by N. T. Wright
That is the key to the sharp polemic at the start of chapter 3. Paul is anxious about the backlash against his message from people who shared the agenda of the “agitators” or “troublemakers” in Galatia. Such people have not yet, it seems, arrived in Philippi, but it may only be a matter of time. This is probably a sign that they are already at work in Ephesus; perhaps their opposition to his mission there had itself contributed to the crisis he had suffered. (That may be the meaning too of the curious passage in 1:15–18, about people who are announcing the messianic message with the sole object of making life harder for him in prison.)
All this might explain the tone of voice in his opening warning:
Watch out for the dogs! Watch out for the “bad works” people! Watch out for the “incision” party, that is, the mutilators! We are the “circumcision,” you see—we who worship God by the spirit, and boast in King Jesus, and refuse to trust in the flesh.10
The point is clear. “Dogs” was what Jews often called Gentiles. “Bad works” is a parody for the “good works” advocated by zealous Torah teachers. “The incision” or “the mutilation” is a translator’s attempt to bring out the force of Paul’s pun: instead of peritomē, “circumcision,” he writes katatomē, the act of making a cut in something, perhaps as a matter of pagan religious ritual. That is what it has come to, he says; people who go around insisting that converts should get circumcised are no better than pagan cult members who want to make knife marks in people’s flesh.
“We are the ‘circumcision’ ” is a breathtaking claim, but utterly consistent with Paul’s whole stance, ever since the road to Damascus. Once again, this is not about comparative religion. He is not saying, “We Jesus-followers have found a better sort of religion than the old Jewish one.” It is about messianic eschatology. This was the ultimate fulfillment of Israel’s hope: Messiah and resurrection! He is not saying, “I’ve decided to move from my old house to a nicer one down the road.” He is saying that his own home has been taken over by the architect who built it in the first place and that it is now being rebuilt around him. He intends to stay and see the business through. If others are saying they prefer the old house the way it was, they are missing the point: if Israel’s Messiah has come and has been raised from the dead, then those who follow him are the true people of God. This is blunt, but consistent. The followers of other first-century Jewish leaders would have said the same. This is not disloyalty to Israel’s God. It is the contested messianic loyalty that has characterized Paul throughout.
Paul was himself in an excellent position to push this point home. He knew the Jewish world from the inside. His credentials there were impeccable, up to and including the “zeal” because of which he persecuted the church. But this is where his meeting with the Messiah fulfilled everything, and thereby changed everything. If we want to know what drove Paul on and what the Damascus Road event had done to him, this is perhaps the clearest statement we have:
Whatever I had written in on the profit side, I calculated it instead as a loss—because of the Messiah. Yes, I know that’s weird, but there’s more: I calculate everything as a loss, because knowing King Jesus as my Lord is worth far more than everything else put together! In fact, because of the Messiah I’ve suffered the loss of everything, and I now calculate it as trash, so that my profit may be the Messiah, and that I may be discovered in him, not having my own covenant status defined by the Torah, but the status which comes through the Messiah’s faithfulness: the covenant status from God which is given to faith. This means knowing him, knowing the power of his resurrection, and knowing the partnership of his sufferings. It means sharing the form and pattern of his death, so that somehow I may arrive at the final resurrection from the dead.11
Out of the many things one could say about this passage, there are three important points for our present purposes. First, Paul is following the messianic pattern set out in the poem of 2:6–11. The Messiah regarded his status (“equality with God”) not as something to exploit, but as committing him instead to the life and the shameful death of the “slave.” That is why he is now exalted as Lord over all. Paul knows that he must therefore regard his own privileged status as a fully fledged member of God’s people as something he must not exploit. Instead, he will discover the true status of covenant membership and the resurrection hope that goes with it not through the Torah, but through the Messiah’s faithfulness.
Second, this passage is focused not just on a belief or theory about the Messiah, but on personal knowledge. He speaks of “knowing King Jesus as my Lord,” of “knowing him, knowing the power of his resurrection, and knowing the partnership of his sufferings.”12 Paul knows the theory through and through. He can expound it all day and, if need be, all night. But it means nothing without the awareness of the person and presence of Jesus himself.
Third, he has learned—perhaps he has learned this in new ways in the weeks and months before writing this letter—that this personal “knowledge” of the Messiah finds intimate expression in suffering. He speaks of this as a “partnership,” “the partnership of his sufferings.” The word is koinōnia, “fellowship” or “sharing.” But, as we saw, for Paul this expressed a mutual belonging for which modern English does not provide exact words. Perhaps this, seen in the light of Paul’s terrible experience, on the one hand, and, on the other, the poem of 2:6–11, gets us as close as we can come to the way in which he was now learning to “rely on the God who raises the dead.”13 Paul had come to the point where he was content to share the Messiah’s death in order that he might arrive with him at the ultimate hope of Israel, “the resurrection from the dead.” The ancient story of Israel had been fulfilled—in the Messiah. All Paul’s previous zeal for God and the Torah had had to be counted as “trash” by contrast. This is an expanded version of what he had said in Galatians 2:19–20:
Through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with the Messiah. I am, however, alive—but it isn’t me any longer; it’s the Messiah who lives in me.
That is why he now forgets his past and, like an athlete with his eye on the finishing line, aims “to strain every nerve to go after what’s ahead.”14
Then comes the point of all this: the Philippians must learn to imitate him, as he is imitating the Messiah.15 But how can they imitate him? They have not been zealous Jews, eager for the Torah. No, but they all have their own status, their own personal or civic pride. And even if they don’t have any (because they are poor, or slaves, or women—though some women, like Lydia, were independent and free), they all have the standing temptation to lapse back into pagan lifestyles. So whether they are Romans reverting to proud colonial ways or simply people who find themselves lured back into sensual indulgence,16 all must resist and find instead the way of holiness and unity that is shaped by the Messiah himself, by his choice of the way of the cross, by his status as the truly human one, the true embodiment of the One God.
Writing all this, celebrating the victory of the Messiah, Paul has arrived at a very different place from the one he describes in 2 Corinthians 1. In one of many allusions in this letter to the great philosophies of his time, Paul declares that being the Messiah’s man has produced the “contentment” for which both Stoics and Epicureans aim:
I’m not talking about lacking anything. I’ve learned to be content with what I have. I know how to do without, and I know how to cope with plenty. In every possible situation I’ve learned the hidden secret of being full and hungry, of having plenty and going without, and it’s this: I have strength for everything in the one who gives me power.17
There it is again: power. But “the extraordinary quality of the power belongs to God, not to us.”18 Paul has learned this now. His meditation on the victory of Jesus, growing out of the scripturally rooted prayers of many years, with those roots going down into the dark of suffering and despair, have brought him to a new place. All power is vested by God in Jesus. Any power Jesus’s followers may have comes
only through his work. He thanks the Philippians once more for the gift. He sends Epaphroditus on his way.
* * *
As the weeks turned into months during the dark prison days sometime in 55 or early 56, some of Paul’s friends were able to come and help take care of him, and he had a visitor, a frightened young man named Onesimus. Onesimus was a slave. He belonged to Philemon, a wealthy householder in the small city of Colossae, some 150 miles inland from Ephesus. He had run away, as slaves sometimes did, probably grabbing some money as he went. He knew the risk he was taking. Runaways were regularly punished with death; crucifixion (“to discourage the others,” of course) was common in such cases. Harboring or helping a runaway was also a serious crime. But Onesimus had come to Paul. Paul, having himself recently faced despair and death and having seen Onesimus’s master Philemon come to faith on a visit to Ephesus, found himself in a complex little situation that would have made a fascinating seminar in moral philosophy, had not so much immediate danger been riding on it. What to do?
The first thing was to share the gospel with Onesimus. The frightened slave, hearing the news of one who died the slave’s death out of sheer love—the same love that had made the world—was captivated by it. No doubt some converts, then as now, professed a quick faith in the hope of a quick reward, but Paul could see that the young man’s heart had truly been changed. He became like a son to Paul, eager to learn, eager to help (his name meant “useful,” and he was keen to live up to it). But the situation couldn’t last forever.
Paul could simply have helped the young man move away from trouble. He could have instructed one of his friends to take him to Greece or even farther afield. But what would Paul then say to Philemon the next time they met? And how would it be if word got out that this subversive jailbird, in addition to his other notorious antisocial behavior, had taken to sheltering runaway slaves? Moreover, when Paul reflected on the vocation he had been given, one of the best descriptions he could find was the word “reconciliation,” katallagē. The gospel was about the One God reconciling the world to himself, and also—as he had written to the Galatians less than a decade earlier—about Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female coming to be “all one in the Messiah, Jesus.” If this was real—if it wasn’t just a grandiose idea in his head—it had to work on the ground. Real Jews, real Greeks. Real men and women. Real slaves, real masters.
Slavery is of course revolting. We know this. We know only too well the terrible ways in which slavery was developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, until brave campaigners abolished it, often in the teeth of principled opposition that claimed, among other things, to be grounded in the Bible. In particular, we associate slavery with racism. And we know that, despite abolition, the practice has made its way back into the modern world. We wish Paul had said, “Free them all! It’s a wicked practice!”
That would have been a futile gesture. Slavery in the ancient world did, more or less, everything that is done in our world by oil, gas, or electricity, everything that we accomplish through our technology. Denouncing slavery would have been like denouncing electricity and the internal combustion engine. What’s more, we must remind ourselves that slavery in Paul’s world had nothing to do with ethnic origin. All you had to do to become a slave was to be on the losing side in battle or even to fail in business. Slaves were, of course, often exploited, abused, treated like trash, but they could also become respected, cherished, and valued members of a family. Cicero’s slave Tiro was his right-hand man. He even invented shorthand. Slavery was complex but omnipresent.
Paul knew that the God of Israel had defined himself in action as the slave-freeing God. That is what the story of the Exodus was all about. Paul believed (and he believed that God believed) in ultimate freedom, a freedom of creation itself from the “slavery to decay,” a freedom that would mean resurrection life for all God’s children.19 As always, Paul’s challenge was to bring this cosmic vision into the real world of compromised and perplexed humans. And he hit upon a plan to make Philemon and Onesimus a small working model of what Messiah-based freedom might look like.
He couldn’t just write to Philemon and say, “By the way, Onesimus has come to me. Please give him his freedom and let him stay here.” That was, we may suppose, what he wanted, but it wouldn’t address the real issue. It would merely encourage other slaves to come and try the same thing. Nor could he say, as the Roman letter writer Pliny had said when writing to a friend in similar circumstances, “I’ve given him a good talking-to, and I want you to let him off this time.”20
Paul’s aim is higher and deeper. He has been meditating in prison, as he worked through the shock and horror of his own plight, on the way in which God himself was present in the Messiah, reconciling the world to himself. Now, perhaps, God would be present in him, Paul, reconciling these two dear people through a high-risk pastoral strategy. Onesimus will go back to Philemon (accompanied, so it seems from Col. 4:7–9, by Paul’s friend Tychicus) with a letter from Paul. It is asking a lot of them both. It is dangerous for Onesimus and extremely awkward for Philemon. But perhaps the letter will not only explain what ought to happen, but actually help to bring it about.
It is a small masterpiece. Paul explains to Philemon that he is praying that their koinōnia will have its full, powerful effect, bringing them all together “into the king,” into the Messiah. From Paul’s other uses of this idea we see what he means: “the Messiah” is not only Jesus, but all those who are “in the Messiah.” It is an incorporative term, as it was in Galatians (“You are all one in the Messiah, Jesus”) and 1 Corinthians (“as the body is one, and has many members, . . . so also is the Messiah”).21 “We must,” he says in Ephesians, “speak the truth in love, and so grow up in everything into him”—that is, into the Messiah.22 This rich unity is one of Paul’s constant imperatives; the other is holiness. But how is it to be achieved?
“God was reconciling the world to himself in the Messiah,” Paul wrote later, “not counting their transgressions against them, and entrusting us with the message of reconciliation.”23 The message of reconciliation is then, at that point, reembodying God’s action. Paul stands between Philemon and Onesimus, joining them together in his own person and appeal. “Here,” he says (stretching out one arm), “is Onesimus, my son, my own heart, who has been looking after me here in prison, on your behalf as it were!” And (stretching out the other arm) to Philemon, he says, “Your love gives me so much comfort. You are my partner in the gospel. You owe me, after all, your own very self. You have the chance now to refresh me, even here in prison.” Paul stands metaphorically between the two men, reaching out in the shape of the cross. “Oh, and by the way,” he says (“not counting their transgressions against them”), “if he’s wronged you, put it down on my account. I’ll make it good.” And then he adds, “One more thing. Get a guest room ready for me. Keep praying, and I will be out of here soon. Then I’ll be coming to visit.”
This would demand humility and trust on both sides. Onesimus was not going to set off to Colossae with a spring in his step, imagining everything was going to be easy. There had been reasons why he ran away, and those reasons, whatever they were, would have to be confronted. Philemon would be astonished and quite possibly angry to see him return; he would also realize the delicate balance both of what Paul had said and of what he was being asked to do. As a policy statement about slavery, the letter falls short of what we would want. As an experiment in a one-off, down-to-earth pastoral strategy, it is brilliant. And it seems to have worked. Fifty years later the bishop of Ephesus is a man called Onesimus. The young slave, now an elderly Christian leader? Or a name already respected within the early community?
* * *
If Paul is going to send Onesimus and Tychicus all the way to Colossae, there are other things he wants to say to the church there as a whole. In any case, he has had in mind the possibility of writing a circular, a letter to all the churches in the area. He has it mapped out already in hi
s head, and he will write the two, as it were, side by side, the general letter to all the churches and the particular one to Colossae. Both of them, probably written therefore in 55 or early 56, explain, in slightly different but convergent ways, why he is in prison and why the churches, hearing about this, ought not to worry as though it might mean that the gospel itself were at risk. Both of them address this by embodying his deep meditation on the power of Jesus over all the powers of the world, the theme that (I am suggesting) has helped Paul back into a position of trust after despair. Both of them, true to his whole worldview, are rooted in the world of ancient Jewish and biblical thought refashioned around Jesus and addressing the world of pagan power with the new and subversive message of the gospel.
Before we plunge into these two letters, Colossians and Ephesians, we need to say a word about Paul’s authorship. The present book is not the place to go into technical arguments, but a short explanation may be in order.
Most modern Western critics still express doubts about Paul’s authorship of one or both of these letters. These doubts are based partly on style, though in fact most of Paul’s letters exhibit different styles, and I have already explained that perhaps the sharpest stylistic difference among the Pauline letters is that between the first and second Corinthian letters, both of which are normally accepted as authentic. The questions of style mostly concern Ephesians rather than Colossians, but I have been impressed by the proposals of some scholars that in these letters, written from and to the heart of the province of Asia, Paul may well have been deliberately adopting the “Asiatic” style of writing, with its wordplay, florid sentences, and rhythm. This was well known (though controversial) at the time, not least among Roman orators, some of whom were imitating “Asiatic” Greek models and others of whom regarded this as degenerate.
In any case, three things have to be said about Pauline style. First, those who have done computer analysis of these things have tended to say that most of the letters come from him. Second, Paul’s surviving letters are in fact so short, by comparison with most literary products from the ancient world, that it is hard to be sure we have enough to make a valid comparison. Third, it is easy for critics to be too wooden in their view of how this or that person ought to write. It is perfectly possible for the same person to write, in the same week, a learned article for a journal, a speech for a political meeting, a children’s talk, and perhaps some scraps of poetry. Small variations in style—and that is all that they are in the case of the Pauline letters—are to be expected when the same person faces different situations. And, in the case of Ephesians, Paul is writing a general letter without a specific situation or audience in mind.