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. The congregation had been founded not by Paul himself but by an associate, Epaphras; the letter presents its author as writing from prison, addressing a church he has not visited but has heard reports about.

Its occasion is a dispute. Something the letter calls a “philosophy” — “empty deceit,” in its phrasing — had taken hold or threatened to, and the writer moves to counter it. The exact content of this teaching is reconstructed only from the rebuttal, and reconstructions vary: it seems to have combined Jewish observances of festival, new moon, and sabbath with dietary restrictions, a regimen of self-abasement, and what the letter names as “the worship of angels,” along with an interest in the stoicheia, the elemental powers thought to govern the cosmos. Whether this was an early form of the speculation later called Gnostic, a Jewish-mystical current, or a local syncretism is contested; the text gives only the polemic, not the system it opposed.

Against it the letter sets a single, expansive claim about Christ. The opening chapter contains a compressed hymn — that in Christ “all things were created,” visible and invisible, thrones and powers alike, and that “in him all the fullness was pleased to dwell.” This is the cosmic Christ: not one mediator among the ranked spirits of heaven but the one in whom and for whom those ranks themselves exist, so that the disputed regimen of angels and elements is, on the letter’s logic, beside the point. The practical exhortation that follows turns on the same axis — the believer has “died” to the elemental powers and need not be subject to their rules.

Authorship is the standing scholarly question. The letter names Paul, and some researchers defend that attribution; a substantial body of scholarship, weighing its distinctive vocabulary, its long periodic sentences, and a Christology more developed than the undisputed letters, judges it deutero-Pauline — composed after Paul’s death by someone writing in his name and authority, a common and not necessarily deceptive practice in the period. The case is genuinely undecided, and the dating shifts with the verdict, from the early 60s to perhaps a generation later. Colossians stands close to Ephesians, with which it shares much language, and to the short letter to Philemon, which names several of the same people.

For later readers the letter’s interest has lain mostly in its Christ-hymn, which gave Christian theology one of its earliest and most far-reaching statements of Christ as the principle of creation, and in its glimpse of an early contest over how far the unseen hierarchies of the cosmos should command a believer’s attention. What that opposing “philosophy” actually was, the letter does not say, and the silence has kept its readers guessing.

→ Related: Epistle To Titus · Second Epistle To Timothy · Epistle Of Jude · Gnosis · Logos