Philippians: Letter From a Cell

At a Glance

Who wrote it: Paul, with Timothy named beside him. No one seriously doubts it. Some scholars think it combines two or three of his shorter notes to the same church.

When: Sometime between about 54 and 62, from prison. Nobody knows which prison: Ephesus, Caesarea and Rome have all been proposed.

Written for: The church in Philippi, the first Paul founded in Europe. It had sent him money in prison. He thanks them, tells them to stop quarreling and warns them against rival teachers.

What it remembers of me: One of the oldest hymns about me, which says I emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, and was obedient to the point of death, yes, the death of the cross (2:7–8).

How close it stays to me: Close, especially on serving and putting others first. Less close where Paul calls his rivals dogs (3:2).

If you only read three chapters: It has four. Read Philippians 1, 2 and 4.

Words to Know

Philippi — a city in northern Greece, refounded by Rome as a colony for army veterans after a famous battle fought there in 42 BC.

Colony — a Roman settlement abroad whose citizens had the rights of citizens of Rome itself.

The emptying — in Greek, kenosis, from the verb in Philippians 2:7. It became the name for the idea that I gave up glory to become human.

Overseers — in Greek, episkopoi, from which comes the word bishop. Here they are local leaders, more than one in a single town.

The Book in Brief

Paul and Timothy write to the believers in Philippi. Paul thanks God for them and tells them about his prison, which he says has spread the good news. Some rivals preach out of envy, but either way Christ is announced. He does not know whether he will live or die, but expects to see them again, and asks them to stand firm together.

Chapter 2 asks them to put others first and to stop quarreling. Paul holds up a hymn about me. I was in the form of God, took the form of a servant, died on a cross, and was raised above everyone. He hopes to send Timothy, and sends Epaphroditus, who nearly died, home.

Chapter 3 warns against teachers who insist on circumcision. Paul counts everything he once boasted of as loss for the sake of knowing me, and says our citizenship is in heaven.

Chapter 4 urges two women, Euodia and Syntyche, to agree. He tells the church to rejoice, not to worry, and to think about whatever is good. He thanks them for the gift Epaphroditus brought, says he has learned to be content in plenty and in hunger, and sends greetings, including from Caesar’s household.

Rejoice in the Lord always! Again I will say, “Rejoice!” (Philippians 4:4).

Words for joy and rejoicing run all through this short letter, more than a dozen times.¹ It was written by a man in prison, who did not know whether he would come out alive, to the one church that had never let him down.

The church that paid

Philippi was the first church Paul founded in Europe, according to Acts. It began with a group of women meeting for prayer by a river outside the city, and the first convert Acts names is Lydia, a seller of purple, a dealer in expensive dyed cloth, whose house became the church’s meeting place (Acts 16:13–15, 40).

Paul refused money from most of his churches, so nobody could accuse him of preaching for pay. Philippi was the exception. No assembly shared with me in the matter of giving and receiving but you only. For even in Thessalonica you sent once and again to my need (Philippians 4:15–16).

Now he was in prison, and prisoners in the Roman world were often fed only by friends from outside. The Philippians had sent a man named Epaphroditus with money and supplies. Epaphroditus fell ill, nearly to death (Philippians 2:27), and recovered. Paul sent him back home carrying this letter. Part of it is a thank-you note.

Go deeperWhat a Roman prison was for

A Roman prison was not a place to serve a sentence. It was a place to wait. A Roman jurist of the early 200s, Ulpian, said it in one line: a prison exists to hold people, not to punish them.²

That meant the state did little to keep a prisoner alive. Food, a blanket, medicine and money for the guards came from friends and family, or did not come at all.² When Paul was held in Caesarea, the governor ordered not to forbid any of his friends to serve him or to visit him (Acts 24:23). Without such friends, a prisoner could starve.

About the year 165, the Greek satirist Lucian wrote about a wandering teacher named Peregrinus, who had joined the Christians and was jailed for it. Lucian mocked the Christians as gullible, and he still described what they did. At dawn, he says, old widows and orphan children were already waiting by the prison. Their officials bribed the guards and slept inside with the prisoner. Meals were brought in, and their holy books were read to him.²

That was the kind of help the Philippians sent to Paul. It cost them money, and it nearly cost Epaphroditus his life. Paul says he was risking his life to supply that which was lacking in your service toward me (Philippians 2:30).

Which prison?

Paul says that his imprisonment had become known to the whole palace guard (Philippians 1:13), and he sends greetings from those who are of Caesar’s household (Philippians 4:22). Those phrases made readers for centuries assume he was in Rome.

But the phrases do not settle it. The governor’s headquarters in any province could be called the praetorium, and Caesar’s household meant the emperor’s slaves and freedmen, who worked across the empire. Many scholars now think Paul was jailed in Ephesus, closer to Philippi, which would explain all the messengers going back and forth.³ The letter does not tell us, and that is fine. What it tells us is how he felt.

For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain (Philippians 1:21). I am hard pressed between the two, having the desire to depart and be with Christ, which is far better (Philippians 1:23).

A man who may be executed is thinking out loud about whether he would rather live or die. He decides he will go on living, because they still need him.

The hymn

In chapter 2 comes the most important passage in the letter, and one of the most important in your New Testament.

Have this in your mind, which was also in Christ Jesus, who, existing in the form of God, didn’t consider equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to the point of death, yes, the death of the cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him, and gave to him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow … and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father (Philippians 2:5–11).

It has the shape of a poem or a hymn, and many scholars think it was sung by my followers before Paul quoted it. If so, it is one of the oldest Christian songs that survive, from within twenty or thirty years of my death.⁴

Notice the shape. It goes down, then up. Down from the form of God, to a servant, to a human, to death, and not just any death, the death of the cross. Crucifixion was the punishment Rome reserved for slaves, rebels and the lowest criminals. Romans called it the slave’s punishment.⁵ The hymn says I went all the way to the bottom.

Then it goes up. Every knee should bow … every tongue should confess. Those words come from Isaiah, where God says, to me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall take an oath (Isaiah 45:23). The hymn gives to me what Isaiah gave to God alone. It is one of the earliest places where you can watch my followers beginning to speak of me in the language they used for God.

Go deeperThe Greek word translators argue over

One word in the hymn has been argued over for a long time. The Greek is harpagmos, and the World English Bible renders it a thing to be grasped. It appears nowhere else in the New Testament.

Translators have taken it two ways. In the first, I held equality with God and let go of it. In the second, I already had equality with God and refused to use it for my own advantage. In 1971 the American scholar Roy Hoover studied how the Greek idiom works and argued for the second, and N. T. Wright reached a similar answer in 1986. Many modern translations have followed them.⁶ On either reading the direction is the same. I go down, and I do not grab.

A second argument is whether the hymn is about Adam. In the garden, the serpent told the first humans that if they ate the fruit, you will be like God, knowing good and evil (Genesis 3:5). James Dunn argued that the hymn sets me against Adam. The first man reached to be like God and fell. I did not reach, and I was raised. Dunn did not find a Son who existed before he was born as a human. Many scholars disagree. They think the hymn begins with someone already in the form of God, and that any echo of Adam is a lesser note.⁶

Why Paul quotes it

Here is what people usually miss. Paul did not quote the hymn to teach doctrine. He quoted it to settle an argument.

The verses just before it say: doing nothing through rivalry or through conceit, but in humility, each counting others better than himself; each of you not just looking to his own things, but each of you also to the things of others (Philippians 2:3–4). Then: Have this in your mind, which was also in Christ Jesus.

The hymn is an example to copy. If I emptied myself and took the form of a slave, then my followers can stop competing with one another. The greatest statement about who I am, in the whole letter, is there to tell a congregation to stop putting itself first.

Citizens of where?

Philippi was proud of being a Roman colony. Many of its people were Roman citizens, living abroad. The city was laid out like a little Rome, and its veterans’ families had the same rights as anyone born on the Tiber.

So when Paul wrote to them, For our citizenship is in heaven, from where we also wait for a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ (Philippians 3:20), every word of it pointed somewhere. Citizenship. Savior. Lord. Those were the emperor’s words, the words of the city’s own pride. Paul gave them to someone else.⁷

It does not mean their home was in the sky and the earth did not matter. A colony was a piece of Rome planted far away, living Rome’s life where it stood. Paul was telling them to be a colony of heaven, living heaven’s life right there in Philippi.

Go deeperWhy Philippi was a little Rome

Philippi was a town built on a battlefield.

In 42 BC, on the plain just outside it, Mark Antony and Octavian, who later became the emperor Augustus, defeated the armies of Brutus and Cassius, the men who had murdered Julius Caesar.⁸ Rome then refounded the town as a colony, and refounded it again after Octavian’s victory at Actium in 31 BC.⁷ A colony was a piece of Italy set down in Greek lands, with Roman law, Roman officials and Roman pride.

You can see this in Acts. The men who order Paul and Silas beaten are called magistrates, and the officers they send to release them are called sergeants (Acts 16:22, 35). The Greek behind those two words matches the titles of a colony’s chief officers and of the rod-bearing attendants, called lictors, who walked in front of them.⁸

The next morning, Paul pointed out that they had been beaten publicly without a trial, and when the magistrates heard that the prisoners were Romans, they were afraid (Acts 16:37–38). Beating a Roman citizen without a trial was against Roman law, and the magistrates of a Roman colony knew it.

Paul’s résumé

In chapter 3 the letter suddenly changes tone. Finally, my brothers, rejoice in the Lord! (Philippians 3:1) sounds like the end of a letter. Then the next verse snaps: Beware of the dogs; beware of the evil workers; beware of the false circumcision (Philippians 3:2). That sharp turn is one reason some scholars think this chapter came from a different letter.⁹

Paul is warning against the same kind of teachers he fought in Galatia, who wanted Gentile believers circumcised. And he answers them by listing his own credentials as a Jew. Circumcised the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; concerning the law, a Pharisee; concerning zeal, persecuting the assembly; concerning the righteousness which is in the law, found blameless (Philippians 3:5–6).

Found blameless. Paul did not describe himself as a tormented sinner who could not keep the Law. He said he kept it, perfectly, by any measure a Pharisee would use.

And then he throws it all away: I count all things to be a loss … and count them nothing but refuse (Philippians 3:8). The Greek word translated refuse is a coarse one. It can mean dung.¹⁰

The women who argued

Near the end, Paul names two women. I exhort Euodia, and I exhort Syntyche, to think the same way in the Lord. Yes, I beg you also, true partner, help these women, for they labored with me in the Good News (Philippians 4:2–3).

Preachers have often used them as a warning about quarrelsome women. Read what Paul actually says. They labored with me in the Good News. They were his co-workers, important enough that their disagreement mattered to the whole church, important enough to be named in a letter read aloud to everyone. In a church that began with women praying by a river, it is no surprise that two of its leaders were women.

I can do all things

Now the most quoted verse in the letter. I can do all things through Christ, who strengthens me (Philippians 4:13).

It is painted on gym walls and printed on athletes’ gear. It is used to mean that with my help you can win the game, close the deal, or get the job.

Read the two verses before it. I have learned in whatever state I am, to be content in it. I know how to be humbled, and I also know how to abound. In everything and in all things I have learned the secret both to be filled and to be hungry, both to abound and to be in need (Philippians 4:11–12).

Then: I can do all things.

Paul was in prison, thanking a church for its gifts. All things meant going hungry and being full, having plenty and having nothing. It is not a promise that you will win. It is a man in chains saying he can bear losing.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Philippians 2:3–11, starting at verse 3, not verse 5.

You will find: the great hymn about me, quoted as an example of putting others first.

Then read Philippians 4:11–13 together. What were the all things?

The Short Version

• Philippians is the most joyful of Paul’s letters, written from prison to the one church that supported him with money.
• Its center is an early hymn: I emptied myself, took the form of a slave, and died the slave’s death of the cross.
• Paul quotes the hymn to tell a congregation to stop competing and look to each other’s interests.
• To a proud Roman colony, Paul says our citizenship is in heaven, using the emperor’s own words for Savior and Lord.
• I can do all things is about being content when hungry, and two women he calls co-workers in the Good News are named.