by N. T. Wright
The real problem, of course, is that from the nineteenth century onward the leading edge of Pauline scholarship was located within German liberal Protestantism. In that world, the remarkably “high” view of the church in these letters was thought to contrast with the more “protestant” view of Romans, Galatians, and the Corinthian letters. This is in fact a straightforward mistake. Paul’s view of the church, though variously expressed, is consistent across the whole corpus, and it is only by shrinking what Paul says in Romans and Galatians that one can imagine Ephesians and Colossians as radically different. There are other related points, for instance, about the view of Jesus. But these too are based on a shrunken view of what Paul was saying in Romans and the other obviously authentic letters.
In any case, though this is something that has only become clear with more recent work on the Jewish world of the day, Ephesians and Colossians are both deeply Jewish in their orientation—rethought around Jesus, of course, but making the sense they make within that worldview. Nineteenth-century Protestantism didn’t favor Jewish thought either, and it certainly didn’t want Paul to be too Jewish. Much more recently, some people have taken exception to the “household codes” in Ephesians and Colossians, supposing them to be anathema to the liberal agenda they find in Galatians and elsewhere. This too is a mistake. As historians, we must not set up the artificial standards of contemporary moralizing and then construct a “Paul” to fit. Fashions come and go in the scholarly world. The fashion for rejecting Ephesians and Colossians—or perhaps we should say for helping the Protestant Paul to keep his distance from Judaism, on the one hand, and from Catholicism, on the other—has had a long run for its money. Because it appears “critical,” many are frightened to challenge it for fear of appearing “uncritical.” Once we place the letters in Ephesus, where I think they belong, these problems begin to look as though they are generated by ideology rather than historical study.
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Colossians is written, it appears, to a young church. Paul has been informed of its existence by Epaphras, himself from Colossae, who seems to have been converted under Paul in Ephesus and to have returned home to spread the word. Paul is praying for the church to grow in faith, wisdom, and understanding and to be able—here is that theme again—to draw on the “power” of Jesus in living and working to his glory.24 In particular, Paul longs that they would develop and enrich the practice of giving thanks. To that end he supplies them with a poem that, like the poem in Philippians 2, celebrates the universal lordship of Jesus over all the powers of the world.
This, as I have suggested, was part of the tonic Paul himself had needed as he battled with the powers. Indeed, part of the meaning of this poem is precisely that it is written by someone in prison. It is, in other words, inviting those who read it or pray it to imagine a different world from the one they see all around them—a world with a different Lord, a world in which the One God rules and rescues, a world in which a new sort of wisdom has been unveiled, a world in which there is a different way to be human.
“Wisdom” is in fact the subtext of much of Colossians. As always, Paul wants people to learn to think—not simply to imbibe rules and principles to learn by heart, but to be able to grow up as genuine humans, experiencing “all the wealth of definite understanding” and coming to “the knowledge of God’s mystery.”25 All this will happen as they realize that it is Jesus himself who reveals that “mystery.” The Messiah himself is “the place” where they are to find “all the hidden treasures of wisdom and knowledge.”26
Paul is here drawing deeply upon two important strands of Jewish thinking. On the one hand, as we have seen, he knows very well the traditions of prayerful meditation through which devout Jews hoped for a vision of the heavenly realm, and perhaps even of the One God himself. These traditions seem to have been developed at a time when, with pagans still ruling even after the Babylonian exile itself had ended, there was a sense that the greatest prophetic promises, particularly those concerning the visible and powerful return of Israel’s God to the Temple in Zion, had not been realized. Perhaps this was a time of testing and patience, in which some might glimpse, in advance as it were, the reality that would one day fill the Temple and flood the whole creation . . .
That whole creation, second, was made by the One God through his wisdom. That was what Proverbs 8 had said, starting a line of thought that would be developed by Jewish thinkers down to Paul’s own day. It began, to be sure, as a metaphor; to speak of “Lady Wisdom” as God’s handmaid in creation was a poetic way of saying that when God made the world, his work was neither random nor muddled, but wise—coherent and well ordered; it made sense. And, of course—this is the point of the book of Proverbs as a whole and the later literature that echoes and develops it—if you want to be a genuine human being, reflecting God’s image, then you need to be wise as well. You need to get to know Lady Wisdom.
The “mystery” tradition and the “wisdom” tradition were both focused by some writers in the period on the Temple. That was where the One God had promised to dwell. If there was to be a display of the ultimate mystery, you might expect either that it would be in the Temple or that it would be as if you were in the Temple. The book known as Ecclesiasticus, or the Wisdom of Jesus ben Sirach, written around 200 BC, imagines Lady Wisdom wanting to come and live among humans and wondering where to establish her dwelling. There is no contest: the Temple, of course, is the answer.27 All this gets bound together in yet another strand of Jewish thinking: David’s son Solomon, the ultimate “wise man” in the Bible, is also the king who builds the Temple. When Solomon consecrates the newly built shrine, the divine glory comes to fill the house in such blazing brilliance that the priests cannot stand there to do their work.28
For us, living in a different culture entirely, all this feels like an odd combination of disparate ideas. In Paul’s world, and especially for a well-educated Jew, all these apparently separate notions belonged together like a single well-oiled machine—or, perhaps better, like a single human being, in this case Jesus. What does it mean to say that he is the place where you’ll find all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge?
This is what it means, Paul declares, as he lays out another astonishing poem in which all that I have just said comes not only to expression, but to beautiful expression. Here is the secret of creation, of wisdom, of mystery, of the Temple. Here is how it fits together.
The book of Genesis begins with “In the beginning,” which in Hebrew is a single word, bereshith. The particle be can mean “in” or “through” or “for”; the noun reshith can mean “beginning,” “head,” “sum total,” or “first fruits.” Proverbs 8 had Lady Wisdom declare that God created her “as the beginning of his work,” bereshith darkō. And the account of creation in Genesis 1 reaches its climax with the creation of the humans in the image of God. Creation as a whole is a Temple, the heaven-and-earth reality in which God wants to dwell, and the mode of his presence in that Temple (as anyone in the ancient world would have known perfectly well) was the “image,” the cult object that would represent the creator to the world and that wider world before the creator. Complicated? Yes, but it only seems that way to us, because our culture has done its best to unlearn this kind of thought. Complex but coherent, a bit like creation itself, in fact, or indeed like a human being.
Now imagine all that complex but coherent Jewish thought pondered and prayed by Paul as he travels, as he works in his hot little shop, as he stays in a wayside inn, as he teaches young Timothy the vast world of scripture, which is his natural habitat. Imagine him praying all that in the Temple itself as he visits Jerusalem after watching the gospel at work in Turkey and Greece. Imagine, particularly, Paul finding here fresh insight into the way in which, as the focal point of creation, of wisdom and mystery, and of the deep meaning of humanness itself, Jesus is now enthroned as Lord over all possible powers. And now imagine Paul in his moment of crisis, of despair, feeling that the “powers” had overcome him after a
ll, reaching down into the depths of this fathomless well of truth to find, in a fresh way, what it might mean to trust in the God who raises the dead. This is what he comes up with:
He is the image of God, the invisible one,
The firstborn of all creation.
For in him all things were created,
In the heavens and here on the earth.
Things we can see and things we cannot—
Thrones and lordships and rulers and powers—
All things were created both through him and for him.
And he is ahead, prior to all else
And in him all things hold together;
And he himself is supreme, the head
Over the body, the church.
He is the start of it all,
Firstborn from realms of the dead;
So in all things he might be the chief.
For in him all the Fullness was glad to dwell
And through him to reconcile all to himself,
Making peace through the blood of his cross,
Through him—yes, things on the earth,
And also the things in the heavens.29
If this poem were less elegant, one might say that Paul was shaking his fist at the powers, the powers on earth and the powers in the dark realms beyond the earth, the powers that had put him in prison and crushed his spirit to the breaking point. But he is not. The theological effect is the same; he is invoking and celebrating a world in which Jesus, the one through whom all things were made, is now the one through whom, by means of his crucifixion, all things are reconciled. This is not, of course, the world that he and his friends can see with the naked eye. They see local officials giving allegiance to Caesar. They see bullying magistrates, threatening officers. They see prisons and torture. But they are now invited to see the world with the eye of faith, the eye that has learned to look through the lens of scripture and see Jesus.
Like an apocalyptic vision, this mystery-revealing poem offers a glimpse of another world, a truer world than the violent and brutish world of paganism then and now. It was a Jewish world, but with a difference—a Jewish world made sense of at last by the coming of the Messiah, the true son of David, the truly human one (the “image”), for whose reality and meaning even the Jerusalem Temple was the advance signpost. “All the Fullness”—the full divinity of the One God—“was glad to dwell” in him. This is Temple language. It offers the highest view of Jesus one could have, up there along with John’s simple but profound statement: “The Word became flesh, and lived among us.”30 And Jesus is the Image, the truly human one at the heart of the world temple, the one who straddles heaven and earth, holding them together at last, the one whose shameful death has reconciled all things to the Creator.
With this brief but breathtaking vision of Jesus, Paul puts the Colossians and himself into the picture. They have come to be part of it all, and Paul’s own sufferings too are part of the way in which Jesus’s lordship is implemented in the world. The Messiah, indeed, is living within them, just as Paul had said to the Galatians. The ancient Jewish hope that the glory of the One God would return and fill the world is thus starting to come true. It may not look like it in Colossae, as ten or twenty oddly assorted people crowd into Philemon’s house to pray, to invoke Jesus as they worship the One God, to break bread together, and to intercede for one another and the world; but actually the Messiah, there in their midst, is “the hope of glory.”31 One day the whole creation will be flooded with his presence. Then they will look back and realize that they, like the Temple itself, had been a small working model, an advance blueprint, of that renewed creation.
This leads to a warning that functions rather as Philippians 3:2–11 had. It is not so clear in this passage that Paul is warning the Colossians against a repeat of what had happened in Galatia, but when we read the whole passage, we get the point. “You are already,” he says, “the true monotheists, focused on the true Temple.32 You have already been ‘circumcised,’ not in the ordinary physical way, but through dying and rising with the Messiah.33 And the Torah, which might have stood in your way, has been set aside.34 Therefore, recognize that you are under no obligation to obey regulations regarding diet, festivals or Sabbaths, no matter what visions and revelations people may claim as they instruct you.”35 What does all this add up to? Monotheism, Temple, circumcision, Torah, food laws, Sabbaths, visions, and revelations . . . this sounds exactly like the Jewish world that Paul knows so well. The warnings are indeed similar to those in Philippians 3. We do not need to imagine, as many have done, that a strange syncretistic “philosophy” had invaded Colossae. This is a coded warning against being lured into the Jewish fold.
Why, then, does he speak of “philosophy and hollow trickery” that people might use to “take them captive”?36 As in Galatians 4, he is clear that, when a synagogue community rejects the message about the crucified Messiah, what is left is simply one philosophy among many. “Philosophy” in Paul’s world was a way of life; some Jewish writers referred to their own worldview that way. The key word, though, is “take you captive,” a single and very rare Greek word: sylagōgōn. Change one letter—a single pen stroke in the Greek—and it would become sylagōgōn, “lead you into the synagogue.” We remember how, in Philippians 3, Paul warned against the katatomē, “mutilation,” as a contemptuous pun on peritomē, “circumcision.” In the same way, he is here sweeping aside any possibility that Jewish (or Jewish Christian) teachers might come and persuade the Colossian Jesus-followers to get circumcised. That’s already happened, he says. They have already died and been raised with the Messiah.
That then forms the framework for his brief instructions that run from the end of chapter 2 to near the end of the letter. This is a longer application of Galatians 2:19–20: “Through the law I died to the law . . . I am, however, alive.” “Realize,” he says, “who you really are. The Messiah died and was raised; you are in him; therefore, you have died and been raised—and you must learn to live accordingly. The day is coming when the new creation, at present hidden, will be unveiled, and the king, the Messiah, will be revealed in glory. When that happens, the person you already are in him will be revealed as well. Believe it, and live accordingly.”37 The instructions that follow—emphasizing sexual purity; wise, kind, and truthful speech; and unity across traditional boundaries—are crisp and basic. All comes back to thanksgiving.38 That is the context for the brief “household code” of instructions for wives, husbands, and—strikingly—children and slaves, who are treated as real human beings with responsibilities.
Prayers and greetings conclude matters. As with Romans (the only other letter written to a church Paul hadn’t visited himself), these greetings are fuller than usual. The list of Paul’s companions corresponds closely to the list at the end of the letter to Philemon, but with more description: Aristarchus appears to be imprisoned alongside Paul; Mark (Barnabas’s nephew) is assisting Paul as well, having apparently gotten over whatever problems he had had seven or eight years earlier. In addition to the rise in Paul’s spirits, caused (I have suggested) by his prolonged meditation on the sovereignty of Jesus over all powers of whatever sort, these companions have clearly been a great encouragement to him, not least the three who are themselves Jewish (Aristarchus, Mark, and Jesus Justus, the only one not mentioned in Philemon). This is significant for a number of reasons. Paul was constantly aware of the danger that, well known as he was for insisting that the Gentiles should be full members of the church without circumcision, Jews, including Jewish Jesus-followers, would shun him. The fact that Mark in particular is working with him may well indicate that any rift between Paul and the family that included Peter as well as Barnabas has been properly patched up.
Paul tells the Colossians, intriguingly, that when they have had the letter read to them, they should pass it on to the church in Laodicea, and also that they should be sure to read the letter that will come on to them from Laodicea. There is clearly a circular coming around. Tychicus
and Onesimus, it seems, will bring them both. It will, however, be an interesting and challenging trip for the two messengers. Tychicus will have his work cut out to keep Onesimus cheerful during the week that it will take them to walk to Colossae.
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From where I sit I can see dozens of photographs, mixed in between piles of books and papers, coffee cups and candlesticks. Most of them are small, particular shots: family members, holiday scenery, a white pony by the seashore, a distant cityscape. There is even a picture of my wife taking a picture of the pope (don’t ask). But in the next room, just out of sight but clear in memory, there is a frame that contains fourteen photographs, cut and joined to make a complete panorama. It was taken on vacation in Switzerland, on the mountain ridge called Schynige Platte in the Bernese Oberland. The camera has swung through a full circle, so that the left end of the panorama actually joins up with the right end. In the center are the great peaks: the Eiger, the Mönch, and the glorious Jungfrau. All around are lesser but still dramatic mountains, snowy and tremendous, bathed in summer sunlight. It is a different kind of picture altogether from the ones in front of me, though it includes elements familiar from the smaller photos: a family member, holiday scenery, grazing animals (in this case cows), and even, in the far distance, a small town. They are all now in the one frame, and they mean all the more as a result. In a single glance, you can take in an entire world.