Purpose
The city of Philippi bears the name of Philip II, king of Macedonia, who founded it in 356 B.C. There had previously been on the site a Thracian village known by its Greek name Krenides (“springs”). The place was taken over in 361 B.C. by settlers from the island of Thasos led by an Athenian exile named Callistratus. The main attractiveness of the place lay in its proximity to the gold mines of Mount Pangaeus, which Philip made sure of controlling by means of his new foundation. It was also strategically important because it commanded the land route to the Hellespont (Dardanelles) and Bosporus, and so across into Asia.
Luke describes it as “a city of the first district of Macedonia”[1]—that is, the first of four districts into which Macedonia was divided by the Romans in 167 B.C.—and adds that it was a Roman colony (Acts 16:12). It was first made a colony by the Roman leaders Antony and Octavian in 42 B.C. after their victory at Philippi over Brutus and Cassius, the assassins of Julius Caesar; the victors settled a number of their veteran soldiers there. Twelve years later Octavian, having in turn defeated Antony at the battle of Actium, settled several of Antony’s disbanded troops there, together with families from Italy whom he dispossessed in order to make room for his own veterans, and renamed the colony after himself: Colonia Iulia Philippensis. Three years later, when Octavian assumed the style of Augustus, the name of the colony was amplified: Colonia Iulia Augusta Philippensis.[2]
The citizens of a Roman colony were themselves Roman citizens; the constitution of a Roman colony was modeled on that of the mother city, Rome, with two collegiate magistrates at the head of it. In most colonies these collegiate magistrates were officially known as the duo uiri (or duumuiri iuri dicundo, “the two men for administering justice”). In some colonies, however, they preferred to be known by the more distinguished title of praetor; of the chief magistrates of Capua, in Italy, for example, Cicero remarked that, “while they are called duo uiri in the other colonies, these men wished to be called praetors.”[3] This appears to have been true also of the chief magistrates of Philippi: Luke refers to them by a Greek term (stratēgoi) that served as the equivalent of the title “praetors” (Acts 16:22, 35, 36, 38). Like the chief magistrates of Rome, those of Roman colonies were attended by lictors bearing the fasces, or bundles of rods, that were their badges of office. The lictors in attendance on the Philippian praetors appear in Luke’s narrative under their Greek designation rhabdouchoi, literally, “rod-bearers’ (Acts 16:35, 38).
Macedonia, the territory to which Philippi belonged, was an ancient kingdom in the Balkan peninsula, bounded on the south by Thessaly and on the east and northeast by Thrace. When the Persians invaded Europe at the beginning of the fifth century B.C., the kings of Macedonia collaborated with them and so were able to preserve a limited independence for themselves.[4] Even so, the Macedonian king Alexander I gave secret aid to the Greek states farther south that were attacked by Xerxes in 480 B.C.[5] He and his successors patronized Greek culture; Alexander himself, as crown prince of Macedonia, was allowed to compete in the Olympic games (open to none but Greeks) because his family claimed to be of Argive descent.[6] By the fourth century B.C. Macedonia was, for most practical purposes, part of the Greek world. Philip II of Macedonia (359–336 B.C.), by diplomacy and military conquest, made himself master of the city-states of Greece. After his assassination his son Alexander III (Alexander the Great) inherited his Greco-Macedonian dominion and made it the base for his conquest of western Asia (as far east as the Indus valley) and Egypt. But with the division of Alexander’s empire soon after his death in 323 B.C., Macedonia became a separate kingdom once more.
The kingdom of Macedonia clashed with the Romans when Philip V (221–179 B.C.) made a treaty with their enemy Hannibal during the Second Punic War.[7] The Romans were able to stir up sufficient trouble for Philip on the eastern side of the Adriatic to keep him occupied, and his treaty with Hannibal remained ineffective. When the Second Punic War was at an end and Hannibal was dead, the Romans found a pretext for declaring war on Philip. The war ended in 197 B.C. with Philip’s defeat at Cynoscephalae in central Thessaly.[8] He was obliged henceforth to confine his rule to Macedonia and not intervene in the affairs of the Greek city-states farther south.
Philip’s son Perseus in his turn excited Rome’s suspicions; these were further fomented by his enemy the king of Pergamum, an ally of Rome. The ensuing Third Macedonian War (as it is called by Roman historians) ended in 168 B.C. with a Roman victory at Pydna, a city in the coastal plain of southern Macedonia.[9] The Romans then abolished the royal dynasty of Macedonia and divided the kingdom into four republics.[10] But in 149 B.C., an adventurer named Andriscus, claiming to be a son of Perseus, reunited Macedonia under his rule for a short time.[11] When the Romans put Andriscus down in 148 B.C., they decided that the only course to take with Macedonia was to annex it as a province.[12] The four republics set up twenty years before remained as geographical districts but retained little political significance.
To consolidate their hold on the new province, the Romans built a great military road, the Egnatian Way, from Apollonia and Dyrrhachium on the Adriatic to Thessalonica; it was in due course extended eastward to Philippi and its port Neapolis (modern Kavalla), and later still to Byzantium.[13]
Macedonia thus became a base for the further expansion of Roman power. It was made a senatorial province by the emperor Augustus in 27 B.C. His successor Tiberius had it transferred to his own control as an imperial province in A.D. 15, but Claudius handed it back to the senate in A.D. 44.[14] The proconsul (as the governor of a senatorial province was called) had his seat of administration at Thessalonica.
Christianity reached Macedonia less than twenty years after the death of Christ. One of the earliest New Testament documents—the first letter to the Thessalonians—was sent from Corinth, probably in the fall of A.D. 50, to the young church of Thessalonica.[15] The letter, which is sent in the names of Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy, indicates that the church of Thessalonica came into existence through a visit that those three men had paid to the city not long before. Their visit to Thessalonica had been preceded by a visit to Philippi, where they had “suffered and been insulted” (1 Thess. 2:2).
The movements of Paul and his companions recorded in 1 Thessalonians agree so well with the more detailed record of Acts 16:6–18:5 that the Acts record, which comes from a later date, can be confidently accepted as providing a historical framework within which the more incidental data of the Pauline correspondence can be read with greater understanding.
When Paul set out with his colleague Silvanus (called Silas in Acts) after the Council of Jerusalem to traverse Asia Minor from the Cilician Gates westward, Macedonia did not figure in their travel plans. So far as can be ascertained from the narrative of Acts, they were heading for Ephesus. But they were prevented from continuing their journey in that direction and found themselves obliged (accompanied now by Timothy, who had joined them at Lystra) to turn northwest from Iconium or Pisidian Antioch until they reached the Aegean Sea at the port of Troas (Alexandria Troas). Here the first of the “we” passages of Acts begins: the narrative continues in the first person plural (which most probably indicates unobtrusively that the narrator himself was present at the events so recorded):
“During the night Paul had a vision of a man of Macedonia standing and begging him, ‘Come over to Macedonia and help us.’ After Paul had seen the vision, we got ready at once to leave for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them” (Acts 16:9, 10).
The missionary party, now increased to four (it appears) by the addition of the narrator (whom we take to be Luke), crossed by sea from Troas to Neapolis and traveled from there about ten miles along the Egnatian Way to Philippi.
Paul’s usual practice when visiting a Gentile city was to make for the local synagogue in order to find an audience among the Jews and God-fearing Gentiles who attended it. In Philippi, it seems, there was not a large enough Jewish community to form a regular synagogue congregation (for which the quorum was ten men).[16] But there was an informal meeting place outside the city, by the river Gangites, where some women assembled on the Sabbath day to recite the appointed prayers. These women may have comprised both Jews and God-fearers (Gentiles who adhered to the Jewish form of worship without becoming full proselytes); their leader was Lydia, a native of Thyatira in Asia Minor, who traded in the purple dye manufactured from the juice of the madder root for which her home country had long been famed. (Homer describes how “a Macedonian or Carian woman stains ivory with purple dye.”)[17] Lydia and some of her companions formed the nucleus of the church of Philippi. The women of Macedonia had long been famed for their initiative and influence, and that noble tradition was well maintained by the women in the Macedonian churches.[18]
Lydia put her house at the disposal of the missionaries, and it was evidently the meeting place of the church that quickly came into being in Philippi.
The missionaries, however, ran into trouble when Paul exorcised from a slave girl “a spirit by which she predicted the future” (Acts 16:16). The spirit is technically called a pythonic spirit; that is to say, it was a pale reflection of the spirit that empowered the Pythian prophetess at Delphi to speak as the mouthpiece of Apollo. As a result of the exorcism the girl was no longer able to tell fortunes. (There is a literary parallel in Menander’s Theophoroumenē [The Divinely Inspired Woman], a play in which a slave girl loses her cymbals and tambourine and, with them, the gift of prophecy that depends on them.)[19] The Philippian owners of the slave girl were annoyed at the loss of the regular income her fortune-telling brought them; Paul, they thought, was guilty of wanton interference with their property rights. He and Silvanus (the two full Jews in the missionary quartet) were therefore dragged before the magistrates in the forum, and a charge was laid against them: “These men are Jews, and are throwing our city into an uproar by advocating customs unlawful for us Romans to accept or practice” (Acts 16:20, 21). The bystanders joined in the attack, and the magistrates, deciding that these two unwelcome foreigners needed to be taught a sharp lesson, ordered them to be beaten with the lictors’ rods and locked up overnight.
When the lictors arrived at the jail next morning to expel the two men from Philippi, they were presented with a protest that they had to take back to the magistrates. Paul and Silvanus were Roman citizens and should not have been subjected to such treatment as they had received. The magistrates had listened to the charge laid against them without troubling to investigate it or inviting the two accused men to give their account of the matter.[20] If Paul and Silvanus asserted their Roman citizenship in the forum, no heed was paid to them in the general excitement. But now they asserted it in quieter circumstances. The magistrates had to pay attention now and apologize for having beaten Roman citizens without a regular trial and conviction. They could not summarily expel Roman citizens from a Roman city, but they did earnestly beg them to leave: they felt unequal to the responsibility of protecting them from public resentment. By setting the legal record straight Paul and Silvanus made sure that their Philippian converts would not incur the odium of being associated with criminals.
The best-known episode of Luke’s narrative of the evangelization of Philippi tells of the earthquake that struck at midnight while Paul and Silvanus were “praying and singing hymns to God” in the darkness of the inner prison, and of the jailer’s alarm, attempted suicide, and conversion (Acts 16:25–34). This episode, which is detachable from its context, has literary affinities of its own. In the first-century Greek work called Testament of Joseph (one of the collected Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs), Joseph tells how his Egyptian master “flogged me and sent me into Pharaoh’s jail. When then I was in fetters, the Egyptian woman heard me in the house of darkness singing hymns to the Lord and glorifying my God, rejoicing with cheerful voice.”[21] There is no question of direct literary dependence one way or the other, but both documents draw on a common stylistic convention. The general idea appears a little later in the Stoic writer Epictetus: “Then we shall be emulators of Socrates, when we can write paeans in prison.”[22]
As for the effects of the earthquake at midnight, Origen in the mid-third century, if not the pagan Celsus seventy years earlier, suggested a parallel between Luke’s account and the description in the Bacchae of Euripides of the escape of the bacchanals and Dionysus from Pentheus’s prison: “the bonds were loosed from their feet of their own accord, and the keys undid the doors without mortal hand.”[23] The literary affinities of the episode cannot fail to be recognized, but they do not undermine the historicity of the event.
Paul and Silvanus had to leave Philippi; the magistrates’ polite request was no more to be ignored than the lictors’ forceful eviction would have been. But they left behind them a young church of ardently committed converts whose affection for their apostle was shown by gifts that they sent him on more than one occasion, beginning within a few weeks of his departure (see Phil. 4:15, 16). Timothy accompanied his two senior colleagues; Luke perhaps stayed on in Philippi. It is noteworthy that the first of the “we” passages of Acts comes to an end in Philippi (Acts 16:17) and the second one begins in Philippi (Acts 20:5). If Luke was in Philippi continuously during the intervening seven or eight years, the Philippian Christians may well have come to regard him as one of themselves: it is even possible that they appointed him to represent them among the delegates from various churches contributing to the Jerusalem relief fund who accompanied Paul to Judaea in A.D. 57. No member of the Philippian church is mentioned in the list of Paul’s travel companions in Acts 20:4 (but the list is probably not complete); those who are listed, says Luke, “went on ahead and waited for us at Troas” while “we” (that is, Paul, with the narrator and possibly one or two others) “sailed from Philippi after the Feast of Unleavened Bread” (Acts 20:5, 6). They would have embarked actually at Neapolis, the port of Philippi. In A.D. 57 the Feast of Unleavened Bread fell during the week of April 7–14.
The church of Philippi, then, was the last of Paul’s churches west of the Aegean with which he had personal contact before his last, fateful visit to Jerusalem. It continued to communicate with him as it had done from its foundation, and his letter to the Philippians gives the reader some idea of the pleasure this church gave him every time he thought of it and of his appreciation of its members’ unfailing kindness and affection.
That the Philippian church preserved the same character half a century later appears in its care for Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, when he was on his way to Rome under military guard to be exposed to the beasts in the arena. Like Paul before him, Ignatius sailed from Troas to Neapolis and continued his journey by land along the Egnatian Way.[24] Details of Ignatius’s stopover in Philippi are lacking, but the Philippian Christians were sufficiently interested in him to write to Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, asking him to send them copies of any of Ignatius’s letters that might be available to him.[25] Polycarp’s reply to their request has survived. At the beginning of his letter he expresses his joy that they “have followed the example of true love and have helped on their way, as opportunity offered, those who were bound in chains.” Such chains, he says, are an ornament for saints; they are “the diadems of those who have been truly chosen by God and our Lord” (among these he is thinking pre-eminently of Ignatius). Then he adds, “I rejoice also that your firmly rooted faith, renowned since early days, endures to the present and produces fruit for our Lord Jesus Christ.”[26] The tree that Paul and his associates had planted continued to bear witness to the quality of their workmanship.
Character, Occasion, and Purpose of the Letter
The letter is sent to the Christian community of Philippi by Paul, who joins Timothy’s name with his own in the opening salutation.
After the salutation and the assurance of his profound thanksgiving and prayer for his friends at Philippi, Paul tells them how his present situation, despite the restrictions of imprisonment, has promoted the spread of the gospel among the officials in whose care he is and has encouraged many of the local Christians to be more uninhibited in witnessing to their faith. Even if some of them are impelled by motives that are not at all friendly to Paul, the fact remains that Christ is being proclaimed, and this makes Paul rejoice. He does not know what the outcome of his imprisonment will be, but his resolve is that, whether it is ended by release or by execution, the glory of Christ will be promoted.
He then makes an appeal for harmony among the members of the Philippian church: he deprecates petty jealousies and antipathies and reminds them of Christ’s self-forgetfulness in becoming a servant to others and enduring death by crucifixion. After further words of encouragement, in which Paul’s sense of personal involvement in the spiritual well-being of his converts is made very clear, he tells them that he will soon send Timothy to see them and bring back news of them. Right now, he says, he is sending back Epaphroditus, one of themselves, who had recently come to discharge a service to him on their behalf and had incurred serious illness in doing so.
Then, with “Finally, my brothers …” (3:1), he gives the impression that he is bringing the letter to an end, when suddenly he puts the readers on their guard against subversive intruders and (partly by way of countering the influence of such people) sets out, with reference to his own experience, the essence of Christian faith and life.
Further words of admonition (4:1–9) are followed by thanks for a gift that Epaphroditus has brought to him from Philippi (4:10–20). The letter closes with a final doxology, greetings, and benediction.
That Philippians is a genuine letter of Paul has been generally accepted.
The first serious challenge to its authenticity was made in the 1840s by F. C. Baur of Tübingen.[27] Baur quoted the verdict of an older scholar, W. M. L. de Wette,[28] to the effect that its genuineness was “above all question” and took leave to suggest a number of points that might weigh against this verdict.
One of these points was the alleged employment of certain Gnostic ideas and expressions with which the writer’s mind was evidently filled and which appear especially in the christological passage, Philippians 2:6–11.[29] Another was the repetitious character of the document. It was marked, Baur thought, “by a want of any profound and masterly connexion of ideas, and by a certain poverty of thought.”[30] He added that there could be found “no motive or occasion for it, no distinct indication of any purpose, or of any leading idea.”[31] The polemic outburst of Philippians 3:2–19 was regarded as a “weak and lifeless” imitation of 2 Corinthians 11:13–15.[32] The reference in Philippians 4:15, 16 to repeated gifts received from Philippi was felt to be at variance with Paul’s affirmation in 1 Corinthians 9:15–18 and elsewhere that he chose not to be supported by his converts but to earn his living by his own work. It was based, Baur thought, on 2 Corinthians 11:9, where Paul does mention one exception to his regular policy—an occasion in Corinth when his needs were met by friends from Macedonia.[33]
Finally Baur, who took Rome to be the place of imprisonment from which Philippians was supposed to be written, argued that its picture of the progress of the gospel in Rome at the time indicated lacks corroboration. The clue to this picture, and to the mention of “the saints … who belong to Caesar’s household” (4:22), was provided (he thought) by the reference to one Clement in Philippians 4:3. This Clement, according to Baur, was intended to be identified with Titus Flavius Clemens, related by marriage to the emperor Domitian, at whose initiative he was put to death in A.D. 95. He was allegedly introduced into the letter by the post-apostolic author who was acquainted with the growing Clementine legend. In this legend Clement was one of Peter’s converts; by bringing him into contact with Paul the author of Philippians made his contribution to the posthumous reconciliation of the two apostles who (as Baur believed) were opponents in their lifetime.[34]
Some of Baur’s arguments were matters of opinion and feeling, some were bound up with a particular reading of the evidence, but the argument about Clement was simply wrong. The Clement of Philippians 4:3 is a Philippian Christian, otherwise unknown to us but not in any way associated with Rome. None of Baur’s arguments about Philippians has commended itself to later generations of Pauline scholarship.
More recently a question mark has been set against the Pauline authorship of the letter on the basis of a statistical analysis of the language.[35] This argument also has failed to win general acceptance; the document is too short to provide cogent evidence of this kind.
It is evident that Philippians was written while Paul was in prison and awaiting a judgment that would affect his liberty and perhaps his life.[36] Three times in the first chapter he mentions his imprisonment and integrates it into the course of his apostolic ministry: he claims to be stationed where he is “for the defense of the gospel” (Phil. 1:16). Through his imprisonment, indeed, the gospel was being promoted in quarters to which it might not otherwise have found access.
But where was this imprisonment? Paul does not say explicitly. His Philippian friends did not need to be told. They knew where he was: they had lately sent Epaphroditus, one of their number, to visit him (2:25). The traditional answer to the question has been Rome;[37] but in more recent times both Ephesus and Caesarea have been suggested.
The claims of Ephesus have been defended by A. Deissmann, G. S. Duncan, and others.[38] It is quite probable that Paul was imprisoned at least once during his residence in Ephesus (A.D. 52–55), but the imprisonment that he was undergoing when he sent this letter to Philippi can scarcely have been an Ephesian imprisonment. When he says that “it has become clear throughout the whole palace guard and to everyone else that I am in chains for Christ” (1:13), the Greek word translated “palace guard” is praitōrion, a borrowing from Latin praetorium. His use of a loanword suggests that it bears its technical sense. The word denotes the headquarters of a praetor, more particularly the commanding officer’s headquarters in a military camp. In the city of Rome under the empire it meant the praetorian guard, the emperor’s personal bodyguard. Farther afield it was used for the headquarters of a provincial governor, but of the governor of an imperial province, who had military units under his command. There is no known instance in imperial times of its use for the headquarters of a proconsul, the governor of a senatorial province such as Asia was at this time.
Appeal has been made to inscriptional evidence for the presence of a praetorianus (member of the praetorian guard) in the vicinity of Ephesus, but this evidence is irrelevant for the matter under discussion. The praetorianus mentioned in three Latin inscriptions was a former member of the praetorian guard who later discharged police duties as a stationarius on a Roman road in the province of Asia.[39]
If Ephesus is ruled out as the place from which the letter was sent, Caesarea comes up for consideration. Its claims have been ably defended by a number of scholars, most notably Ernst Lohmeyer.[40] In favor of Caesarea is the express statement of Acts 23:35 that Paul was kept under guard there “in Herod’s palace” (lit., praetorium). This was an official building set up by Herod the Great on the artificial acropolis that he had constructed for his new city of Caesarea between 22 and 12 B.C.; it appears to have served now as headquarters for the Roman procurator of Judaea. Since the procurator had auxiliary cohorts under his command, his headquarters could properly be designated the praetorium.[41]
In the closing years of his Aegean ministry Paul organized a collection in the churches of his Gentile mission field for the relief of the poverty of the Jerusalem church. At Whitsuntide, A.D. 57, he came to Jerusalem with representatives of those churches, who were to hand over their churches’ contributions to the leaders of the church of Jerusalem. Not many days after his arrival he was attacked by a hostile crowd in the temple precincts and rescued by members of the Roman garrison in the Antonia fortress, which overlooked the outer court of the temple. The commanding officer of the garrison took him into custody and sent him to the procurator Felix at Caesarea.
Paul remained in Caesarea for two years (A.D. 57–59), waiting for Felix to promulgate a judicial decision on his case (Acts 24:26, 27). Felix, in fact, never got around to pronouncing a formal verdict on Paul: Luke puts this procrastination down to his hope of receiving a bribe from Paul or his friends. Felix knew that Paul had come to Judaea with a substantial sum for disbursement in Jerusalem (Acts 24:17) and surmised that he might have access to further funds. But Paul had every reason to suppose that Felix’s verdict, when it was given, would be favorable and that he would be discharged. This, it could be argued, would provide a suitable background for his optimism: “I know that I will … continue with all of you for your progress and joy in the faith” (Phil. 1:25).
But Caesarea was a political backwater. If it was there that Paul was imprisoned when he wrote to the Philippians, certainly everybody in Herod’s praetorium would know that he was there and why he was there, but would there be anything very remarkable about that? There were Christians in Caesarea, but were they sufficiently numerous or diversified to take sides with or against Paul in the manner described in Philippians 1:15–18? Even if they were stimulated by his enforced residence in that city to preach the gospel with renewed enthusiasm, Caesarea offers too restricted a setting to account for the joyful enthusiasm that Paul expresses in telling how his imprisonment has worked out for the advance of the gospel. Rome, however, would present a very different picture.
Felix was recalled from Judaea in A.D. 59, without having discharged Paul. He was succeeded as procurator by Festus. When Festus began to reopen Paul’s case, Paul soon realized that he might be exposed to mortal danger through action Festus, in his inexperience, seemed likely to take. He availed himself therefore of a Roman citizen’s privilege and “appealed to Caesar”—that is to say, he appealed to have his case transferred from the provincial governor’s court to the direct jurisdiction of the emperor in Rome. To Rome, then, Paul was sent, and he arrived there early in A.D. 60. He spent the next two years under house arrest waiting for his case to be heard. When his case came up, he would probably have to answer more charges than one. The charge pressed against him when he was arrested in Jerusalem was one of violating the sanctity of the temple, but that could be easily rebutted. Mention is made, however, of a charge of disturbing the Roman peace throughout the provinces of the empire (Acts 24:5). This was a serious charge, and although Paul could give a powerful reply to it, there was no means of knowing how it would be handled before the imperial tribunal.
While Paul waited for his case to be heard before Nero, it would have been supremely exhilarating for him to see how the gospel was spreading in Rome through his presence there, in custody though he was. In favor of a Roman provenance for the letter, moreover, is the reference to the “saints of Caesar’s household” who, along with other Christians, send their greetings to the Philippian church (Phil. 4:22). True, the imperial civil service was staffed by members of Caesar’s household—largely his freedmen—and these were to be found throughout the provinces. But they were concentrated mainly in Rome, and only in Rome would they be sufficiently numerous to include a significant body of Christians.[42]
If it be concluded that this letter was sent from Rome, it becomes necessary to relate Paul’s declared expectation and intention to visit Philippi shortly (Phil. 1:25–27; 2:24) to his earlier plan, disclosed in Romans 15:24, 29, of going on from Rome to Spain. When he sent his letter to the Romans at the beginning of A.D. 57, he was in course of bidding farewell to the Aegean world. To the same effect is Luke’s report of Paul’s words to the elders of the Ephesian church when he met them briefly at Miletus on his last journey to Jerusalem: “I know that none of you … will ever see me again” (Acts 20:25). If Philippians is to be dated during his Roman imprisonment, or even during his Caesarean imprisonment, he must have changed his plans substantially.
Paul’s travel plans were never inflexible: they were always subject to his awareness of divine guidance. Indeed, his readiness to change them could at times prove disconcerting to his friends and give his opponents ground for charging him with vacillation (cf. 2 Cor. 1:15–2:1). When he told the Roman Christians of his plan to spend a short time with them on his way to Spain, he foresaw the possibility of trouble arising during his imminent visit to Jerusalem, but he did not foresee his arrest there, his subsequent two years’ captivity in Caesarea, his being sent under armed guard to Rome, and his further two years’ house arrest there while he awaited the summons to appear before Caesar. This unforeseen and unforeseeable sequence of events might well have moved him to reconsider his travel plans. News kept on reaching him from his friends in the Aegean world that made him decide they needed a further visit from him as soon as he was free to pay one. A similar expectation is expressed in his letter to Philemon of Colossae (also probably to be dated during his Roman imprisonment): “prepare a guest room for me, because I hope to be restored to you in answer to your prayers” (Philem. 22).
If a Roman dating of Philippians is probable on other grounds, Paul’s expressed hope of revisiting Philippi is not a decisive argument against such a dating.
The number of journeys back and forth between Philippi and Paul’s place of imprisonment that the letter implies has been thought to favor an Ephesian rather than a Roman provenance.[43] The journey in either direction between Rome and Philippi required about forty days;[44] one could sail from Philippi to Ephesus in a week to ten days.[45]
At the time the letter was written
a. news of Paul’s imprisonment was taken to Philippi;
b. Epaphroditus traveled from Philippi to hand over a gift to Paul (4:18);
c. news reached Philippi of Epaphroditus’s illness (2:26);
d. news reached Epaphroditus of the Philippians’ anxiety at the report of his illness (2:26);
e. Epaphroditus was about to set out for Philippi, carrying Paul’s letter (2:25, 28);
f. Timothy was to follow him shortly, as soon as Paul’s prospects became clearer (2:19–23);
g. Paul himself hoped to visit Philippi, in the event of his release (2:24).
Four of these journeys had been completed; the last three were to be undertaken in the near future. But the first four have been set out in a manner that implies that Epaphroditus fell ill after he arrived at the place where Paul was: as is suggested below in the comment on 2:26, this is not necessarily so; he may have fallen ill on the way to Paul. This would reduce the time required for the successive journeys. In any case, as C. H. Dodd puts it, “wherever Paul may have been at the time, circumstances compelled frequent intercommunication with Philippi, and if Ephesus was near, the Roman imprisonment was long.”[46] Paul spent two years in Rome before his case came up for hearing; when this letter was written, a decision about him was imminent. There was plenty of time for all the journeys to have taken place.
It has been argued that Paul’s expression of thanks to the Philippians because “at last” they had shown their care for him again (4:10) “cannot be construed except as a rebuke, and a sarcastic rebuke at that,”[47] if the letter was not sent until the period of his Roman imprisonment. This also has been urged as an argument in favor of an Ephesian provenance. As will be shown in the commentary on that passage, however, Paul and the Philippians both knew that the long intermission in their sending him gifts was due to his own financial policy, not to any negligence on their part.[48] Others indeed have maintained that the expression of thanks in 4:10–20 constitutes a separate short letter, earlier than the main letter into which it has been editorially inserted.
This raises the question whether or not the letter as it has been handed down to us is a composite document.
It is more especially in recent times that questions have been seriously raised about the literary unity of the letter.[49] Polycarp, indeed, writing to the Philippian Christians in the earlier part of the second century, reminds them how Paul not only taught them “the word of truth” when he was present with them “but also when he was absent wrote letters to you” (To the Philippians 3:2). But it would be risky to infer from this that he knew parts of the canonical letter as separate documents: if he is not using a generalizing plural, he may have in mind other letters than the one that has survived.
Many commentators (perhaps most) still maintain the unity of the document, but several regard it as composite. Günther Bornkamm has described it as a “Pauline letter-collection.”[50] There are in particular two sections that are thought to be insertions into the main letter: (a) the note of thanks in 4:10–20 and (b) the section beginning at 3:2 and continuing into chapter 4.
Note of Thanks (4:10–20). The note of thanks in 4:10–20 is linked with the main body of the letter by the reference to Epaphroditus (4:18; cf. 2:25–30). It is one and the same mission of Epaphroditus that is mentioned in both places. But those who infer from 2:25–30 that Epaphroditus spent a considerable time with Paul after he delivered the Philippians’ gift to him, and fell ill during that time, conclude that Paul must have sent his note of thanks quite soon after he received the gift and not waited until Epaphroditus was able to return home. Hence the note of thanks must have been sent earlier than the main letter.[51]
But if (as is more probable) Epaphroditus fell ill on his way to Paul, and Paul sent him back to Philippi earlier than had been planned, to relieve his Philippian friends’ anxiety about him, then it was most convenient that Epaphroditus should carry Paul’s note of thanks to Philippi—either along with, or as part of, a larger letter (see comments on 2:26–28). (If it was sent along with the larger letter, it was subsequently attached to it.)
Warning Against Troublemakers (3:2ff.). Three noteworthy features of this section are (a) its coming after “Finally” (3:1), (b) its difference in tone from the rest of the letter, and (c) its resemblance to the last four chapters of 2 Corinthians.
The phrase “Finally” (Gk. to loipon) in 3:1 (caught up again in 4:8) might be thought to prepare the reader for the end of the letter, but not much can be built on this by itself, since in informal letters (not to speak of sermons) words suggesting that the end of the composition is approaching may come quite a long way before the actual end.
But the sudden severity of the warning in this section and the resemblance in tone and subject to 2 Corinthians 10–13 call for some explanation. There are differences, indeed: whereas in 2 Corinthians 10–13 the “false apostles” have already been at work in Corinth, it is not implied in Philippians 3:2ff. that the troublemakers are already active in Philippi—still less that there was any disposition in the Philippian church to give them a sympathetic hearing.
In Corinth the intruders claimed better credentials and higher achievements than Paul, and he felt obliged, “speaking as a fool” (2 Cor. 11:21), to argue that, if such credentials and achievements as they put forward were really necessary and important, then he could produce a more impressive record than any of them. He takes a similar line in Philippians 3:4–16, remarking that, if it were fitting to have confidence in natural endowments and accomplishments, he would have no lack of ground for such confidence. But those things he had formerly valued he now wrote off as worthless—and then he launches into an eloquent statement of the things he really values: the personal knowledge of Christ, the sharing of his sufferings, the hope of resurrection with him, and the ambition to apprehend the high purpose for which he was once apprehended by Christ.
C. H. Dodd, who accepted Philippians as a unitary document and dated it during Paul’s Roman imprisonment, could quote Philippians 3:13–16 as showing “most clearly what experience had made of this naturally proud, self-assertive and impatient man,” as providing evidence for his thesis that about the time of Paul’s “hardships in the province of Asia” (2 Cor. 1:8) he underwent a “second conversion” which resulted in a marked change of temper.[52] But it is difficult to recognize this “change of temper” in Paul’s treatment of the troublemakers in the very context of 3:13–16—in his castigation of the “dogs” of 3:2 or his denunciation of the libertines of 3:18, 19. True, he says that he writes these denunciatory words “with tears,” whereas in 2 Corinthians 10–13 he may have written more in anger than in sorrow, but there is not much to choose between his language here and his language there. If there is any substance in Dodd’s thesis of a “second conversion” (and there is some), then it must be said with T. W. Manson that Philippians 3:2ff. “is more easily understood before the second conversion than after it.”[53]
It is unlikely that anything can be inferred from a change in perspective that has been detected between Paul’s expectation in 3:20, 21 of sharing the bodily “change” that surviving believers will undergo at the advent of Christ and his expectation in 1:23 of being “with Christ” at death; the possibility of execution as the outcome of his impending trial sufficiently accounts for his outlook in 1:23, whereas in 3:20, 21 he is voicing (perhaps in a credal form) the hope of Christians in general.
Apart from that, if it were possible to overcome such a breach of “bibliographical probability”[54] as the division of Philippians into two originally separate letters, much could be said in favor of dating 3:2ff. in the same general period as 2 Corinthians 10–13, while dating the letter as a whole to the later stages of Paul’s Roman imprisonment. Although the unsympathetic persons of 1:15–18 are not identical with the people mentioned so severely in 3:2, 18, 19 (and, indeed, do not appear to have adulterated the gospel), yet the mildness with which Paul refers to them marks a notable contrast with his fierce invective against the others and suggests that a period of mellowing has intervened. Paul has learned to see cause for thanksgiving in a situation that at one time might have made him explode with indignation.
If we suppose that another letter, or part of another letter, begins at 3:2, how far does it go? Certainly as far as 4:1, with its plea to the Philippians to “stand firm in the Lord,”[55] but perhaps as far as 4:3,[56] and possibly even as far as 4:9.[57] If it does go on to 4:9, we should have a satisfactory ending to a letter, the last paragraph beginning “Finally, brothers” (4:8) and ending with a benediction: “the God of peace will be with you.” The main letter would then announce its conclusion with “Finally, my brothers, rejoice in the Lord!” (3:1), followed by the note of thanks (4:10–20) and the final greetings and benediction (4:21–23). But arguments for treating Philippians as a composite work are at best tentative. The judgment of W. G. Kümmel must command respect: “There is … no sufficient reason to doubt the original unity of the transmitted Philippians.”[58]
The purpose of the letter can be inferred only from a consideration of its contents.
Epaphroditus was going back to Philippi at Paul’s insistence, and Paul took the opportunity to give him a letter for the Philippian Christians, thanking them for the gift that Epaphroditus had brought from them and for their general and constant partnership in his ministry, and incidentally explaining why he was sending Epaphroditus back so promptly.
At the same time he took the opportunity to let them know his present situation, to prepare them for Timothy’s prospective visit, which might be followed (he hoped) by a personal visit from Paul himself. He warned them against a variety of persons who were going around among the churches subverting Christian faith and morals. But his principal purpose was evidently to encourage a spirit of unity among them. What militated chiefly against this was a natural tendency to self-assertiveness, which Paul deprecated with all the earnestness of which he was capable. The example of Christ should inspire his followers to put the interests of others before their own and to be marked by a spirit of spontaneous self-forgetfulness and self-sacrifice. If they learned this lesson, they would not only fill Paul’s cup of joy to overflowing, they too would be liberated from internal tensions and would be able, with Paul, to rejoice in the Lord.
Note: A list of the abbreviations in the commentary is found at the beginning of the book (see pp. xiii–xvi). See also “For Further Reading” (pp. 163–72); full bibliographical references for works referred to in short-form notes within the commentary are supplied there.