Epistle to the Philippians

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The Epistle to the Philippians opens onto a congregation that had paid Paul’s keep. He sits under guard somewhere in the Roman world, and into his confinement has come a gift carried overland by one of the Philippians’ own, a man named Epaphroditus who reached him, fell gravely ill, and nearly died on the errand. The letter is, at its surface, a thank-you note threaded through with affection — Paul writing to the one community from which he was willing to accept money, the church at Philippi, a Roman colony in Macedonia that he had planted years before on the journey across the Aegean that first carried his message into Europe. Of all the letters gathered under his name in the New Testament, this is the warmest, and it is the one in which the largest claim he ever made about Christ arrives almost sideways, lodged in an appeal for two quarrelling women to make peace.

The Apostle Paul in Prison (1627) by Rembrandt; the letter to the Philippians was written by Paul in confinement. — Rembrandt, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Founding and the bond with Philippi

The community had its beginning, on the account preserved in the Acts of the Apostles, after Paul crossed from Asia Minor into Macedonia on his second missionary journey, drawn by a night vision of a man begging him to come over. Philippi was a Roman colony settled with veterans, governed under Roman law and proud of the privilege; it had no synagogue, and Paul found the first hearers of his message at a riverside place of prayer outside the gate.

The forum and acropolis of ancient Philippi, the Roman colony in Macedonia where Paul founded the community. — Ian W. Scott, via Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA 3.0)

The earliest convert named there is Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth from Thyatira, baptized with her household — the first European Christian on the Acts narrative — followed by the exorcism of a slave girl, the magistrates’ beating and jailing of Paul and Silas, and the conversion of the jailer who had held them. From that beginning the Philippians remained, in Paul’s telling, his closest partners. They sent support more than once; they shared, in the letter’s recurring word, a koinonia, a fellowship or partnership, in the work of the gospel. The tone of the letter is unmistakably a return of that affection.

The Baptism of Lydia (1861) by Marie Ellenrieder; Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth, is remembered as the first European convert. — Marie Ellenrieder, Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Authorship, place, and date

Among the writings credited to Paul, Philippians stands in the small inner group that critical scholarship across its full range accepts as genuinely his, alongside Romans, the Corinthian correspondence, and the early letter to Thessalonica. Unlike the contested cases of Ephesians, Colossians, and the letter to Timothy, its Pauline origin is not in serious dispute.

The ancient theater of Philippi, originally built in the fourth century BCE and rebuilt under Roman rule. — Carole Raddato, via Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA 2.0)

What is disputed is from where and when he wrote it. The letter says he is in chains, that his case has become known throughout the praetorium, and it closes with greetings from those of “Caesar’s household.” On the traditional reading these point to Rome and to the house arrest with which Acts ends, placing the letter around 60 to 62 CE, in the early 60s. But neither phrase settles the matter: a praetorium could be a provincial governor’s residence and its guard, and “Caesar’s household” named imperial slaves and freedmen scattered across the provinces, not only the capital. Caesarea, the scene of Paul’s detention under Felix and Festus in the late 50s, has had its defenders. A larger share of recent scholarship favors Ephesus, around the middle 50s: the letter implies a steady traffic of messengers between Paul and Philippi that a journey of weeks each way to Rome makes hard, while Ephesus lay within days of the colony; and Paul elsewhere speaks of mortal danger in Asia and of fighting “with beasts at Ephesus.” No source records an Ephesian imprisonment outright, so the case rests on inference. The question of place therefore carries the question of date with it, and both stay open — a matter of the scholarly record, not of the letter’s standing.

The personal letter

Much of the letter is occasional and concrete. Paul reports on his situation and insists, against the obvious, that his confinement has advanced rather than hindered the message; he weighs, in a famous passage, the pull between dying to be with Christ and remaining for the sake of the churches, and declares that for him living is Christ and dying is gain. He sketches his plans: to send Timothy, his most trusted coworker, once the outcome of his case is clear, and meanwhile to send Epaphroditus home recovered, lest the Philippians keep grieving over the news of his illness. Near the end he addresses two women of the congregation, Euodia and Syntyche, who had labored beside him in the gospel and had fallen into conflict, and he asks a third party to help reconcile them — one of the rare moments where a local quarrel in a first-century church is named in the record and left standing. Over the whole runs the imperative to rejoice; Paul returns to it so insistently that joy under pressure has become the letter’s signature, the counterintuitive note of a man in irons writing to people who fear for him.

The mood breaks sharply in the third chapter, where the warmth gives way to warning. Paul turns on rival teachers — those who would press circumcision and the works of the Law on his Gentile converts — with unusual heat, recounting his own credentials as a Pharisee of impeccable standing only to count them as loss for the sake of Christ. It is the seam at which the partition theorists have argued that a separate, more polemical letter was stitched in. Out of the polemic comes one of the letter’s other enduring images, and one finely judged for its audience: writing to the citizens of a proud Roman colony, men and women who held the privileges of Roman law in a Greek province, Paul tells them their true commonwealth — their politeuma, their citizenship — is in heaven, from which they await a savior who will transform the body of their humiliation into the likeness of his glory. The civic vocabulary of the colony is turned toward a loyalty above the emperor’s, an undertone not lost on readers who weigh the letter against its setting in the Roman order.

The hymn of self-emptying

The weight the letter has carried for later readers gathers in a short passage in the second chapter, set down not as doctrine but as the ground of an appeal for humility: let the same mind be in you that was in Christ. What follows is a compact narrative of descent and exaltation. The one who was in the morphe — the form, or condition — of God did not regard equality with God as something to be seized or exploited, but emptied himself, taking the morphe of a servant, born in human likeness; and humbling himself further, he became obedient to the point of death, death on a cross; and therefore God exalted him and granted him the name above every name, before which every knee shall bow. The Greek verb at the hinge, ekenosen — he emptied — gives the passage the name by which theology has known it ever since: the kenosis, the self-emptying.

Even the wording of its first line is a long-standing crux. The noun harpagmos, in the clause that Christ did not count equality with God a thing harpagmon — to be grasped — can be read in more than one direction. One reading, argued at length by R. W. Hoover in the Harvard Theological Review in 1971 and adopted by commentators including Peter O’Brien and Gordon Fee, treats it idiomatically as something one holds and might use for one’s own advantage, so that Christ, already possessing the divine status, declined to exploit it. Another, defended by C. F. D. Moule, keeps the more active sense of a thing snatched at or seized, not yet held. Behind both readings many interpreters hear the contrast with Adam, who in the garden grasped at being like God, and behind the descent itself the figure of the suffering servant of Isaiah, “poured out” unto death — though the strength of those allusions is itself debated. A second crux runs alongside the first: whether the passage assumes that Christ existed before the incarnation, descending from a divine condition he already held, or whether it describes a human figure exalted for his obedience, an Adam who reversed the first Adam’s grasping. Charles Talbert’s study of 1967 put the pre-existence question on the modern agenda, and the choice between a pre-existence reading and a purely Adamic one continues to divide commentators, since the same compressed Greek will carry either weight. The two cruxes are entangled: how one construes harpagmos tends to settle whether the one who declined to grasp already possessed what he might have seized.

A hymn, or exalted prose

Whether the cadenced lines are Paul’s own composition or an earlier piece he is quoting is the passage’s most worked-over question, and it belongs squarely to the realm of scholarly argument rather than settled fact. The case for a pre-Pauline hymn was put most influentially by Ernst Lohmeyer, whose Kyrios Jesus of 1928 set the verses out as a structured poem — on his analysis six strophes of three lines each — older than the letter and inserted into it. The proposal was taken up and modified across the twentieth century by Joachim Jeremias, Ernst Käsemann, and Ralph P. Martin, whose study of the passage in its recent interpretation became a standard point of reference and helped fix the label Carmen Christi, the song of Christ, on the lines. Against this current, Gordon Fee, in his commentary of 1995, argued that the passage is not really a hymn at all but exalted Pauline prose, integral to the letter and answering its argument, poetic in shape without being a quotation. Markus Bockmuehl’s commentary of 1998 weighs the options with similar care while reading the verses as theology grounded in their history of effect. The cadenced, balanced phrasing that long struck readers as liturgical is exactly what makes the question hard to close; the lines feel set apart from the prose around them, and that feeling has proved easier to register than to explain.

Afterlife: kenosis becomes a doctrine

Out of these verses the church drew one of the load-bearing texts of its long argument over how the divine and the human met in Christ. In the patristic and medieval reading the self-emptying was understood as a veiling rather than a loss — the Son took on the morphe of a servant without ceasing to be what he was, the full divinity present but hidden. The Lutheran scholastics of the seventeenth century turned the matter into a sharp dispute between the faculties of Tübingen and Giessen, the so-called krypsis–kenosis controversy: whether the incarnate Christ merely concealed his constant use of divine powers, or genuinely abstained from using them through his earthly life. It was in nineteenth-century Germany that kenosis hardened into a doctrine in its own name. Gottfried Thomasius (1802–1875), a Lutheran of the Erlangen school, proposed that in becoming human the Son actually laid aside certain divine attributes — the “relative” attributes of omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence — while retaining the essential attributes of holiness, love, and truth. The idea crossed to England, where Charles Gore (1853–1932) and after him P. T. Forsyth and H. R. Mackintosh made kenotic Christology a live option in the first half of the twentieth century. The claim that in the incarnation God set something divine aside, carried by a few verses Paul wrote to settle a local dispute about humility, is itself a measure of how far the passage has been made to bear.

A descent read from outside

For traditions outside the church, the descent-and-ascent shape of the hymn — a divine figure who comes down, takes a lowly form, and is raised again — has invited comparison with the wider late-antique pattern in which a soul falls into the world and is restored to its source. The map is familiar from the Gnostic systems and the literature of gnosis, where a heavenly figure descends through the spheres and a divine element is recovered from matter, and it sits not far from the speculations on the descending Logos that ran through the same centuries. The comparison runs only so far. Paul’s Christ empties himself by choice and as an example to imitate, not as a spark to be awakened. The letter ends as it began, in gratitude and in chains, its largest claim folded almost in passing into an appeal for two people to get along.

Research and reception

The standard scholarly editions and studies set the agenda for reading Philippians. Gordon D. Fee’s Paul’s Letter to the Philippians in the New International Commentary on the New Testament (Eerdmans, 1995) is the major modern argument that the Christ passage is Pauline composition rather than a borrowed hymn. Markus Bockmuehl’s volume in Black’s New Testament Commentary (1998) offers a historically grounded theological reading attentive to the letter’s later interpreters. The hymn-theory itself descends from Ernst Lohmeyer’s Kyrios Jesus (1928); its twentieth-century career, including the work of Käsemann and Jeremias, is surveyed in Ralph P. Martin’s monograph, A Hymn of Christ: Philippians 2:5–11 in Recent Interpretation. The vexed question of whether the hymn presupposes Christ’s pre-existence, and how the Adam parallel bears on it, is laid out in Charles H. Talbert’s The Problem of Pre-Existence in Philippians 2:6–11 (Journal of Biblical Literature, 1967). Whether the verses began as a sung liturgical piece at all has been pressed afresh in recent work; the question and its bearing on the earliest worship of Christ are weighed in Larry Hurtado’s discussion of the supposed Christ-hymns, which sets the Philippians passage beside the comparable lines in Colossians. On the unity of the letter, a German consensus of the 1960s held that canonical Philippians is a compilation of two or three letter-fragments, on the strength of the abrupt change of tone at the third chapter, the seemingly premature word of conclusion that still leaves two chapters to run, the late placement of the thanks for the gift near the very end, and the second-century witness of Polycarp of Smyrna, who speaks of Paul’s letters to the Philippians in the plural; against this stands the absence of any manuscript trace of separate letters, the earliest copy in the Chester Beatty papyrus P46 (around 200 CE) already carrying the letter whole, and the steady defense of its integrity by many later commentators.

A leaf of Papyrus 46, the earliest substantial copy of the Pauline letters (around 200 CE), which preserves Philippians whole. — Papyrus 46, Chester Beatty / University of Michigan, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

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