Colossians: The Town Paul Never Saw

At a Glance

Who wrote it: It says Paul and Timothy. Scholars are divided roughly in half. Some think Paul wrote it from prison. Others think a follower wrote it soon after his death.

When: If Paul wrote it, about 55 to 62. If not, probably in the 70s or 80s.

Written for: The church in Colossae, a town Paul had never visited. A teaching there seems to have mixed strict rules, special days and visions of angels, and the letter answers it.

What it remembers of me: Nothing from my life. A hymn in the first chapter calls me the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation (1:15).

How close it stays to me: Close on forgiving debts. Far on wives and slaves, who are told to submit and to obey.

If you only read three chapters: It has four. Read Colossians 1, 2 and 3.

Words to Know

Colossae — a small town in the Lycus valley in what is now western Turkey, near the larger cities of Laodicea and Hierapolis.

Household code — a list of duties for wives and husbands, children and fathers, slaves and masters. It is probably the earliest one in the New Testament.

Elements of the world — in Greek, stoicheia. It could mean the basic principles of a teaching, the physical elements, or spiritual powers thought to rule the world.

Certificate of debt — in Greek, cheirographon, a handwritten note acknowledging a debt.

The Book in Brief

Paul and Timothy write to the believers in Colossae, a town Paul has not visited. They thank God for the church’s faith and love, as Epaphras reported it.

In chapter 1 a poem praises Christ. He is the image of the invisible God and the firstborn of all creation. All things were made through him, and through his cross God makes peace with them all. Paul says he suffers gladly for the church.

Chapter 2 warns against being taken captive by empty philosophy and human tradition. God has cancelled the debt held against us, nailing it to the cross. So no one should judge believers over food, festival days or the Sabbath, or demand self-denial and the worship of angels.

Chapter 3 says that since they were raised with Christ, they should put away anger and lies, and put on compassion, forgiveness and love. There is no Greek or Jew, slave or free, for Christ is all. Rules follow for wives and husbands, children and fathers, and slaves.

Chapter 4 begins with the rule for masters, then asks for prayer, promises news from Tychicus and Onesimus, passes on greetings, tells the church to share the letter with Laodicea, and ends in Paul’s own hand.

The letter says so. Paul writes of how he struggles for you, and for those at Laodicea, and for as many as have not seen my face in the flesh (Colossians 2:1). The church in Colossae was started by someone else, a local man named Epaphras, whom the letter calls our beloved fellow servant (Colossians 1:7).

So this is a letter to strangers, as Romans was. It was carried by the same messenger, Tychicus, who carried the letter called Ephesians, and it travels with the shortest of Paul’s letters, to Philemon, who also lived in Colossae. The two letters share a whole cast of names: Epaphras, Mark, Aristarchus, Demas, Luke, Archippus, and a slave named Onesimus (Colossians 4:9–17; Philemon 1–2, 10, 23–24).

Go deeperWas Colossae really a nobody?

The first readers of this letter lived in a town that had seen better days.

Colossae stood in the valley of the river Lycus, in what is now western Turkey. The Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the 400s BC, called it one of the great cities of Phrygia. Xenophon, who marched through it about 401 BC with a Greek army, called it a populous city, prosperous and large. Its wealth came from wool.¹

By Paul’s day its neighbors down the valley had outgrown it. The geographer Strabo says that Laodicea, small before, had grown large in his lifetime. In AD 60 an earthquake ruined Laodicea, and the Roman historian Tacitus says it rebuilt itself from its own money, without help from Rome. He does not mention Colossae.¹

For a long time, writers pictured Colossae as a faded village that never recovered. Newer work questions that. Inscriptions and coins suggest that it was still alive in the following century, and may even have grown richer.²

Colossae was never dug the way its neighbors were. Its ruins lie under a mound about two miles north of the Turkish town of Honaz. A team from Pamukkale University began surveying the site in 2021, and the first digging season followed in 2025.² Much of what we would like to know about the church that first read this letter is still under the ground.

Did Paul write it?

This is one of the closest calls among the disputed letters. I told you I would not pretend otherwise.

For Paul: the names. A later writer could have copied them from Philemon, but the overlap is natural and detailed, and it fits a letter sent at the same time. The letter closes the way Paul did, with a line in his own hand: The salutation of me, Paul, with my own hand: remember my bonds (Colossians 4:18).

Against Paul: the style, which is heavier and more elaborate than in Paul’s undisputed letters. And the thinking, which has moved. In Romans, Paul says that believers will also be part of his resurrection (Romans 6:5), in the future. In Colossians, they were also raised with him (Colossians 2:12), already, in the past. If then you were raised together with Christ, seek the things that are above (Colossians 3:1). The future has moved closer to the present, and the church has started to settle in.

Scholars split about evenly. Whoever wrote it, it became the model for Ephesians, which copies large parts of it.

The hymn

The letter opens with a poem about me, and it is the grandest one in your Bible.

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created in the heavens and on the earth, visible things and invisible things, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things are held together (Colossians 1:15–17).

The village carpenter from Nazareth, described as the one through whom the stars were made. The writer was taking what Jewish teachers had said about God’s Wisdom, which was with God at creation, and saying it about me.

The hymn ends where the cross is: God was pleased through him to reconcile all things to himself … having made peace through the blood of his cross (Colossians 1:20). Not some things. All things, on earth and in heaven.

Two and a half centuries later, a priest in Alexandria named Arius used the phrase the firstborn of all creation to argue that I was the first thing God made, and so was not God in the full sense. That argument split the church and led to the Council of Nicaea in 325. A line in a hymn, written to a small town in Asia Minor, became the center of a fight across an empire.³

The debt nailed to the cross

There is one image in this letter that you should not miss.

Colossians says that God forgave us, wiping out the handwriting in ordinances which was against us. He has taken it out of the way, nailing it to the cross (Colossians 2:14).

The Greek word behind handwriting is cheirographon. It was a technical word. It meant a handwritten certificate of debt, the IOU a borrower signed.⁴ In my world, that piece of papyrus was the thing that took your land, and then your freedom.

So the picture is this. Everything held against you, the whole account, written in your own hand, is taken down and nailed to the cross, cancelled. When I taught people to pray forgive us our debts, I meant real debts and the forgiveness of sin, together. This letter keeps the picture of the debt.

The next verse takes the picture further. God stripped the principalities and the powers, and made a show of them openly, triumphing over them (Colossians 2:15). That is the language of a Roman triumph, the parade in which a victorious general led his defeated enemies through the streets in chains. Here, the cross is the triumph, and the powers of the world are the ones in chains.

Don’t handle, don’t taste

Something was troubling the church in Colossae, and the letter never says exactly what. Scholars call it the Colossian heresy and argue about it endlessly.

You can see its outline in the warnings. Be careful that you don’t let anyone rob you through his philosophy and vain deceit … after the elements of the world (Colossians 2:8). Let no one therefore judge you in eating, or in drinking, or with respect to a feast day or a new moon or a Sabbath day (Colossians 2:16). Let no one rob you of your prize by self-abasement and worshiping of the angels (Colossians 2:18). And its slogans: Don’t handle, nor taste, nor touch (Colossians 2:21).

It seems to have been a strict, mystical kind of piety, with fasting, special days and visions of angels, perhaps mixing Jewish practice with local religion. The letter’s answer is that all of that is a shadow, and that a person who has me does not need the rules of men to climb toward God.⁵

Go deeperWorship of angels, or worship with angels?

The warning about worshiping of the angels (Colossians 2:18) hides a puzzle in the Greek. The phrase can mean worship offered to angels. It can also mean the worship that angels themselves offer, which a visionary claims to join.

The second reading has a striking parallel. Among the Dead Sea Scrolls are the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice, thirteen songs for thirteen Sabbaths. They describe the angels worshiping God in a temple in heaven, and they invite the worshipers on earth to join in. Copies were found at Qumran and at Masada. In 1962 the scholar Fred Francis argued that the Colossian teachers were mystics of this kind, who claimed to enter heaven and share in the angels’ worship.⁶

Other scholars, such as Clinton Arnold, think the church was really tempted to call on angels for protection, as the local folk religion did.⁵ Both readings fit a letter that says Christ is head of all principality and power (Colossians 2:10).

Even the next phrase is uncertain. The World English Bible says the teacher is dwelling in the things which he has not seen (Colossians 2:18). The word not is missing from modern critical editions of the Greek, and most modern translations speak of someone going on about what he has seen in visions. The King James Bible kept the not.⁶

Something missing

Now set two verses side by side.

Galatians, which Paul certainly wrote: There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:28).

Colossians: where there can’t be Greek and Jew, circumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bondservant, or free person; but Christ is all, and in all (Colossians 3:11).

Greek and Jew are still there. Slave and free are still there. Barbarian and Scythian have been added. But male and female is gone.⁷

And seven verses later the household code begins: Wives, be in subjection to your husbands (Colossians 3:18).

The first household code

This is probably the earliest household code in your New Testament, and Ephesians builds directly on it.

Wives, be in subjection to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives, and don’t be bitter against them. Children, obey your parents in all things … Fathers, don’t provoke your children (Colossians 3:18–21).

Then the slaves, who get more words than anyone else: Servants, obey in all things those who are your masters according to the flesh, not just when they are looking, as men pleasers, but in singleness of heart, fearing God (Colossians 3:22).

Obey in all things. For centuries that verse was read to enslaved people in the Americas by the men who claimed to own them, and by preachers paid to keep them quiet.

Read what comes after it. But he who does wrong will receive again for the wrong that he has done, and there is no partiality (Colossians 3:25). And then: Masters, give to your servants that which is just and equal, knowing that you also have a Master in heaven (Colossians 4:1).

The word translated equal is the same word Paul used when he told the Corinthians that their gift to the poor was for equality.⁸ A master who gave his slaves what was equal would not long remain a master. That verse was read much less often.

The writer did not tell masters to free their slaves. He told slaves to obey and masters to be fair, inside a system he did not question. It was the voice of a church learning to live quietly inside the Roman household, a long way from neither slave nor free.

Go deeperWhere the household code came from

The household code was not a Christian invention. Greek and Roman writers had laid down rules for the household for centuries. In the 300s BC, Aristotle said that a household is made of three relationships: master and slave, husband and wife, father and children. Seneca, a Roman philosopher writing in the 60s AD, called advice of this kind a recognized part of philosophy: how a husband should behave toward his wife, how a father should raise his children, and how a master should rule his slaves.⁹

So the writer of Colossians was following a familiar pattern. One reason may have been defense. In 1981 David Balch argued that Christians took up the pattern to answer Roman neighbors who suspected a new religion of undermining the order of the family.⁹

But the writer changed it. In the philosophers’ lists, the teacher spoke to the man who ran the house. Colossians speaks to everyone in the house, wives, children and slaves included, as people who answer to the Lord. Wives are to submit as is fitting in the Lord (Colossians 3:18). Masters are reminded that you also have a Master in heaven (Colossians 4:1).

Those changes are real. Whether they were enough is the question. The pattern was borrowed, and the order of the Roman household stood where it was.

The lost letter

At the end, the letter gives an instruction that has puzzled readers ever since. When this letter has been read among you, cause it to be read also in the assembly of the Laodiceans, and that you also read the letter from Laodicea (Colossians 4:16).

There was a letter to Laodicea. It is lost. Some think it is the letter you call Ephesians, which in the oldest copies has no address.

But people did not like a gap. Sometime in the early centuries, someone wrote a short Letter to the Laodiceans in Paul’s name, stitched together mostly from phrases in Philippians. It survives in Latin. It was copied into more than a hundred medieval Latin Bibles, and it was printed in German Bibles before Luther. For about a thousand years, many Christians in the West read it as Paul’s.¹⁰

A verse mentioned a letter. Someone supplied one. And for centuries it sat inside the Bible.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Galatians 3:28, then Colossians 3:11.

You will find: that the later letter keeps Greek and Jew and slave and free, but drops male and female.

Then read Colossians 3:18–4:1 straight through, and notice which group gets the most words.

The Short Version

• Colossians was written to a church Paul never visited, founded by Epaphras. Scholars are divided about evenly on whether Paul wrote it.
• It opens with a hymn calling me the image of the invisible God and the firstborn of all creation.
• It pictures our debts as a certificate of debt nailed to the cross.
• It repeats neither Greek nor Jew, slave nor free, but drops “male and female,” and then gives the New Testament’s earliest household code.
• It mentions a letter to Laodicea that is lost. A forged replacement sat in Latin Bibles for a thousand years.