued if the spiritual lesson is practiced (Migration of Abraham. 92). Here, therefore, Paul applies to those who insist on the external rite a disparaging parody of the sacral word—a parody that links literal circumcision with those pagan cuttings of the body that were forbidden by the law of Israel (Lev. 19:28; 21:5; Deut. 14:1; cf. 1 Kings 18:28).

But it is not to Jews in general that he refers here so scathingly, nor yet to those Jewish Christians who may have continued to circumcise their sons in accordance with ancestral custom. The people against whom Gentile Christians needed to be put on their guard, and whom Paul elsewhere denounces in the same kind of unsparing terms as he uses here, are those who visited Gentile churches and insisted that circumcision was an indispensable condition of their being justified in God’s sight. This insistence was conceivably part of a campaign to bring Paul’s Gentile converts under the control of the mother church in Jerusalem. Paul was certainly at pains to emphasize his converts’ independence of Jerusalem; but his basic objection was that the insistence on circumcision undermined the gospel that proclaimed that God in his grace justified Jews and Gentiles alike on the ground of faith in Christ, quite apart from circumcision or any other legal requirement. The Judaizers, then, are the mutilators of the flesh—“the Snippers,” as H. W. Montefiore aptly translates the dismissive term.

In calling them those men who do evil, Paul may be echoing the phrase “workers of iniquity” (NIV: “all who do wrong,” “all you who do evil”) which some of the OT psalmists used to describe their enemies (cf. Pss. 5:5; 6:8; etc.); he refers to the same class of interlopers in 2 Corinthians 11:13 as “deceitful workmen.” To his mind, they were doing the devil’s work by subverting the faith of Gentile believers. In calling them dogs, he was perhaps throwing back at them a term of invective by which they described uncircumcised Gentiles; it was all the more apt if he pictured them as prowling round the Gentile churches trying to win members to their own outlook and way of life.

It is not implied that such people had already made their way into the fellowship of the Philippian Christians, but it was quite likely that they would attempt the same tactics in Philippi as they had used in Corinth (cf. 2 Cor. 11:4–6, 12–15, 20), and the Philippian Christians are forewarned against them.

3:3 / For it is we, says Paul, who are the circumcision: (another instance of “circumcision” as a collective noun). True circumcision, “the circumcision done by Christ” (Col. 2:11), is a matter of inward purification and consecration. Those who are the circumcision render to God true heart devotion: they worship him by the Spirit of God. This is the teaching conveyed by Jesus to the Samaritan woman: “God is Spirit, and his worshippers must worship in spirit and in truth” (John 4:24). Such people glory in Christ Jesus—more literally, they “boast in Christ Jesus”; he is the object of their exultation (there is no need to give the phrase “in Christ Jesus” its incorporative force here). More than once Paul quotes Jeremiah 9:24 in the form “Let him who boasts, boast in the Lord” (1 Cor. 1:31; 2 Cor. 10:17). He probably alludes to the same text here: for Paul, “the Lord” is Christ Jesus.

The flesh is henceforth irrelevant. Physical circumcision has been replaced by the circumcision of the heart which is “by the Spirit, not by the written code” (Rom. 2:29). The word rendered flesh (Gk. sarx) is used by Paul not only in its ordinary sense but also to denote unregenerate human nature and sometimes to include practically everything, apart from God, in which people mistakenly put their trust.