Philippians - Lesson 4

I. Introduction & Paul's Imprisonment

Well, this is episode four, and we are diving into the letter itself, although I have to warn you, I'm only going to be talking in this lesson on two verses of chapter 1, verses 1 and 2. I promise you we won't go this slow through the whole of the letter. But I am trying, as you'll see, I'm also doing a little bit of background still in this introduction to set us up for what we'll see in the rest of the letter. So we'll take a look, and actually in chapter 1 as a whole, we'll be looking at Paul's imprisonment. We'll talk a little bit about that. We'll talk about how Paul understands Christian maturity and how he understands the enemies that are around him right now. And I put enemies in scare quotes because we'll explore really who these people may be and how Paul feels about them.

But Paul, in the very beginning of the letter, introduces himself as he does in all letters. He introduces himself, and then he says hello. He identifies the people to whom he is writing. The letter opens by Paul saying, "Paul and Timothy, who is a coworker of Paul's, they are servants of Christ Jesus to all the holy people, God's holy people or saints in Christ Jesus at Philippi, together with the overseers and deacons: Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ." So what we're going to look at here is those two verses.

Timothy is mentioned as a co-sender. There are several letters where we find Timothy's name: 2 Corinthians, Colossians, Philemon, 1 and 2 Thessalonians has Timothy and Silas, or Silvanus. So Timothy is an important figure in Paul's letters. We also know, embedded in chapter 2, towards the end of chapter 2 in Philippians, that Timothy has provided special support for Paul while Paul is in prison. So it's not just that they're partners in ministry, but there's a real affection between them.

It seems as though, although this is argued, one could, especially with Paul's language in chapter 2 where Timothy is referred to in the third person, that has scholars thinking that Timothy is a co-sender of the letter, but not a co-author of the letter. It's difficult to know how to parse this, but Timothy is clearly in ministry and close ministry with Paul, and Paul wants the Philippians to know that he and Timothy are sending this letter.

II. Slavery in Ancient & Biblical Contexts

The identification that Paul gives of himself, his self-identification here, is as a slave, a doulos. It is translated in many English translations as servant, and that's a fair translation. But I want us to focus for a minute on doulos, which at this time would, I mean, it is the word for slave. And I'm going to highlight it in part because Paul will use the same word in chapter 2 when he describes Christ. So we're going to spend a little bit of time talking about slavery in the ancient world and what Paul might have meant when he identified himself as a slave of Christ Jesus.

A slave is someone who is legally owned by another person. There were slaves who were part of the earliest Christian communities, especially in Paul's communities. We also find that the word slave can be used rhetorically or symbolically, like let's say Romans 6:19, where Paul identifies believers as slaves of righteousness and no longer slaves of sin. In Paul's letter to the Philippians, he identifies the owner, if you will, "the Lord Jesus Christ." He is a slave of the owner, Lord Jesus Christ. We need to, I think, face this language squarely and unpack it given contemporary history in the United States and the reality of human trafficking that exists globally.

So let me give you a couple of data points. In the ancient Israelite culture, there was literal slavery, human slavery. Perhaps the best known is Hagar, who was the slave of Sarah and the mother of Ishmael, Abraham's first son. There's also literal slavery in that the Israelites as a people were enslaved in Egypt. And the foundational event of the Israelites that continues to be the group-identifying event of the Jewish people today is the Exodus, where God took the Israelite slaves out of Egypt and brought them to the Promised Land. In the Hebrew Bible, in the Old Testament, there are laws about the treatment of slaves, for example, in Exodus 21. So we know that Israelites owned slaves. We know that they were slaves and that God had laid out expectations for how slaves should be treated.

We also know in the biblical text, the Old Testament, that slavery can be used metaphorically or symbolically. So Moses is identified in the book of Numbers 12:7, as a servant or slave of the Lord. The Israelites themselves could understand themselves as God's slaves based on the covenant that they established. And I want this to be really clear: The Israelites, when they would identify themselves as a slave of God, they did not by analogy then mean that God is a slave owner. And I'll repeat that. When the Israelites would say that they, either as a people or as an individual, are a slave of God, they did not, because they're using this metaphorically, extend the metaphor to mean that God is a slave owner.

That's important for us as we think about the opening line of Paul here to the Philippians: "Paul and Timothy, slaves of Christ Jesus." As he's speaking metaphorically here, he identifies himself as a slave of God, but the metaphor stops there. It does not continue in the assumption that Christ Jesus is a slave owner.

Paul lived in the Roman Empire, and I think almost all historians would agree that the Roman Empire is a slave economy. Not all economies that have slaves are slave economies, but Rome's economy was organized in part around the institution of slavery. Slavery in the Roman experience was both permanent in a certain sense, but also your status could be changed out of slavery. So let me explain. In terms of once a slave, always a slave, the social stain, the social experience of being a slave, and sometimes even the physical marks of slavery—the whippings and the mistreatment that would leave permanent scars on the body—that always was there.

But Rome, unlike ancient Greek slavery, Roman slavery also had the pathway of freedom, but not total freedom. There was a category between slave and free that's called freed, a freedman or freedwoman. And this category fit in the broader cultural framework of benefaction. Getting your freedom from an owner was a gift of benefaction. The freedman was still part of the owner's family, but had some independence. The freedmen could now work in the business in a much more extensive way, travel on behalf of the family, and that sort of thing. So there was, and another example of this would be imperial slaves who were then granted freedom, and you had these imperial freedmen who sometimes had lots of wealth. They might even, as freedmen, own other people, have slaves themselves. So there was a social honor that came with being freed, but your history in slavery was never completely forgotten.

And I would just add that for women, their pathway of freedom typically was not through saving up money because they were able to do some other tasks on the side; it actually was usually through marriage—marriage to the owner or the owner's son. And so at that time, that's a difference, that the freedwoman would then, she'd be freed and then maybe the next day be married to the owner, her previous owner, or an heir. With that, she would receive the honor due a matron. And in that, that honor meant that she was not available to any man other than her husband.

Here it gets a little tricky, but I think this is important to note and an exception. If she's freed and she marries a freedman, maybe from the same family, so they're both freed, they can then form a marriage. Her owner, who's no longer her owner, her previous owner, still has sexual rights to her. It's the only example I can find in the ancient world where a husband's prerogative is shared with another man. I point this out as an example of how there's a permanence to the institution of slavery. Even when someone is freed, the owner still has influence over the slave.

My example also demonstrated, I think, the range of what the owner had authority over, and that included sexual availability of the male slaves and the female slaves. A woman could own, a married woman could own male slaves, but she did not have sexual authority over the male slave. I mean, she can't share her marriage bed with anybody but her husband. So in that sense, there's a qualifier. But I'm mentioning all of this as well because in real life, there are male and female slaves in Paul's congregations, and their level of autonomy is very limited. It's totally contingent on what their owners allow.

III. Gospel Impact on Social Status

And into this reality, Paul preaches the message of freedom in Christ, of sexual purity, sexual morality. And with all of this, I suggest that Paul also recognizes people are to be responsible for what they can be responsible for. But the reality is that you're also going to have within these communities individuals who aren't going to be free in terms of what their owners would demand. In the same way, there would be contingencies on the slaves that the free people would not experience. And that comes, why is this important as we think about the gospel? Because the gospel says that nothing in your past is determinative of your holiness in Christ. So when Paul says to the saints in Philippi, to the saints, to the holy ones, he is also including in that slaves, who from the wider cultural perspective wouldn't have that social honor. But in Christ, they do.

I want to say just one or two words about the modern experience of slavery in the United States and how that is contrasted. There are some important contrasts and similarities with the ancient institution of slavery. In the US, slavery was based on race, so we don't have examples of a Black man owning a white man. In the ancient world, that was not the case. People were sold into slavery, there were pirates that would capture you, and that's how you were a slave. You could be born a slave. And so it didn't map onto racial distinctions in the ancient world. So I think it's important for us to note that there's not a racial component to slavery in Paul's day, but the ownership of the body of one person by another person, that is a similarity.

So Paul has this reality in his ministry, that there are going to be slaves as well as freed people and free people in his congregations. The society organizes people in hierarchical levels. Slaves were understood as ontologically less human, although not to the extent that Aristotle, a couple hundred years earlier, understood slaves ontologically as being less than human.

By the time of Paul and the Stoic thought that was prevalent, there was a sense in which—and Seneca, who is a contemporary of Paul, he also taught Nero. I like to point out that professors can't be responsible for how their students turn out. But Seneca wrote a treatise on benefits, on gifts, in which he argued that a slave could give a gift. And what he meant by that is that the owner would then be, in theory, beholden to the slave, which is a remarkable abstract theory. But it shows that for Seneca, a slave is not as ontologically inferior as Aristotle had presented. Seneca is able to say at some point in their ancestry, the slave had a father who was free.

The gift that a slave can give, as Seneca suggests, is their life. If their owner is in trouble, thieves are coming into the house, and the slave defends the owner, the owner can get away, but the slave loses their life. That's a gift that goes above and beyond what is expected of a slave. And so in so doing, he gives a little bit of honor. Seneca recognizes that a slave can have honor.

But for the gospel, you think about Paul talking in terms of unity. These slaves now have a family. Technically, they have no mother or father; they're without family. That's part of the definition of being a slave. But in the gospel, in Christ, they have brothers and sisters. They have God the Father. They have an inheritance. So this gospel will change the mindset of these slaves as they receive God's great gift. And yet, they're still slaves. Paul does not lead a march into Rome requesting a change in the government policy so that the institution of slavery is dissolved. I wish that it had all stopped there in the 1st century; we all do. But I see within Paul's gospel the very ways in which slavery itself is an institution, because it is an institution of domination, and the gospel speaks completely against that. We have the seeds of the institution of slavery's demise already in the gospel, if it's properly lived out. Slaves are at the bottom of the social ladder. Paul will talk about Jesus in chapter 2:7, as a slave. We want to keep that in mind.

IV. Paul's Background & Apostolic Authority

Paul's own family actually may have had, in its recent history, been in the condition of being enslaved. There's a theory that the church father Jerome mentions. He argues that at the time of Herod the Great's death, which we date about 4 BC, there was, and we know this, there were great convulsions in Judea. And Jerome says that Paul's father was taken from Gischala, which is in Galilee, and he was relocated to Tarsus. He was a slave to the Roman Varus who crushed a rebellion. Then there are going to be slaves; this often happened when the Roman military went into a place and won, crushing the rebellion. There'd be many slaves. So Paul's father was made a slave, relocated to Tarsus.

This is a plausible theory, because if Paul's father was enslaved by a Roman citizen who then passed, and in the will of this owner there was the freeing of his or her slaves, when they would be freed, they often were also granted Roman citizenship. Paul says in the book of Acts 22:28, that he was born a Roman citizen. So that meant that his father had to be a Roman citizen. Now, citizenship was quite rare then, and for Jews to have Roman citizenship, even more rare. So this explanation from Jerome that Paul had slavery in his recent familial background that led to his Roman citizenship is quite plausible, given what we understand about the gaining of Roman citizenship.

So when Paul and Timothy are identified as slaves of Christ Jesus, Paul is thinking of this metaphorical term of serving the Lord Jesus Christ. But I find it interesting that it's not just Paul who identifies himself as a slave, a doulos of Christ; you find other apostles who also identify themselves this way. And it is not only metaphorical, but I think it's also, well, it's not literal in the sense that Paul wasn't literally a slave. I mean, you can't be a slave and a Roman citizen at the same time. But the social suffering, the dishonor that was typical for a slave, that Paul accepts as part of being an apostle to the Gentiles. You see this especially in 1 Corinthians chapters 3 and 4, as Paul thinks about how as an apostle he's kind of paraded, you know, as a captive at the end of a victory train, having no honor, no honor at all. And it's this lack of honor that will also be highlighted in chapter 2 when he describes who Jesus is.

But people have wondered, why is it that Paul doesn't identify himself as an apostle? The main reason, which I'm not persuaded by, but the main reason that is given for why we don't find the word apostle mentioned, is that, well, Paul is on such good terms with the Philippians that he doesn't need to bring up his superior status in governing the Philippians. And I think, "Wow, that misses the mark by a lot, because the whole point of being an apostle is serving others." Apostleship is not the C-suite. It's not insisting on your own way. It's not superior status. Apostle and the apostle's authority, as Paul describes it, first comes completely from God, and Paul has no special rights to it. You can look at 1 Corinthians 15:8-9, as Paul will really describe how he sees himself as an apostle.

As I mentioned just a moment ago, he sees apostles like these prisoners of war, right, that are paraded through the streets, that are mocked. This is in chapter 4:9 of 1 Corinthians. Yes, apostles establish the correct foundation for the church, 3:10 of 2 Corinthians, and also in Ephesians 2:20. But it's not because apostles are, that they have more authority in the way the Romans have thought about authority. It's that for Paul, the apostles have to be speaking always and only about the gospel. I mean, Paul says to the Corinthians, "If I don't preach correctly, the cross of Christ loses its power." How can the cross of Christ, which defeated death, lose its power? It can, if Paul suddenly puts himself up in the place of Christ. So yes, the apostles establish the correct foundation for the church, but it's in the attitude of service. So it's not that the Philippians don't need his apostolic authority, but boy, the Corinthians really do. That imagines a top-down picture of authority, but for Paul, his apostolic mission is from the bottom up of service. I think this is shown, and I'll give you even a little bit more evidence. You can look at the beginning of Romans, Romans 1:1, and also in Titus, verse 1 of the first chapter, where Paul uses apostle and slave. For Paul, doulos informs his apostolic ministry. It's the posture that he should take. Why? Because his Lord took the form of a slave. And that's what Paul points to, and that's what we will point to. That's why I spent a lot of time talking about the institution of slavery in the Old Testament, in Paul's day, the metaphorical, the real, because it all goes back to Jesus for Paul.

VI. Church Structure & Leadership Roles

The saints who are in Philippi, whom Paul greets, when we hear, when I hear the word "saint," I can think of human perfection. No, that's not what Paul is getting at here. These are holy ones. These are ones made holy and blameless through being in Christ, through the work of Christ. We see the same language, and I think this is where Paul would be pulling it from, in Exodus, for example, chapter 19. Paul would have known this word. God declares that if Israel will keep his commandments, she'll be his treasured possession. She'll be a priestly kingdom, a holy nation. Now, Peter will pick that up in his letter we call 1 Peter. This idea that now in Christ we can be this holy nation unto God. James in Acts chapter 15, Luke tells us that James declared, God is visiting the Gentiles, to take out of them a people for his name. So that's what Paul is getting at here when he calls the Philippians saints. And then he greets them with, "Grace and peace to you." This is a typical greeting, except Paul will add the word grace instead of just the generic greetings that Gentiles would use between themselves. And so by saying "grace," he goes straight back to the grace of God the Father exemplified through the Lord Jesus Christ and realized in his death and resurrection.

In finishing up this opening, there are two groups that Paul mentions that he doesn't address in any of his other letters in the opening, and that is the—he mentions the episcopoi and the diakonoi, the overseers and the deacons. There's no, when we look closely at the episcopoi, just plural, the overseer is how it's sometimes translated. There is no individual human, only human individual in the New Testament labeled like this, but Peter identifies Jesus as the shepherd and episcopos, the overseer, the guardian of believers' souls. This is in 1 Peter 2:25. So Jesus is an overseer, but no other person is named as an overseer. However, in Acts 20:28, Paul speaks to the Ephesian elders, the bishops, that they would oversee and shepherd themselves and the church, right, that the Holy Spirit has placed before them.

There is, when we look at deacon, that term is used more frequently in the New Testament. Paul identifies himself sometimes translated as minister in 1 Corinthians 3:5 and 2 Corinthians 6:4. And in the 16th chapter of Romans, we have the woman Phoebe who's identified as a deacon. It's hard to know what these titles represent. What were the functions? What were the duties? What were the expectations? The New Testament doesn't give us extensive clarity on what were the expectations, and it may be that different communities like Philippi and Corinth and Ephesus, maybe they had different local practices or lists of responsibilities that fit within these categories.

For our purposes in Philippians, and because the letter focuses on the gift that was sent by the community to Paul, it's possible that the episcopoi and deacons in some way oversaw the funds that were sent to Paul. So that's one theory as to why Paul mentions these two groups, both in the plural. Maybe it's these two groups that helped to oversee the sending of the funds. But we can't be sure what the specifics are here. It's tantalizing to think, but it's also exciting to see how the church is forming itself, organizing itself. Even though we don't know details, we begin to see how these communities are taking shape.

What seems to be implied in Paul mentioning them at the opening, and then as we go through the letter, what I think we'll see is a well-led congregation supports ministries. They're not looking only internally, but they're looking outward at the ministry of the church partnering with those who are not just in their location, but other places. Secondly, I think what we see is a well-led congregation has regular and open communication between leaders and their communities. What this creates, and what we see in Philippians, is a sense of ownership or partnership, unity between the Philippian congregation there in Philippi and Paul as he's ministering all over and now under house arrest.

I would say finally then, an example of a well-led congregation is that the Philippians, I think they really actually liked Paul. They were legitimately worried about how he was doing. There are emotional connections, and those emotional connections, they can enrich any relationship: the meals shared, I don't know, casual get-togethers, just sharing life. That develops unity. It can foster a caring community, a safe community. And so those three examples that I just gave, I think we can be alert to that reality that we see exhibited here in the letter to the Philippians. And because these leadership titles are mentioned at the beginning, I think it just should clue us in to be thinking about how our own local church is structured or, if we're in a denomination, how that is structured, and hold ourselves up to the mirror that is Philippians. Now we'll turn to the meat of the letter here in chapter 1, verse 3 and following.

VI. Theological Dialogue on Doulos

I'm assuming from your discussion of doulos that your kind of default translation is slave and not servant. I think depending on the context, I'm comfortable with servant. I think it is especially helpful when we're thinking about the metaphorical use of doulos, to have it as servant captures the heart. A servant can be, it can be a role that is chosen, that is with all one's heart towards a common goal. So servant can be to me more of a positive, a positive term. Slave, obviously it's not chosen typically, or it wouldn't be chosen for a good reason, you know, maybe sell yourself because you are in debt, but that's a sad reason. And the brutality of the institution of slavery is, and we know today in our trauma studies, can't be passed over lightly. So I like to mention that.

And I think I also want to insist on the seriousness of doulos because I think it then provides an even greater, and I think accurately so, but it provides a greater contrast between in the form of God and in the form of a slave that Paul will speak to in chapter 2. And I think Paul invites us to think about that great distance, especially in terms of honor and worth, social worth, as we think about then our own modeling of Christ. So servant and slave, I think this is where translators have to really think about the context and which particular nuance is Paul getting at at that particular time.

Student: What would you do in salutations: servant or slave? 

Dr. Cohick: In general, in salutations, I'm comfortable with servant, but being a professor, I love footnotes. So I might, here in Philippians, just make a footnote that the same word will be found in the Greek, you know, in chapter 2. How's that for weaseling out of your question? 

Student: Translators hate footnotes. 

Dr. Cohick: I know. Except in that Bible, so anyway. 

Student: Yes, yes. 

Dr. Cohick: No, I know. But I'm going to claim that, you know, as a possibility.

Because I think it is all throughout Philippians, Paul is connecting himself to Christ, the Philippians in Christ. So when Paul says imitate me, and we know he's imitating Christ, and Christ is given as someone who we are to emulate—obviously not in total; he is the Savior and we are not—I think the more that that can be known is better. And it would have been obvious to the original listeners. Because it's not obvious to us, I think we have to determine what our individual community needs to hear. And I can see, especially in Philippians with chapter 2 coming, that you might actually get that footnote in chapter 1. I'd argue for it. I'll say that to the translation committee.