AUTHOR
AUTHOR
The letter claims to have been written by Paul, and no serious doubt is raised against this claim. The style is Pauline, and while it is difficult to assign the letter to a specific point in the life of Paul, the situation presupposed rings true. Paul was the kind of man who would have found himself in this situation and written such a letter.
One problem is the authorship of the hymn in Philippians 2:5-11. Some of the vocabulary is unusual—μορφη, (morphe, “form,”, G3671, vv. 6, 7), αρπαγμός (harpagmos, “something to be grasped,” NIV, G772, v. 6), ύπέρυψοώ (hyperypsoo, “to exalt [him] to the highest place,”, G5671, v. 9), and other words are not found elsewhere in Paul—and the rhythmic style is not common in Paul, though it is the kind of thing we find in religious Hebrew poetry. Both the language and the rhythm would perhaps fit if the passage was a Greek translation of a Hebrew or Aramaic composition. 1The passage speaks of Christ as "a servant” (v. 7), and Vincent Taylor sees this as "the strongest argument” that the passage is pre-Pauline. 2Both before and after the hymn Paul exhorts the Philippians to right conduct, and it is urged that the apostle would not stop in his exhortations to compose such an exquisite song and then go right back to them. Nor would he have omitted such characteristic themes as redemption through the cross, the resurrection, and the place of the church.
This kind of reasoning leads some scholars to the view that the hymn is a pre-Pauline composition, perhaps coming from the early Palestinian church. It is fairly countered that there are passages that are undoubtedly Pauline that have as many unusual words in a comparable space and that there are Pauline passages with a rhythmic style (e.g.,
1 Cor. 1:26-31; 2 Cor. 11:21-29). As for the early Palestinian flavor, Paul’s mother tongue was Aramaic (Acts 22:2; 2 Cor. 11:22), so this does not preclude his authorship. The contention that the passage uses a Servant theology whereas Paul does not is countered by the fact that the passage has a very Pauline reference to "death on a cross” (Phil. 2:8—this is a characteristic Pauline expression; indeed, those who deny Pauline authorship of the whole often see it as a Pauline insertion). It is not easy to take seriously the view that the interruption of the hortatory sequence rules out Paul as author. Paul’s letters sometimes take unexpected turns, and it is not legitimate to expect that a letter will always follow a given line without deviation. Moreover, this view does not reckon with the possibility that Paul had composed the hymn at an earlier time and simply inserted it at this point in the argument. The absence of characteristic Pauline themes is surely not very significant. There is no place where Paul mentions them all; his selection is always due to the needs of the moment, and perhaps at this point he chose not to use themes he found significant elsewhere.
The arguments are thus fairly evenly balanced. Although the passage is doubtless too short for us to be able to give a final proof or disproof of Pauline authorship, we should probably see it as coming from Paul, for (1) it is found in a writing undoubtedly penned by the apostle, and (2) there is no convincing reason for either rejecting Paul as the author or assigning the hymn to anyone else.