Ολ, κάθαπερ ἄν τις εἰκάσειε, ἀνθρώποις ὐπηρέτην τινὰ πέμψας ἢ ἄγγελον ἀλλʼ αὐτὸν τὸν τεχνίτην καὶ δημιουργὸν τῶν ὅλων.—Ep.adDiognet. 7.
THE remaining three of the Epistles of the Captivity were written within a short time of each other, and were despatched by the same messengers. Tychicus was the bearer of those to the Ephesians and Colossians. Onesimus, who naturally took the letter to Philemon, was sent at the same time with him, as appears from the mention of his name in the Epistle to the Colossians. In both of these latter Epistles there is also a message for Archippus.
There is nothing but internal evidence to decide which of these letters was written first. The letter to Philemon was, however, a mere private appendage to the Epistle to the Colossians, which may have been written at any time. The letter to this Church must claim the priority over the circular Epistle which is generally known as the Epistle to the Ephesians. The reason for this opinion is obvious—the Epistle to the Colossians was called forth by a special need, the other Epistle was not. It is in exact psychological accordance with the peculiarities of St. Paul’s mind and style that if, after writing a letter which was evoked by particular circumstances, and led to the development of particular truths, he utilised the opportunity of its despatch to send another letter, which had no such immediate object, the tones of the first letter would still vibrate in the second. When he had discharged his immediate duty to the Church of Colossæ, the topics dwelt upon in writing to the neighbouring Churches would be sure to bear a close resemblance to those which had most recently been occupying his thoughts. Even apart from special information, St. Paul may have seen the desirability of warning Ephesus and its dependencies against a peril which was infusing its subtle presence within so short a distance from them; and it was then natural that his language to them should be marked by the very differences which separate the Epistle to the Colossians from that to the Ephesians. The former is specific, concrete, and polemical; the latter is abstract, didactic, general. The same words and phrases predominate in both; but the resemblances are far more marked and numerous in the practical exhortations than in the doctrinal statements. In the Epistle to the Colossians he is primarily occupied with the refutation of an error; in that to the Ephesians he is absorbed in the rapturous development of an exalted truth. The main theme of the Colossians is the Person of Christ; that of the Ephesians is the life of Christ manifested in the living energy of His Church.1 In the former, Christ is the “Plenitude,” the synthesis and totality of every attribute of God; in the latter, the ideal Church, as the body of Christ, is the Plenitude, the recipient of all the fulness of Him who filleth all things with all.2 Christ’s person is most prominent in the Colossians; Christ’s body, the Church of Christ, in the Ephesians.
The genuineness of these two letters has been repeatedly and formidably assailed, and the grounds of the attack are not by any means so fantastic as those on which other letters have been rejected as spurious. To dwell at length on the external evidence is no part of my scheme, and the grounds on which the internal evidence seems to me decisive in their favour, even after the fullest and frankest admission of all counter–difficulties, will best appear when we have considered the events out of which they spring, and which at once shaped, and are sufficient to account for, the peculiarities by which they are marked.
Towards the close of St. Paul’s Roman imprisonment, when his approaching liberation seemed so all but certain that he even requests Philemon to be getting a lodging in readiness for him, he received a visit from Epaphras of Colossæ. To him, perhaps, had been granted the distinguished honour of founding Churches not only in his native town, but also in Laodicea and Hierapolis, which lie within a distance of sixteen miles from each other in the valley of the Lycus. That remarkable stream resembles the Anio in clothing the country through which it flows with calcareous deposits; and in some parts of its course, especially near Colossæ, it flowed under natural bridges of gleaming travertine deposited by its own waters, the course of which was frequently modified by this peculiarity, and by the terrific earthquakes to which the valley has always been liable. The traveller who followed the course of the Lycus in a south–eastward direction from the valley of the Mæander into which it flows, would first observe on a plateau, which rises high above its northern bank, the vast and splendid city of Hierapolis, famous as the birthplace of him who in Nicopolis
“Taught Arrian when Vespasian’s brutal son
Cleared Rome of what most shamed him”—3
and famous also for the miraculous properties of the mephitic spring whose exhalations could be breathed in safety by the priests of Cybele alone. About six miles further, upon the southern bank of the river, he would see Laodicea, the populous and haughty metropolis of the “Cibyratic jurisdiction,” which alone of the cities of proconsular Asia was wealthy and independent enough to rebuild its streets and temples out of its own resources, when, within a year of the time at which these letters were written, an earthquake had shaken it.4 Passing up the valley about ten miles further, he might before sunset reach Colossæ, a town far more anciently famous than either, but which had fallen into comparative decay, and was now entirely eclipsed by its thriving and ambitious neighbours.5
This remarkable valley, and these magnificent cities, St. Paul, strange to say, had never visited. Widely as the result of his preaching at Ephesus had been disseminated throughout Asia, his labours for the Ephesian Church had been so close and unremitting as to leave him no leisure for wider missionary enterprise.6 And although Jews abounded in these cities, the divinely guided course of his previous travels had not brought him into this neighbourhood. It is true that St. Luke vaguely tells us that in the second missionary journey, St. Paul had passed through “the Phrygian and Galatian country,”7 and that in the shifting ethnological sense of the term the cities of the Lycus–valley might be regarded as Phrygian. But the expression seems rather to mean that the course of his journey lay on the ill–defined marches of these two districts, far to the north and east of the Lycus. In his third journey his natural route from the cities of Galatia to Ephesus would take him down the valleys of the Hermus and Cayster, and to the north of the mountain range of Messogis which separates them from the Lycus and Mæander. From St. Paul’s own expression it seems probable that the Churches in these three cities had been founded by the labours of Epaphras, and that they had never “seen his face in the flesh” at the time when he wrote these Epistles, though it is not impossible that he subsequently visited them.8
And yet he could not but feel the deepest interest in their welfare, because, indirectly though not directly, he had been indeed their founder. Ephesus, as we have seen, was a centre of commerce, of worship, and of political procedure; and among the thousands “both Jews and Greeks” “almost throughout all Asia,” who heard through his preaching the word of the Lord,9 must have been Philemon,10 his son, Archippus, and Epaphras, and Nymphas, who were leading ministers of the Lycus Churches.11
And there was a special reason why St. Paul should write to the Colossian Christians. Philemon, who resided there, had a worthless slave named Onesimus—a name which, under the circumstances, naturally lent itself to a satiric play of words; for instead of being “Beneficial,” he had been very much the reverse, having first (apparently) robbed his master, and then run away from him. Rome was in ancient days the most likely place to furnish a secure refuge to a guilty fugitive, and thither, even more than to modern London, drifted inevitably the vice and misery of the world. Philemon was a Christian, and some access of wretchedness, or danger of starvation, may have driven the runaway slave to fling himself on the compassion of the Christian teacher, whom he may have heard and seen when he attended his master on some great gala–day at Ephesus. The kind heart of Paul was ever open; he had a deep and ready sympathy for the very lowest and poorest of the human race, because in the very lowest and poorest he saw those “for whom Christ died.” His own sufferings, too, had taught him the luxury of aiding the sufferings of others, and he took the poor dishonest fugitive to his heart, and was the human instrument by which that change was wrought in him which converted the “non tressis agaso” into a brother beloved. But Onesimus was still legally the debtor and the slave of Philemon; and Paul, ever obedient to the law, felt it a duty to send him back. He placed him under the protecting care of Tychicus of Ephesus, and sent with him a letter which could not fail to ensure his pardon. It was necessary, therefore, for him to write to a citizen of Colossæ, and another circumstance determined him to write also to the Colossian Church.
This was the strange and sad intelligence which he heard from Epaphras. They had many opportunities for intercourse, for, either literally or metaphorically, Epaphras shared his captivity, and did not at once return to his native city. In his conversations with St. Paul he told him of an insidious form of error unlike any which the Apostle had hitherto encountered. The vineyard of the Lord’s planting seemed, alas! to resemble the vineyards of earth in the multiplicity of perils which it had to overcome before it could bring forth its fruit. Now it was the little foxes that spoiled its vines; now the wild boar which broke down its hedge; and now, under the blighting influence of neglect and infertile soil, its unpruned branches only brought forth the clusters of Gomorrah. An erroneous tendency, as yet germinant and undeveloped, but one of which the prescient eye of St. Paul saw all the future deadliness, had insensibly crept into these youthful Churches, and, although they only knew the Apostle by name, he felt himself compelled to exert the whole force of his authority and reasoning to check so perilous an influence. Doubtless Epaphras had expressly sought him for the sake of advice and sympathy, and would urge the Apostle to meet with distinct warnings and clear refutation the novel speculations with which he may have felt himself incompetent to cope.
The new form of error was partly Judaic, for it made, distinctions in meats, attached importance to new moons and sabbaths,12 and insisted upon the value of circumcision, if not upon its actual necessity.13 Yet it did not, as a whole, resemble the Galatian Judaism, nor did it emanate, like the opposition at Antioch, from a party in Jerusalem, nor was it complicated, like the Corinthian schisms, with personal hostility to the authority of St. Paul. Its character was Judaic, not so much essentially as virtually; not, that is, from any special sympathy with national and Levitical Hebraism, but rather because there were certain features of Judaism which were closely analogous to those of other Oriental religions, and which commanded a wide sympathy in the Eastern world.
We must judge of the distinctive colour of the dawning heresy quite as much from the truths by which St. Paul strives to check its progress, as by those of its tenets on which he directly touches.14 In warning the Colossians respecting it, he bids them be on their guard against allowing themselves to be plundered by a particular teacher, whose so–called philosophy and empty deceit were more in accordance with human traditions and secular rudiments than with the truth of Christ. The hollow and misguiding system of this teacher, besides the importance which it attached to a ceremonialism which at the best was only valuable as a shadow or a symbol, tried further to rob its votaries of the prize of their Christian race by representing God as a Being so far removed from them that they could only approach Him through a series of angelic intermediates. It thus ignored the precious truth of Christ’s sole mediatorial dignity, and turned humility itself into a vice by making it a cloak for inflated and carnal intellectualism. In fact, it was nothing more nor less than pride which was thus aping humility; and, in endeavouring to enforce an ignoble self–abrogation of that direct communion with God through Christ which is the Christian’s most imperial privilege, it not only thrust all kinds of inferior agencies between the soul and Him, but also laid down a number of rules and dogmas which were but a set of new Mosaisms without the true Mosaic sanctions. Those rules were, from their very nature, false, transient, and trivial. They paraded a superfluous self–abasement, and insisted on a hard asceticism, but at the same time they dangerously flattered the soul with a semblance of complicated learning, while they were found to be in reality valueless as any remedy against self–indulgence. That these ascetic practices and dreamy imaginations were accompanied by a pride which arrogated to itself certain mysteries as an exclusive possession from which the vulgar intellect must be kept aloof; that, while professing belief in Christ, the Colossian mystic represented Him as one among many beings interposed between God and man; that he regarded matter in general and the body in particular as something in which evil was necessarily immanent,15 seem to result from the Christology of the Epistle, which is more especially developed in one particular direction than we find it to be in any of St. Paul’s previous writings. Already, in writing to the Corinthians, he had said that “if he had ever known Christ after the flesh, from henceforth he knew Him no more,” and in this Epistle the Person of our Lord as the Eternal Co–existent Son is represented in that divine aspect the apprehension of which is a boon infinitely more transcendent than a human and external knowledge of Jesus in His earthly humiliation. And yet—as though to obviate beforehand any Cerinthian attempt to distinguish between Jesus the man of sorrows and Christ the risen Lord, between Jesus the crucified and Christ the Eternal Word—he is, even in this Epistle, emphatic in the statement that these are one.16 To say that there is any change in St. Paul’s fundamental conception of Christ would be demonstrably false, since even the juxtaposition of our Lord Jesus Christ with God the Father as the source of all grace, and the declaration that all things, and we among them, exist solely through Him, are statements of His divinity in St. Paul’s earliest Epistles17 as strong as anything which could be subsequently added. But hitherto the Apostle had been led to speak of Him mainly as the Judge of the quick and dead, in the Epistles to the Thessalonians; as the invisible Head and Ruler of the Church in those to the Corinthians; as the Author of all spiritual freedom from ceremonial bondage, and the Redeemer of the world from the yoke of sin and death, as in those to the Romans and Galatians; as the Saviour, the Raiser from the dead, the Life of all life, the Source of all joy and peace, in that to the Philippians. A new phase of His majesty had now to be brought into prominence—one which was indeed involved in every doctrine which St. Paul had taught concerning Him as part of a Gospel which he had received by revelation, but which no external circumstance had ever yet led him to explain in all its clearness. This was the doctrine of Christ, as the Eternal, Pre–existing, yet Incarnate Word. He had now to speak of Him as One in whom and by whom the Universe—and that not only its existing condition but its very matter and its substance—are divinely hallowed, so that there is nothing irredeemable, nothing inherently antagonistic to Holiness, either in matter or in the body of man; as One in whom dwells the “plenitude” of the divine perfections, so that no other angelic being can usurp any share of God which is not found in Him; as One who is the only Potentate, the only Mediator, the only Saviour, the Head of the Body which is the Church, and the Source of its life through every limb. And the expression of this truth was rendered necessary by error. The Colossian teachers were trying to supplement Christianity, theoretically by a deeper wisdom, practically by a more abstentious holiness. It was the beautiful method of St. Paul to combat false doctrine as little as possible by denunciation and controversy (though these two have at times their necessary place), and as much as possible by the presentation of the counter truth. We are able, therefore, to find the theological errors of the Colossians reflected in the positive theology which is here developed in order to counteract them. In the moral and practical discussions of the Epistle we see the true substitute for that extravagant and inflating asceticism which had its origin partly in will–worship, ostentatious humility, and trust in works, and partly in mistaken conceptions as to the inherency of evil in the body of man. St. Paul points out to them that the deliverance from sin was to be found, not in dead rules and ascetic rigours, which have a fatal tendency to weaken the will, while they fix the imagination so intently on the very sins against which they are intended as a remedy, as too often to lend to those very sins a more fatal fascination—but in that death to sin which is necessarily involved in the life hid with Christ in God. From that new life—that resurrection from the death of sin—obedience to the moral laws of God, and faithfulness in common relations of life, result, not as difficult and meritorious acts, but as the natural energies of a living impulse in the heart which beats no longer with its own life but with the life of Christ.
Alike, then, from the distinct notices and the negative indications of the Epistle we can reproduce with tolerable clearness the features of the Colossian heresy, and we at once trace in it the influence of that Oriental theosophy, those mystical speculations, those shadowy cosmogonies and moral aberrations which marked the hydra–headed forms of the systems afterwards summed up in the one word Gnosticism. This very circumstance has been the main ground for impugning the genuineness of the Epistle. It is asserted that Gnosticism belongs to a generation later, and that these warnings are aimed at the followers of Cerinthus, who did not flourish until after Paul was dead, or even at those of Valentinus, the founder of a Gnostic system in the second century. In support of this view it is asserted that the Epistle abounds in un–Pauline phrases, in words which occur in no other Epistle, and in technical Gnostic expressions, such as plenitude, mystery, wisdom, knowledge, powers, light, darkness. Now, that Gnosticism as a well–developed system belongs to a later period is admitted; but the belief that the acceptance of the Epistle as genuine involves an anachronism, depends solely on the assumption that Gnostic expressions18 may not have been prevalent, and Gnostic tendencies secretly at work, long before they were crystallised into formal heresies. As far as these expressions are concerned, some of them are not technical at all until a Gnostic meaning is read into them, and others, like “knowledge” (gnôsis), &c., “plenitude” (plerôma), though beginning to be technical, are used in a sense materially different from that which was afterwards attached to them. As for the asserted traces of doctrines distinctly and systematically Gnostic, it is a matter of demonstration that they are found, both isolated and combined, during the Apostolic age, and before it, as well as afterwards. The esoteric exclusiveness which jealously guarded the arcana of its mysteries from general knowledge; the dualism which became almost Manichæan in the attempt to distinguish between the good and evil impulses; the notion that God’s “plenitude” could only flow out in a multitude of imperfect emanations; the consequent tendency to exalt and worship a gradation of angelic hierarchies; the rules and purifications which were designed to minimise all infection from the inevitable contact with matter; the attempt to explain the inherency of evil in matter by vain and fanciful cosmogonies; the multiplication of observances; the reduction of food and drink to the barest elements, excluding all forms of animal life; the suspicious avoidance or grudging toleration of marriage as a pernicious and revolting necessity;—these are found in various Oriental religions, and may be traced in philosophies which originated among the Asiatic Greeks. They find a distinct expression in the doctrines of the Essenes.19 Their appearance in the bosom of a Christian community was indeed new; but there was nothing new in their existence; nothing in them with which, as extraneousforms of error, St. Paul’s Jewish and Gentile studies—were it only his knowledge of Essene tenets and Alexandrian speculations—had not made him perfectly familiar. That they should appear in a Phrygian Church, powerfully exposed to Jewish influences, and yet consisting of Gentiles trained amid the mysteries of a ceremonial nature worship, and accustomed to the utterances of a speculative philosophy20 must have been painful to St. Paul, but could not have been surprising. The proof that these forms of heresy might have been expected to appear is rendered yet more cogent by the knowledge that, within a very short period of this time, they actually didappear in a definite and systematic form, in the heresy of Cerinthus, with whom St. John himself is said to have come into personal collision.21 And under these circumstances, so far from seeing a mark of spuriousness, we rather deduce an incidental argument in favour of the genuineness of the Epistle from the nature of the errors which we find that it is intended to denounce. Many critics have been eager to prove that St. Paul could not have written it, because they reject that fundamental doctrine of the Eternal Divinity of Christ, of which this group of Epistles is so impregnable a bulwark; yet this was so evidently the main article in the belief of St. Paul that the proof of its being so would hardly be weakened, even if these Epistles could be banished from the canon to which hostile criticism has only succeeded in showing more conclusively that they must still be considered to belong.
The Christology, then, of these Epistles is nothing more than the systematic statement of that revelation respecting the nature of Jesus, which is implicitly contained in all that is written of Him in the New Testament;22 and the so–called “Gnosticism” with which these Epistles deal is nothing more than a form of error—a phase of the crafty working of systematic deception—which is common to the intellectual, moral, and spiritual aberrations of all ages and countries. It is found in the Zend Avesta; it is found in Philo; it is found in Neoplatonism; it is found in the Kabbala; it is found in Valentinus. Abject sacerdotalism, superstitious ritual, extravagant asceticism, the faithlessness which leads men to abandon the privilege of immediate access to God, and to thrust between the soul and its One Mediator all sorts of human and celestial mediators; the ambition which builds upon the unmanly timidity of its votaries its own secure and tyrannous exaltation; the substitution of an easy externalism for the religion of the heart; the fancy that God cares for such barren self–denials as neither deepen our own spirituality nor benefit our neighbour; the elaboration of unreasonable systems which give the pompous name of Theology to vain and verbal speculations drawn by elaborate and untenable inferences from isolated expressions of which the antinomies are unfathomable, and of which the true exegetic history is deliberately ignored; the oscillating reactions which lead in the same sect and in even the same individual to the opposite extremes of rigid scrupulosity and antinomian licence:23—these are the germs not of one but of all the heresies; these are more or less the elements of nearly every false religion. The ponderous technicalities of the systematiser; the interested self–assertions of the priest; the dreamy speculations of the mystic; the Pharisaic conceit of the externalist; the polemical shibboleths of the sectarian; the spiritual pride and narrow one–sidedness of the self–tormentor; the ruinous identification of that saving faith which is a union with Christ and a participation of His life with the theoretic acceptance of a number of formulæ:—all these elements have from the earliest dawn of Christianity mingled in the tainted stream of heresy their elements of ignorance, self–interest, and error. In their dark features we detect a common resemblance.
“Facies non omnibus una
Nec diversa tanem, quales decet esse sororum.”
There was Gnosticism in the days of St. Paul as there is Gnosticism now, though neither then nor now is it recognised under that specific name.
We may, therefore, pass to the study of the Epistle with the strongest conviction that there is no expression in it which, on these grounds at any rate, disproves its genuineness. None but Paul could have written it. To say that it is un–Pauline in doctrine is to make an arbitrary assertion, since it states no single truth which is not involved in his previous teachings. The fact that it is a splendid development of those teachings, or rather an expansion in the statement of them, in order to meet new exigencies, is simply in its favour. Nor do I see how any one familiar with the style and mind of St. Paul can fail to recognise his touch in this Epistle. That the style should lack the fire and passion—the “meras flammas”—of the Epistle to the Galatians, and the easy, fervent outflowing of thought and feeling in those to the Thessalonians, Corinthians, and Philippians, is perfectly natural. Of all the converts to whom St. Paul had written, the Colossians alone were entire strangers to him. He had not indeed visited the Church of Rome, but many members of that Church were personally known to him, and he was writing to them on a familiar theme which had for years been occupying his thoughts. The mere fact that he had already written on the same topic to the Galatians would make his thoughts flow more easily. But in writing to the Colossians he was handling a new theme, combating a recent error with which, among Christians, he had not come into personal contact, and of which he merely knew the special characteristics at secondhand. When, in the Epistle to the Ephesians, he reverts to the same range of conceptions,24 his sentences run with far greater ease. The style of no man is stereotyped, and least of all is this the case with a man so many–sided, so emotional, so original as St. Paul. His manner, as we have repeatedly noticed, reflects to an unusual degree the impressions of the time, the place, the mood, in which he was writing. A thousand circumstances unknown to us may have given to this Epistle that rigid character, that want of spontaneity in the movement of its sentences, which led even Ewald into the improbable conjecture that the words were Timothy’s, though the subject and the thoughts belong to St. Paul. But the difference of style between it and other Epistles is no greater than we find in the works of other authors at different periods of their lives, or than we daily observe in the writings and speeches of living men who deal with different topics in varying moods.