Epistle to the Colossians

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The Epistle to the Colossians is one of the shorter letters of the New Testament, written in the name of the apostle Paul to a small Christian community at Colossae, a town in the Lycus valley of inland Phrygia, in what is now western Turkey. Colossae sat on the old road east from Ephesus toward the Euphrates, in the shadow of two larger neighbors, Laodicea and Hierapolis, both named in the same letter. The congregation there had been founded not by Paul himself but by an associate, Epaphras — a Colossian who had carried the message home and is praised in the text as the church’s first teacher. The letter presents its author as writing from prison, in chains, addressing a church he has never visited and knows only by report. He has not seen these people’s faces; what he sends is not the record of a shared history but the intervention of an absent authority into a quarrel he has heard about from afar.

The occasion: a rival teaching, reconstructed from its rebuttal

The occasion is that quarrel. Something the letter calls a “philosophy” — “empty deceit,” in its own phrasing — had taken hold at Colossae, or threatened to, and the writer moves the whole weight of the letter to counter it. The difficulty for any reader is that the teaching survives only in the mirror of its refutation. The text never sets it out; it only strikes at it, point by point, so that the shape of the thing has to be read backward from the blows aimed at it. This is the same problem faced by anyone reconstructing a lost current from the testimony of its enemies — a labor with a long history in the study of heterodox movements, where the only witnesses are frequently the very heresiologists who wrote to destroy what they described, and where the description and the distortion cannot be cleanly separated. The Mead translation of Fragments of a Faith Forgotten opens precisely on this difficulty for the later Gnostic schools, whose doctrines were long known chiefly through the polemics of those who condemned them.

What can be drawn from the rebuttal is a cluster of practices and claims. There is the keeping of a sacred calendar — festival, new moon, and sabbath — the markers of an observant Jewish piety. There are dietary restrictions, food and drink hedged about with rules. There is a regimen the letter names with a word for self-abasement or harsh humility, an ascetic severity toward the body captured in the slogan it quotes and mocks: handle not, taste not, touch not. There is what the text calls the “worship of angels,” coupled with the visionary boasting of a man who dwells on things he claims to have seen. And running beneath all of it is an interest in the stoicheia tou kosmou, the “elements of the world” — a phrase that in the Greek of the period could mean the basic physical constituents of the cosmos, or the rudimentary first principles of a system, or, in the reading that has fascinated later interpreters, the elemental cosmic powers thought to stand over the material order and govern it. The same phrase carries the same ambiguity in the letter to the Galatians, where Paul links the stoicheia to a bondage from which the believer has been freed — a usage that ties Colossians to the undisputed Pauline correspondence, the Romans and Corinthian letters among them.

Whether this Colossian teaching was an early form of the speculation later named Gnostic, a Jewish-mystical current of visionary ascent, or a local Phrygian syncretism blending Jewish observance with pagan and folk-religious habit, is contested and will likely stay so, because the evidence is one-sided by construction. The case for a Jewish-mystical reading rests on the calendar, the asceticism, and on a particular construal of the “worship of angels”: the scholar Fred Francis argued that the Greek phrase is best taken not as worship directed to angels but as the worship performed by angels — the heavenly liturgy of the host, into which the visionary, by fasting and self-discipline, hopes to be admitted, a pattern with striking parallels in the angelic Sabbath liturgies recovered from Qumran. Against this, Clinton Arnold and the older consensus read the phrase the plain way, as a cult of angelic intermediaries of the kind native to the magical and folk piety of Phrygia, where the veneration of angels is attested into late antiquity. The letter itself does not adjudicate; it gives the polemic, not the system, and the silence at its center is structural, not incidental.

The cosmic Christ of the opening hymn

Against the whole apparatus of calendar, abstinence, and angelology the letter sets a single, expansive claim, and concentrates it in the most famous passage it contains. Early in the first chapter the prose lifts into what reads as a hymn — a unit of exalted, balanced language that many scholars judge to be older than the letter, a confession the writer takes up and presses into service rather than composing fresh. Its lines run in two movements, each opening on the same turn, “who is,” and each crowned by the same word, “firstborn.” In the first, Christ is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation: in him, through him, and for him “all things were created,” in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible — and then comes the roll call that gives the hymn its edge: thrones, dominions, rulers, powers. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. In the second movement he is the head of the body, the church, the beginning, the firstborn from the dead; for in him “all the fullness was pleased to dwell,” and through him to reconcile all things, making peace by the blood of the cross.

The force of this for the Colossian dispute lies in the inventory. The ranked spirits the rival teaching courts — the angelic powers, the elemental rulers of the cosmos, the very stoicheia whose calendar and abstinence the Colossians were being urged to keep — are named here only to be placed. They are created things. Thrones and dominions and powers belong on the made side of the line that runs through the hymn, not the maker’s side; they are not rungs of a ladder the soul must climb through fasting and vision, but items in a catalog of what was brought into being in Christ and is held together by him. This is the cosmic Christ: not one mediator among the spirits of heaven, jostling for rank, but the one in whom and for whom the ranks themselves exist. The word the hymn uses for this totality, pleroma — fullness — is the hinge. In the later Gnostic systems pleroma would name the divine realm of the full assembly of aeons, the graded emanations spread out between the unknowable source and the world; the soul’s task in those systems was to ascend back through that distribution. The Colossian hymn refuses the distribution. The fullness is not spread thin across a hierarchy of intermediaries to be negotiated one by one — it dwells, whole and undivided, in Christ. Several readers have suspected that the writer took the word straight from the vocabulary of the opponents and turned it against them: the fullness they seek, he answers, is exactly what is found in Christ, in one place, already.

This is the Christology the letter exists to assert, and it is the most far-reaching of its contributions to later Christian thought: the figure of Christ not merely as redeemer within the world but as the principle through which the world is, the agent and the goal of creation, the one who holds the cosmos in coherence. It stands close to the cosmic role assigned to the divine Logos in the philosophical Judaism of Philo of Alexandria and to the opening of the Gospel of John, and it would supply the church’s theologians with one of their earliest and densest statements of Christ as the meaning of the made order.

”You have died to the elements”

From this height the letter descends to the practical, and the descent keeps the same axis. If the powers are created and Christ is their head, then the believer’s relation to them has already been settled, and settled in advance of any observance. The argument turns on a death. In the rite of baptism the believer was buried with Christ and raised with him; and in that joining, the letter says, he died to the stoicheia. The question the writer then puts is withering in its logic: if they died to the elements of the world, why — as though they still belonged to it — do they submit to its regulations, handle not, taste not, touch not, rules that perish in the using and rest on human command? Such discipline has, in the letter’s concession, “an appearance of wisdom,” a real look of severe and chosen piety; but it has no power against the indulgence it claims to master, and, more to the point, it is the wrong gesture entirely. The believer is not climbing toward the powers; he has been lifted clean past them. The exhortation that follows tells him to seek the things above, where Christ is, because his life is now hidden there. The whole ascetic program of the rival philosophy is not so much forbidden as rendered pointless: one does not appease or ascend through rulers one has already died out from under.

The same move quietly dissolves the calendar and the boundary markers. Festival, new moon, and sabbath, food rules and circumcision, are called shadows of what was to come; the substance is Christ, and one does not go on bowing to the shadow once the body that cast it has arrived. Here the letter touches the great first-century argument over the standing of the Jewish law for gentile believers — the argument that drives the letter to the Romans and the Corinthian correspondence — but it touches it from a particular angle, through the cosmology rather than through the question of justification. The problem at Colossae is framed less as legalism than as a misplaced cosmic allegiance: an attention paid to the unseen hierarchies of heaven that, on the letter’s reckoning, is owed to none of them.

The contested authorship

Authorship is the standing scholarly question, and it is a genuinely open one. The letter names Paul, opens and closes in his manner, and for most of Christian history was read without hesitation as his. A substantial body of modern scholarship judges it instead to be deutero-Pauline — composed after Paul’s death by someone writing in his name and under his authority, a practice common in the period and not necessarily understood as deception, since to write in the voice of a master could be an act of fidelity, extending his teaching into a situation he had not lived to address. The arguments are internal. The Greek of Colossians runs to long, accumulating, periodic sentences, heavier and more liturgical in their build than the swift dialectical thrust of the undisputed letters. The vocabulary carries an unusual number of words found nowhere else in the Pauline corpus. And the Christology is more developed, more cosmic and more “realized” in its eschatology — the believer is already raised with Christ, set in the heavenly places — where the certain letters keep the resurrection of the believer as a future hope. Set against all this is the letter’s dense web of personal names and its tight kinship with the short, almost universally accepted note to Philemon, which names many of the same companions; that overlap is read by defenders of authenticity as the fingerprint of a real situation, and by others as the careful furniture of a skilled imitator working with a genuine Pauline letter open before him.

James Dunn, in his 1996 commentary on the Greek text, takes the letter as a bridge between the undisputed Paul and the later Pauline school — close enough to the apostle to have come from his circle in his lifetime, perhaps drafted by a co-worker such as Timothy with Paul’s sanction, yet already leaning toward the developed thought of the next generation. John Barclay’s 1997 guide lays out the same evidence and declines to force a verdict, treating the question as one that the data genuinely underdetermine. The dating moves with the judgment: if Paul’s, the letter belongs to one of his imprisonments in the early 60s; if not, it may fall a generation later, in the 70s or 80s, when his name had become a banner under which the churches he founded went on arguing. Either way Colossians stands in the closest possible relation to the Epistle to the Ephesians, with which it shares whole blocks of language — Ephesians reading, on most accounts, as an expansion and generalization of it — and to the personal letter to Philemon, which it appears to accompany, the two carried, in the narrative the text supplies, by the same messengers.

In the canon and after

Colossians entered the collection of Pauline letters early and without controversy: it stands in the canon of Marcion in the mid-second century, is listed among the genuine Pauline writings in the Muratorian fragment, and is echoed by Ignatius of Antioch within a generation or two of any plausible date of writing. Its career in later thought has run along two channels. For the main Christian traditions it is read as a charter of the all-sufficiency of Christ and a caution against any piety that would add observances, intermediaries, or secret disciplines to him. For readers drawn to the esoteric, it has offered something nearer to a map — a heaven stocked with thrones and dominions, an interest in the elements and the angelic ranks, a vocabulary of fullness and hidden things that resonates with the cosmologies of Gnosis, Gnosticism, and the mystery cults, and with later schemes of emanation and graded being. The irony is exact: the letter furnishes the furniture of those systems precisely in the act of repudiating them.

For everything the letter leaves dark about its opponents, its central gesture is not in doubt, and it is not a gesture of mystery but of placement. The rulers are named, the powers are listed, the thrones and dominions are set down one by one — and every one of them is filed under what was made, with a single name written over the whole inventory. Where the rival teaching arranged the cosmos as a graded ascent of beings each owed its measure of fear and observance, the letter collapses the gradient: there is the maker, and there is the made, and the made — every angel, every element, every throne — is held together in the one through whom it came to be. The believer who has died into that one has nothing left to climb and no one left above him to placate.

Editions, commentary, and the text

The Greek text of Colossians is established in the standard critical editions of the New Testament, the Nestle-Aland and the United Bible Societies’ texts, where its variants are few and its integrity secure. The classic English-language commentary remains J. B. Lightfoot’s Saint Paul’s Epistles to the Colossians and to Philemon (1875), whose long essay on the Colossian “heresy” set the terms for a century of debate by reading it as an “Essene”-tinged Judaism with ascetic and angelological features. Among modern treatments, James Dunn’s commentary on the Greek text (NIGTC, 1996) is the fullest scholarly handling of the stoicheia problem and the philosophy, while John M. G. Barclay’s Colossians and Philemon (Sheffield, 1997) is the most balanced short orientation to the critical questions, surveying the authorship debate and the rival reconstructions of the opposing teaching without foreclosing them. Each reconstruction must work the same backward path — building the opponents’ system from the polemic that buries it, the method by which the Gnostic schools too are known mainly through the writings raised against them — and each, in the end, runs up against the letter’s refusal to describe what it is so determined to subordinate.

→ In the library: Mead — Fragments of a Faith Forgotten — on reconstructing a teaching from the writings of its opponents

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