Philippians - Lesson 2

I. Background of Philippians

So this is our second lesson. We're still in the background of the letter to the Philippians. And this will give you kind of a general introduction to the letter itself. Paul, we're going to ask, why did Paul write this? Where was he when he wrote this? That's going to be the content that we'll study for this lesson. So why did Paul write Philippians? Well, he wrote Philippians in part because he was in prison and he couldn't actually visit them. In fact, this is something to keep in mind for all of Paul's letters. He writes because he can't actually be there and talk with them. So it's kind of the same as today. We write or text because we can't actually be present with the person.

He writes because he's in prison, and we know from studying the letter that there are four trips that he assumes or that we can assume that he references in this exchange. First, that the Philippians hear that Paul is in prison, then that Epaphroditus is sent, then that the church learns that Epaphroditus was ill, then that Epaphroditus hears that the church is concerned because they heard he was ill, and then finally, Paul says that Timothy is going to be sent to them. And Paul expects that once Timothy gets there, somehow word will be sent back to Paul what's going on. So it's this back and forth that we can reconstruct from the letter.

So Paul writes because he's in prison and he can't actually address them directly, but he also writes because they're anxious about Paul in a good sense. They're worried in a good sense. They care about him, their partnership with him. So they want to know, how are you doing? And then finally, Paul writes because he wants to let them know that he has received the gift that Epaphroditus brought, and probably the gift also included the help personally that Epaphroditus could give. And so Paul is thanking them for that. But it's a way they have a relationship, they have a partnership. And so this is one of the different ways that Paul is able to stay in touch with them.

II. Location of Imprisonment

Well, where was Paul when he wrote Philippians? This is a contested argument in scholarship today between two cities. He either wrote from Rome or he wrote from Ephesus. And I'll talk about both of these. Some scholars would say it really doesn't matter where he was, where you place his imprisonment. The only pushback I would give to that is as we're trying to reconstruct Paul's journeys and when he writes his letters, we often can form a helpful understanding of one letter if we can place it in relation to other letters that Paul is writing at about the same time. So we're going to look at Paul writing Philippians from Rome, and that would place the letter a little bit later. I'll also explain to you the argument of Paul writing Philippians from Ephesus. That means the letter would be written a little bit earlier in the series of Paul's letters, so maybe in the mid-50s if he writes from Ephesus or around 61 or 62 if he writes from Rome.

So in summary, let's take a look first. If Paul wrote the letter from Ephesus, the key issues are that it's closer and we know they had a lot of travel, and secondly, that this household, Caesar's household, can be understood as freed imperial slaves. But there's another issue, and that is Paul's statement about the Praetorian guard. This is in the first chapter of Philippians, verse 13. And typically this term is understood to represent the emperor's personal bodyguard, which was only in Rome. There may be an official that could be found in other cities like Ephesus. And there's even an argument that's now being made—the test of time will show whether it carries the day—but that the Praetorian would be an actual label for a building, a provincial building where civic functions would happen. If this latter definition is correct and we had a Praetorian in Ephesus, then the argument for Ephesus becomes that much stronger.

However, the predominant view still is that Paul is imprisoned in Rome when he writes Philippians. And the Roman imprisonment is described by Luke in the last several chapters of the book of Acts. For those who hold to the theory that Paul writes from Rome, they would argue we just don't have any evidence that the Praetorian guard is there in Ephesus. Ephesus itself is a senatorial province, the argument that maybe you would have some sort of representation in Ephesus. Well, some look at those inscriptional evidences and say, "No, that's the man's previous occupation and it doesn't represent something currently happening in Ephesus. It reflects the man's previous engagements in Rome."

We don't have any evidence that Paul was imprisoned in Ephesus. I mean, it's possible. But we don't have something specific in the book of Acts that tells us that he spent a bit of time in jail in Ephesus. And I would like to say that when in Corinthians, 1 Corinthians 15, he says he faced wild beasts in Ephesus, there he's being rhetorical. He means human enemies who are going after him. He doesn't mean that he literally faced beasts, lions and bears in the arena.

I think the point that we want to drive home when making a case for Rome is it seems to many reading Philippians that this imprisonment that Paul experiences extends over many months. And this imprisonment is based on a capital charge, a charge that would, if found guilty, demand his death. As a Roman citizen being accused of a capital crime, the place where Paul would have his case adjudicated would be Rome, not Ephesus. So he would be writing from Rome.

To those who still struggle with the distance between Rome and Philippi, as I mentioned in lesson one, you have the Via Egnatia that is an extensive, well-traveled road that goes straight from Philippi—well, really from Constantinople today, Istanbul, all the way across to the port city on the Adriatic. If you're in a chariot, you could make maybe 40 miles a day, a person walking maybe 15, 20 miles a day. But sea travel is much faster. If you catch the wind in certain months, you could do Rome from Philippi via Corinth to Rome in maybe a week or so. So you would be maybe traveling in part by boat, in part by land, but it's not as onerous as some make it out to be. So Rome or Ephesus. I tend to go with the traditional Rome perspective, which means it's going to be written in around 61 or so.

In holding the traditional view that Paul writes from Rome, I think it is also important to note that we pay attention, I will be paying attention to the clues within Philippians itself. And I think what we'll discover is that in some ways, reading Galatians alongside Philippians is really helpful. And also reading Romans alongside Philippians is really helpful. We're going to take the whole corpus of Paul's letters because I think his thoughts—well, they might mature as all of us mature each and every year as we continue to grow in our faith in Christ. I don't imagine that there'll be significant leaps such that Philippians would... there's an argument that's made that it's important to see Ephesus as the place you write so that you can read Philippians next to Galatians. And I think, well, I can do that even if he writes from Rome. So maybe I don't even need to say it. Maybe I'm arguing something that people don't have in their heads.

III. Nature of Letter

All right. So I've already said the traditional view of Paul is writing from Rome. What kind of letter is he writing? Is it similar to a friendship letter or a communication that expresses friendship? There are themes such as unity, affection, sadness that he's not present with them that are reflected in letters between friends at this time, a mutual reciprocity. But there aren't the formal characteristics of friendship that we would expect. There's not the language that uses philia, the kind of warmth, the language of warmth.

Paul also, and I think this is key to note, the value of friendship at this time, even among adult free males, included a component of competitiveness. So, you know, if a friend gave a gift to another friend, that other friend wanted to give a better gift back. There was in the broader culture the sense of competition even between friends. And I mention that because that may come into play when we get to chapter 4, Euodia and Syntyche, their relationship. There's an argument that maybe they were in competition with each other, which would have been typical of the way friendship is construed at this time. But Paul, of course, is not in competition with anyone in Philippi. He's not competing to have more wealth than his friends or honor.

Instead, I think rather than looking at the concept of friendship, we should look at the concept of partnership. Koinonia is a term we actually say—you find it a lot, even just transliterated in English—but this Greek term means a partnership, a working together, rolling up your sleeves together and getting to work in the mission. And that, coupled with the warm tone of the letter, I think is the best way to think about the relationship that Paul has with the Philippians.

There's also an argument that the letter to the Philippians was actually maybe two letters, two short letters sent to Philippi and that were later stitched together by someone we have no record of. The reason people say that is they look at verse 1 of chapter 3, which seems to kind of have like an ending, you know, kind of sounds an ending note, and then chapter 3:2, where suddenly we have this intense warning, and so they say these just rub together like they don't fit nicely together. But I have to say abrupt changes are things you find elsewhere in Paul's letters; they don't necessitate having two different letters stitched together. But even more, I would say we have no example of a different form of Philippians existing anywhere. All we have in all of our manuscripts is Philippians as we have it today in our letter. And we have no example of an editor taking letters and stitching them together. In fact, you could say the editor did a really bad job. I mean, if it was an editor and they stitched it together, surely they could have done better. So we're going to read Philippians as one total letter delivered by Paul.

Now, that said, Paul probably used a scribe and a man, a secretary, to compose all of it. So just in your mind, don't picture Paul actually writing things down. There's a whole process of letter writing that includes some expense, writing drafts, that kind of thing. So it was an involved process, but Paul followed that like most other letter writers of his day.

IV. Audience & Opponents

The letter itself, what's Paul's argument in the letter? Well, it tells us a little bit about Paul, right? Because the letter brings to light Paul's own story about Christ, and about Christ's story in the Philippians and, by extension, believers today. I think the other one, another aspect of Paul's argument that we should underline, this letter is very real about ministry. Paul will say, "I can do all things," and he says that while he's under house arrest. Now, of course, he says that, "I can do all things through the one who strengthens me," right, through Christ, being in Christ. But he is saying it from a position where he has almost no human freedom the way that we think of an evangelist, a pastor, someone working in the church would need in order to be effective. And so I say that this letter that Paul writes shows Paul's vulnerability, his candidness, his openness to the Philippians. This letter shows joy, the kind of joy that is supernatural, rooted only in the truth of God, because Paul is also suffering and we'll see specific examples of what type of suffering he faces. Think also this letter stresses hospitality and partnership. Now, we'll get into the theological details in a minute, but I wanted to just frame up the person of Paul that is revealed in his argument, and I think that also can teach us today.

Who are the Philippians? Well, they have the honor of being the first church of Macedonia. You can read about that in Acts chapter 16. I continue to refer back to Acts 16. We use Luke as a way to help us fill out the information that we have in Paul's letter. He doesn't need to say in his letter all the things that we like to know because the Philippians already know those things. They're living those things. But Luke helps us fill in some of the gaps of what Paul's experience in Philippi was like. I stress this because these are real people that Paul is writing to. So it reminds us these first believers will have the same foils and foibles and fears that we have, and yet they also are distinct from us. They're 1st century people, we're 21st century people. The letter is written first to them. It's also written to us as God's word, but authorial intent, what Paul is trying to say to them, guides us in then understanding how it can be applied for us today.

In the Philippian church, probably there were few, maybe one Roman veteran. These would be a more elite level in the culture. And so it's unlikely that they would have been drawn to the Christian message. They would have given up a lot of social status to join the church. Probably few wealthy citizens. It doesn't appear that this is a wealthy church. For evidence, I would point to 2 Corinthians 8. They had extreme poverty, but yet such a desire to be part of Paul's ministry. And all that adds up in God's economy to great giving and joy. We have Lydia, who is well off, so she… I don't know if we would call her wealthy, but she's well enough off and seems to have a church in her home, although her name is not mentioned in the letter to the Philippians. It may be that she has since passed and is no longer part of the church.

Sixty to sixty-five percent probably of the believers would be non-Romans. These would be the Greeks and the people from around the Mediterranean who are in Philippi for work or have resettled as their service class, freed slaves. I don't know how they would have felt necessarily about the Roman presence. Maybe they were proud in certain ways to be part of this grand city. But they might also have had conflicting feelings because it is entirely possible that the Romans in the city would have looked down their noses. Roman society at this time was highly stratified. Everybody needed to fit on one particular rung in the ladder, and you needed to know your place, and you shouldn't step out of your place, shouldn't be above yourself. And you can see how in that social construct, the gospel would create absolute havoc because you'd have an owner who would serve his or her slave. Communion just throws everything up in the air. So this is the social hierarchical world of Philippi into which these believers, who now are all one and united in Christ, need to live out their faith. And probably most of them are service. Some might be really poor. Most are probably just subsistence. Maybe they have enough saved for a couple of days extra, but not a lot of stored up wealth.

Into this picture, we've got a couple of groups that Paul talks about as opponents. At the end of chapter 1, he talks about town officials. The beginning of chapter 3, he talks about—he uses this rhetorically—"dogs." I like to tease sometimes, say to some students sometimes, Paul was a cat lover; he didn't like dogs. That would be bad exegesis. So he talks about these dogs who are probably related to enemies of the cross that he mentions later in the chapter, verses 18 and 19. We'll look more closely as we study these chapters as to who these people might be. But I would say overall, although they're probably two different groups, the answer in facing each of these groups is the same, and that is that we stand firm and that we recognize that in standing firm and accepting the suffering, we are actually in that posture demonstrating our opponents' condemnation that will come upon them in God's time. We'll study, as I said, these two groups more closely.

But I should also just finish with this thought. As I mentioned, they're opponents, but I don't want you to think that they're like two competing teams on the same sports field. Christianity is not in competition with Rome, it's not in competition with the imperial cult, it's not in competition with paganism. Christianity is laying out an alternative way of life. This new way of life is one of mutuality in Christ, where social worth is not one's individual intrinsic worth. The worth of the person is rooted in Christ. So this framework of being in Christ is what shapes the whole community. They're not trying to set Jesus up over against Caesar Augustus. Jesus is above all and his kingdom will be eternal. And so the way that you live in that is just so different. The kingdom of God solves the problem of sin and alienation; the kingdom of Rome says, no, your problems will be solved with wealth, with, quote-unquote, peace and security—this tagline that the Romans put out, what they really meant is domination and do it my way.

This vision of the community rooted in Christ is actually, at one level, a real threat to Rome. But not because Christianity is going to win on the playing field, but because Christianity at the end says there's something better, far better, that will give real and true peace. And that's what Paul gives them. That's what Paul presents in Christ. So with that in mind, we're going to turn in our next lesson to look at the theological concepts that Paul will develop in the overall letter, and then we'll dive into the letter itself.

Student: So I started to go back and make sure it's clear in my head as to whether it's Ephesus or Rome. The argument, strongest argument for Ephesus, was the distance, the close distance between Ephesus and Philippi. We don't know of a major imprisonment in Ephesus, but Paul seemed to get thrown in jail wherever he went, so that could take care of that. The major argument for Rome is that there's a Praetorian guard. And this was a capital offense that had to be taken care of at Rome. Is that basically what the two arguments would be?

Dr. Cohick: That's right. That's right. The travel, it really comes down to a question of today, how confident are we that there could be several trips back and forth from Philippi to Rome? And some make the case—and I think it's compelling—that you can have that kind of travel. And others say, "No, it's almost certain it would have to be serendipitous to make that number of trips." I think also the way that people try to order Paul's letters—what did he write when, and then in sequence try to understand Paul's theology—for some, they see Paul's theology developing chronologically, and for those people, it really matters how to order the letters and thus where Paul was when he wrote a letter. My own sense is there is an overarching consistency in Paul's theology over the decade or more that he wrote. And so ordering the letters might help us reconstruct how heretical movements grew up, but it's not going to show us a shift in Paul's thought.