Paul's Letter to the Philippians: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary

Introduction

Preliminary Considerations

Philippians is a much beloved and, recently, much belabored document. The volume of commentaries on Philippians is by no means as high as on Romans and 1 Corinthians, but in the past fifteen years Philippians has not lagged far behind in being a source of discussion and controversy, and thus of scholarly publications. Some of this has to do with the special character, in some respects distinctive character, of this document within the Pauline corpus. Though scholars are often all too ready to suggest that a change in style or vocabulary signals a change in author, Philippians has almost entirely escaped such a charge. It is almost universally agreed to be by Paul himself. This seems odd in some respects when one gives detailed attention to the Greek of Philippians. Let us consider one example — the issue of the letter’s vocabulary and semantic field.

There are some 1633 words in Philippians, which makes it considerably longer than the usual letters we find on ancient papyri from Egypt, but by Pauline standards this document is relatively short. Of those 1633 words, there are in fact only 438 different words (thus we note considerable repetition) and of those 438, some 42 are found nowhere else in the NT and a further 34 are unique within the Pauline corpus. Some of these unique words reflect the unique content of Philippians, which involves references to the Praetorian Guard or to Caesar’s household or to citizenship (1.27–3.20), which is to say some of this unique vocabulary signals the very specific Roman provenance from which and to which Paul writes. At this point one could contrast 1 Corinthians, which is certainly written to a Roman colony city, but not likely from one (i.e., probably from Ephesus). Things Roman are on Paul’s mind in Philippians.

Then there is the highly emotive and personal family language in this discourse — references to Paul’s absence from those he loves (2.12), calling them his loved ones (see 4:1; three of the eight Pauline uses of the vocative beloved are found in this letter), addressing his readers as brothers more frequently by percentage in this letter than in other letters (some 7 times), expressing concerns about their safety (3.1) or his desire to cheer them up (2.19), and language about their or his personal affairs (1.12, 27; 2.19, 20, 23 — found elsewhere only in Col. 4.8 and Eph. 6.21-22). Then there is the mercantile language about accounts and giving and receiving (4.15) as well as the language of sharing punctuated by syn- compounds: the Philippians are his coworkers, his partners in the gospel, his fellow sufferers, and so on (e.g., 4.14). There can be no doubt that Paul is strongly emphasizing the special relationship, a family relationship, he has with his converts in Philippi.

What is also remarkable is what is missing in Philippians — some of Paul’s more loaded theological vocabulary. Words such as grace, faith, and believe occur rarely, and the verbs for salvation or the terms for hope occur not at all. One does not go to Philippians to get final answers on Paul’s views on things like God’s righteousness or predestination. Nor do we find Paul trotting out his credentials as an apostle in this letter. He has no need to do so, as he is not defending himself or attacking opponents. As G. D. Fee notes, this explains the general lack of the use of the explanatory gar, which regularly occurs when Paul is in the heat of a heavy argument. This letter has a lighter and more joyful tone, even though the author and the audience are suffering and the author may be in mortal peril. As often noted, the singularly most frequent word group involves the nouns and verbs of joy, not only as an expression of a real experience but as imperatives as well.¹ To say this is a situation-specific discourse would be an understatement. But how does it relate to that other source of information about Paul’s relationship with the Philippians — the Acts of the Apostles?

Since I have commented at great length elsewhere in this very series on the historical reliability of the account found in Acts 16 of Paul’s first visit to Macedonia and to Philippi in particular,² it is unnecessary to repeat that information here. Suffice it to say that I have not changed my mind that (1) Luke was a sometime companion of Paul and went with him on that initial trip to Philippi; (2) he knew the political and social situation of that city well, including that it was a Roman colony city in the first district of Macedonia (founded as such by Augustus himself); (3) he was well aware that there was very little Jewish presence in that city, and in fact anti-Semitism was more likely to characterize the Roman presence in that city than a warm welcome to Jews; (4) since it was a Roman colony city it was illegal to beat or incarcerate a Roman citizen without a trial and so Paul had a right to an apology from the officials in the city; and (5) that a Christian presence was established in the city by the conversion of a businesswoman named Lydia (or perhaps she was called the Lydian, in which case we do not know her personal name) and her household, with that household becoming the initial place where Christians met.

As to whether there was actually a synagogue in this period in Philippi E. Schnabel is adamant that Luke is referring to such a building by the term proseuchē in Acts 16.13.³ The term literally means place of prayer. Note however that Luke does indeed customarily use synagōgē when he is referring to a building called a synagogue (e.g., Acts 13.14; 14.1). I would suggest that both the locale of this Philippian meeting place and the change in terminology suggest that this is not a formal synagogue, though there may well have been some sort of shelter or building involved. Note that nowhere in Acts 16 do we hear about Jews protesting Paul’s actions or being involved in his incarceration or release. Indeed, no Jewish males are mentioned in the story at all, which is telling. What we find instead is that the term Jews and reference to Jewish customs carry some odium in this town, and the accusation that Paul is such a person doing such things can land him and his coworkers in jail in Philippi (16.20-21). Nothing in this account suggests a viable presence of Jews in the city of Philippi, much less a synagogue in that city. A resident alien and her family meeting outside the city gates hardly qualify as proof that there was a Jewish congregation there in the mid-50s.

Nothing in Luke’s account conflicts with what we find in Philippians itself, and several things that we find in Paul’s writings confirm some of the particulars of the account. For example, Paul tells us in 1 Thess. 2.2 that he suffered and was shamefully mistreated in Philippi. Or we could point to the important mention of women coworkers of Paul in Philippi in Phil. 4.2: he corrects them openly in the presence of their community, precisely because they are leaders in that community. We can fill out the picture some more when we examine 2 Cor. 8.1-5:

And now, brothers, we want you to know about the grace that God has given the Macedonian churches. Out of the most severe trial, their overflowing joy and their extreme poverty welled up in rich generosity. For I testify that they gave as much as they were able, and even beyond their ability. Entirely on their own, they urgently pleaded with us for the privilege of sharing in this service to the saints. And they did not do as we expected, but they gave themselves first to the Lord and then to us in keeping with God’s will.

Paul is here referring to the church in Philippi and presumably also the one in Thessalonike. Paul was supported financially while in Corinth by the Macedonian churches, but they also contributed to the collection for the Jerusalem saints (see also 2 Cor. 11.9). Note the references to both joy and trials in this excerpt, which also characterizes the discourse in Philippians. It is hard to say who Paul is suggesting was extremely impoverished. Is it the churches in Thessalonike and Philippi, or only the former, or only the latter? There is enough in the Thessalonian correspondence to make us think he may be thinking mainly of that church when he speaks of poverty.⁴ More importantly he is stressing the ongoing generosity of the Christians in Macedonia sometime in the mid-50s, and this note we find again in Philippians in the early 60s. A consistent portrait emerges of a church fully committed to the gospel but undergoing trials with some regularity.

Luke, it is true, has some apologetic aims in his account, namely to show that Christianity should not be treated as an illicit religion harmful to the empire, but where his account can be tested against external evidence it is shown to be historically trustworthy and it helps illuminate Paul’s letter to the Philippians at several junctures, as we shall see in the commentary itself. Of course the rhetorical aims of Paul’s discourse to the Philippians are quite different from those of Luke in Acts 16, and this accounts for some of the differences we find in these two sources of material about Paul and the Philippians.⁵ Something more now needs to be said about the city of Philippi at this juncture.

While it is not necessary here to rehearse the ancient history of the city of Philippi (today called Krenides),⁶ founded by Philip of Macedon,⁷ what is of relevance to our discussion is that Philippi in Paul’s day was a town of approximately 10,000 and most importantly that it was a Roman colony city named Colonia Iulia Augusta Philippensis.⁸ Paul takes into account the Roman character of the city when he calls its residents Philippēsioi (4.15). What this meant, among many things, is that the city was legally set up and run as if it were a miniature of Rome, following Roman laws and customs. Latin was the language of jurisprudence in this town, and its officials followed Roman protocols and customs. It is not a surprise then that a significant majority of the inscriptions found in Philippi from this period are in Latin, some 80% as compared to about 40% in Pisidian Antioch.⁹ There were not merely Roman officials running the town, but a significant number of Roman soldiers from the 28th Legion had been given land there and had brought their families to live in Philippi. Furthermore, Roman self-consciousness was high in this city not least because this was the very spot where Octavian won a great victory over Brutus and Cassius which led to Octavian’s becoming Augustus and in turn led to the city being refounded and renamed by Augustus.¹⁰

In addition, Augustus had at the turn of the era settled various Italian colonists in Philippi, making room for the settling of other troops in southern Italy. There was a problem in finding land, homes, and jobs for so many soldiers who mustered out once the empire was established and the Pax Romana, or pacification of the Mediterranean region, was basically completed. Given the social character and recent history of the city, it is no surprise that none of the Christians we know by name who are associated with Philippi have Jewish names — rather they are all Greek and Latin names. The loyalty of the Philippians to Rome itself was considerable, not least because many of them had been granted not only Roman citizenship but also Italian citizenship, resulting in tax exemption for the land of these citizens. In gratitude for all these benefactions, a triumphal arch had been erected in Philippi in the first half of the first century, signaling the city’s association with and loyalty to Rome.¹¹

We must then talk about a Roman overlay of culture and custom on top of the indigenous Greek Hellenistic culture which still continued in various ways, for example, in many religious matters such as the worship of the locally popular goddess Diana and even of the Thracian deity Silva (for whom Paul’s coworker Silvanus may well have been named). What the Roman presence had mainly introduced into the religious culture in Philippi was the worship of the emperor.

We simply do not know, and it would outrun the inscriptional and archaeological evidence to say that the emperor cult dominated or had become the center of religious life in this colony city during Paul’s day. But there can be no doubt that it was a part of that religious life, and there are places in Philippians where Paul may well be obliquely and indirectly critiquing the emperor cult, but we will discuss this in the commentary itself. Here it is sufficient to note that two temples have been found in the Philippian forum dedicated to the worship of the emperor dating to the second century A.D., though there is some reason to think they had precursors in the first century. Lukas Borman in his important study says that we should assume for Philippi a religious identity influenced primarily by Roman religion in which the worship of the princeps and his deified ancestors or predecessors was central besides the traditional Greco-Roman pantheon.¹²

I would say a bit more cautiously that the emperor cult in the mid-first century was becoming increasingly important as one form of Greco-Roman religion and that this religion that focused on a deified human being, without displacing the other gods, was the new religion on the block. The problem for Christianity, as for Judaism, was worship of only the one God of the Bible, who would be seen as a new and additional god by pagans. Christianity was the other new cult in Philippi focused on worship of a historical person of recent memory. It would have been natural to see it and emperor worship as competing.

The outcome of this competition was that Philippi was one of the first towns in the empire to become a Christian city, beginning with the work of Paul in the first century and leading to the building of remarkable Christian buildings and later basilicas in 330-600 which are still being excavated today. In the second century Polycarp wrote to the Christians in Philippi and referred to Paul’s earlier correspondence with them. Apocryphal Christian documents from the second and third centuries such as the Acts of Paul, the Acts of Andrew, material in the pseudo-Clementine literature (Homily 9.16.3), and Testament of Joseph 8.5 refer to the Christian presence in the city. Philippi was the seat of a bishop in the fourth century, Bishop Porphyrios, who attended the council of Sardis in 325 and is portrayed in a mosaic in the octagonal St. Paul’s Church. This church located south of the Via Egnatia, the oldest Byzantine church of the city, was built between 395 and 408, but the inscription of the mosaic says that an earlier building on that spot was dedicated by Paul himself. While this is surely pious exaggeration, nevertheless, all of this indicates an ongoing and flourishing Christian presence in the town.¹³

As late as the sixth century, Christian women played various ministerial roles such as deacons and canons of the basilica.¹⁴ What made it possible for women to play such roles in the church in Philippi when they seem not to have done so in some other locations? Macedonian women, particularly high status ones, played crucial roles in religious life in that region before, during, and after the time of Paul, providing a precedent for the sort of roles we find women playing in the Philippian church, as attested by both Luke and Paul. For example, V. Abramsen and L. Portefaix have demonstrated that in the popular cults of Diana and of Isis in Philippi, women played important religious roles. The sanctuary of Diana is cut into the rock of the acropolis, and one can see that representations of women far outnumber those of men on that sanctuary.¹⁵ Seven inscriptions attest flamines and sacerdotes divae Augustae, which refer to women serving in the temple of Livia, the wife of Augustus.¹⁶ Women of means and of high status in Macedonia seem to have played a wide variety of roles in Greco-Roman religion as priestesses, prophetesses, patrons, and participants.

It would not then be unusual for a high status female convert to Christianity to expect to play such a role in the Christian religion as well, and in places like Philippi they did. There was already a cultural acceptance of women in such roles. When we couple this with the lack of evidence of a Jewish synagogue in Philippi in Paul’s day where a quorum would be made up of men and worship would be led by a man,¹⁷ even though Lydia was a God-fearing Gentile there seems to have been no cultural obstacles or impedance to her or other later women converts being leaders and coworkers with Paul in Philippi.

But was Lydia actually a woman of high status? Acts shows an interest in demonstrating that high status persons (presumably like Theophilus himself, to whom Acts is addressed), including women, were converted to Christianity (e.g., Acts 17.4, 12). Lydia could certainly have been one such woman. The account in Acts 16 tells us that she was the head of a household, which may mean that she was a widow or an unmarried woman. Furthermore, her household was big enough to house several guests, in this case both Paul and his companions. There is also considerable evidence that Paul’s missionary strategy involved not only an urban focus but also a practical focus on converting high status persons who could be sponsors for a fledgling Christian community, including housing it. Lydia fits the profile nicely.

Lydia was a businesswoman who sold purple cloth (Acts 16:14). Purple dye was made from the madder root, found in Lydia’s home region in Thyatira. But the higher quality and more costly royal purple dye came from the murex shell, and use of this dye was carefully controlled by the emperor and members of his household, who licensed its use to only certain high status clients or business-persons.¹⁸ The term used in Acts for Lydia’s profession, porphyropōlis, is attested elsewhere (CIG 2.2519) and does seem to refer to a high status person authorized to use the murex dye. Lydia may have been a resident alien rather than a citizen of Philippi, but this would not prevent her from being a person of considerable status in the city, especially if she had the license to use the murex dye and worked with members of Caesar’s household who managed such matters.¹⁹

All in all the evidence suggests Lydia was a person of some status and considerable means, and if so she may well have provided Paul with contacts in the household of Caesar when he was incarcerated in Rome. At a minimum she was certainly not a poor textile worker, since she owned her home and business and had a household.²⁰ At a maximum she may well have been one of the most high status women in Philippi and might have attracted other women of her station, such as Euodia and Syntyche, who had the time, skills, and freedom to be Paul’s coworkers in Philippi.

Phillip Payne’s summary about the importance of Euodia and Syntyche in the spread of the Pauline gospel is apt. In commenting on the phrase they have contended by my side in the cause of the gospel he says Paul specifically classifies them with ‘Clement and the rest of my fellow workers …’confirming that Paul associates them not simply with other devout women, but with his own fellow ministers of the gospel. The words ‘along with’ and especially ‘and the rest of my workers’ indicate their equality in standing with Paul’s male fellow workers in the gospel.²¹ These Christian women, and their counterparts in Corinth, Thessalonike, and elsewhere raise in an important way questions about the social and educational level of the local leaders of the Christian movement. We will have occasion to address this more when we interact with the discussion of Edwin Judge in a later excursus.

Provenance

Where was Paul when he wrote Philippians, and when did he write it? The traditional answer has been that he wrote it in Rome late in his ministry while he was under house arrest awaiting trial before the emperor, that is, in the early 60s. Of late there have been an increasing number of scholars who have favored the suggestion that Paul wrote this letter from Ephesus, and there have been others, a smaller number, who have favored the notion that Paul wrote Philippians from Caesarea Maritima.

There are significant problems for either of the non-traditional suggestions about the letter’s provenance. First, if indeed Paul was a Roman citizen, and there is good reason to think Luke was right about that,²² then the comments in Philippians which suggest that Paul was facing imminent death by legal execution do not make sense if he was anywhere but in Rome, since elsewhere Paul could appeal to the emperor for justice.

Second, both Acts and Paul’s letters are absolutely silent about any specific incarceration of Paul in Ephesus, which is why Caesarea is at least a better theory than Ephesus. Appeals to Paul’s rhetorical and metaphorical reference to fighting wild beasts in Ephesus (1 Cor. 15.32) to establish an Ephesian imprisonment are not apropos, as Paul is using an analogy with what went on in the arena, not what went on in jail.²³ Likewise, the imprisonments or chainings referred to in 2 Cor. 1.8 and 11.23 could not provide a setting for Philippians, unless one wants to argue Paul wrote Philippians very early in his ministry, before 2 Corinthians. Few scholars are willing to do that, not least because Philippians reflects a relationship between Paul and the converts in that city of considerable duration. Finally, 2 Cor. 1.8-10 refers to an affliction we experienced in Ephesus. Surely this is a reference to some sort of illness or, more likely, social pressure or persecution rather than to any sort of incarceration, and in any case we probably means Paul and his coworkers, not just Paul.²⁴ By contrast, Paul is the sole person in chains in Philippians.

Furthermore, Paul does not say or even suggest in Philippians that he is in jail. He says that he is in chains, and, as B. Rapske has rightly pointed out, this likely means that Paul was chained to a soldier and under house arrest.²⁵ It need not refer to imprisonment at all. This explains nicely why there was such ready access to Paul and freedom of communication between him and the Philippians during this time. As a Roman citizen, he had both the status and the standing to be allowed such treatment not only in Caesarea but in Rome, and the letter to the Philippians suggests that Paul’s social situation is that he was under house arrest when he wrote this document. We will speak shortly about why some of the silences in Philippians also must count against the Ephesian provenance of this document.

Third, Paul says that because of his chains the gospel has been heard in/among the whole of the Praetorium and all the rest (Phil. 1.13). The whole of the Praetorium is odd if it refers merely to a place rather than to a group of persons (i.e., the Praetorian Guard). If it refers to the whole of the building where Paul is being held, then and all the rest is unnecessary. If, however, the reference is to the Praetorian Guard, all the rest would be Roman officials who heard, presumably from the guard, about Paul’s gospel. I would suggest more specifically that it refers to the members of Caesar’s household, usually freedmen, who were bureaucrats in the imperial service and who did indeed work with the Praetorian Guard to serve the emperor. This would explain the clearer reference to them in 4.22. Furthermore, Asia was not an imperial province but a senatorial province, and there is no evidence of a Praetorium in Ephesus. In favor of this reading of the evidence are Tacitus, History 4.46 and Suetonius, Nero 9, where we hear of the body of elite guards serving the emperor. It was after the battle of Philippi in 42 B.C. that Octavian formed 8,000 veterans into Praetorian cohorts. By the time we get to Claudius and Nero, when Paul was writing, these soldiers were working closely with the emperor — for instance Sejanus, the infamous head of the Praetorian Guard during the reign of Tiberius.²⁶ The Philippians would be well aware of this history, and furthermore would have known exactly what Paul is referring to here. The theory advanced here is all the more likely if someone like Lydia had connections with Caesar’s household through her business.

In any case, the reference in 4.22 to converts in Caesar’s household is most naturally associated with a Roman provenance because the vast majority of Caesar’s household and bureaucrats would be found in Rome. In no other Pauline letter do we hear reference to either a Praetorian Guard or Caesar’s household. It is doubtful this is a pure accident since Paul wrote some of his other letters while in places, such as Corinth, where there would be representatives and agents of the emperor, whom Paul never mentions in these other letters.²⁷

But what about the suggestion of G. Hawthorne and others that Paul was writing from Caesarea Maritima in Judea? This theory has the merit of involving actual evidence from Acts that Paul was under legal supervision during the time he was there, unlike in Ephesus, but other difficulties attend this theory. If the distance between Philippi and Rome (some 800 miles) is sometimes thought to count against a Roman provenance, Caesarea merely compounds the problem. Sailing from Caesarea was much more dangerous than journeying between Greece and Rome, and would normally be limited to the sailing season between March and October (as Acts 27:9 attests). By contrast the journey from Rome across the Adriatic and then on the Via Egnatia, which passed through Philippi, was much more manageable. It could even be done in less than four weeks if one had a horse. Nothing in the references in Philippians to the comings and goings of Epaphroditus and others is at all impossible or unlikely if Paul is writing from Rome, but if he is writing from Caesarea Maritima these references become much more problematic.²⁸ And, as I have already stressed, Paul was under no immediate threat of execution in Caesarea Maritima.

In sum, the traditional view does a far better job of satisfying all the evidence about the provenance of this letter than either of the other two main possibilities. It was written from Rome while Paul was under house arrest, and probably near the end of the judicial process, so in about 62.

Consistency and Change

My mind has changed in some important ways in regard to the study of Paul’s letters, including Philippians, since I wrote Friendship and Finances in Philippi some eighteen years ago. Broadly speaking, I have had a growing realization of the need (1) to attend more clearly to the dominantly oral and rhetorical nature of the Greco-Roman world when interpreting Paul’s letters, and (2) to ponder more seriously the silences in a particular letter, especially when elsewhere in the Pauline corpus there is not silence. Like the dog that did not bark in one of the more perplexing Sherlock Holmes mysteries, these silences become important clues.

What silences in Philippians might serve in this way? First, there is the noticeable absence of clear citations, and very few allusions, to the OT. Contrast this with Romans 9–11, which is a feast for those who relish discussion of the use of the OT in the NT. Why would Paul, so accustomed to draw on the OT for ammunition, sacred backing, even inartificial proofs for his arguments, largely neglect such a resource in Philippians? Might this not tell us something significant about Paul’s audience?

The evidence for any sort of significant Jewish population in Philippi in the mid-first century A.D. is between slim and nonexistent. Paul found no synagogue there, only a few God-fearing Gentile women praying at a meeting place at the river, according to Acts 16. The Philippians may well have been Paul’s most beloved and supportive group of converts, but they were also apparently his most predominantly Gentile group of converts, by which I mean converts largely from paganism, not from the synagogue.

Second, the Greek text of Philippians is remarkably free of textual variants, and there is absolutely no textual evidence whatsoever that this document was compounded from multiple letters of Paul. Nor, as we shall see in the next section of this Introduction, are there any good internal reasons to suggest that this document is not a unified whole, if one attends to the rhetorical conventions and recurring themes involved in its composition. Furthermore, we have some very good evidence in the form of inline-image 46 that Philippians was, in the earliest period of its being copied, and was viewed as, a single document. [N]either this nor any other manuscript, to say nothing of early patristic allusions, give any indication that the letter ever circulated in a different form from that which we have.²⁹

Third, Philippians makes no reference to the collection for the Jerusalem church, which is one of Paul’s greatest concerns in the earlier letters to Corinth and Rome. This silence cries out for explanation, and all the more when in 2 Corinthians 8–9 the Philippians are cited as examples of good and cheerful givers in order to induce the Corinthians to give to the collection for Jerusalem. In other words, this silence speaks loudly that this document was likely written after the collection had been delivered. Thus it was written not in the 50s but after Romans. This silence also speaks loudly against an Ephesian provenance for Philippians.

Let us turn to the issue which I mentioned first at the beginning of this section — the oral and rhetorical nature of the Greco-Roman world in which all of Paul’s letters were composed. So much was this the case that instructions on how to write letters were placed in rhetorical handbooks. The dominant communication ethos was oral and rhetorical, not epistolary, not least because only about ten to fifteen percent of the population could read. The very Greek word epistolē, from which we get the English word epistle, originally referred to oral communication.³⁰ Texts in Paul’s world were largely surrogates for oral communication, for when one was at a distance from the person or group one wanted to talk to. They were oral texts, composed to be read aloud, not to be inspected or ruminated on by reading eyes.³¹ Indeed, the use of scriptum continuum, the continuous flow of Greek letters without breaks between words, sentences, or paragraphs inhibited such silent and private reading. One often needed someone who already knew the content of the document, a scribe or an orator used to using such documents as scripts for oral performance, to read it aloud to the audience, and then the literate would be able to look at the document and find relevant sentences and the like.

For us, who live in a text-driven culture and a computerized world, it may be difficult to understand that Paul’s letters are not texts in the modern sense at all, nor do they conform mainly to epistolary conventions either ancient or modern. Since I have discussed this at great length elsewhere,³² I will stress here only that rhetoric must be primary for understanding Philippians and epistolary conventions entirely secondary. Only at the beginning and the end of Paul’s discourses do we find elements that can be analyzed under the rubric of epistolary conventions. Terms like thanksgiving period or body middle help us not at all to get at the character or meaning of this material. In any case, there was no epistolary convention to include thanksgiving prayers in ancient letters. Mere perfunctory or conventional health wishes are not thanksgiving prayers or reports of prayers that preview some of the themes of the coming discourse, which is what we find in Paul’s letters. These prayers are better seen as something of an exordium meant to establish rapport with the audience and give a preview of coming attractions. Nor do ancient letters normally include the sort of lengthy arguments and discourse material we regularly find in Paul’s epistles. But rhetorical speeches do include such arguments, and we would be much better served to realize that it is rhetorical conventions not epistolary conventions that Paul is mainly following in Philippians.

When one takes the time to consider the matter of dating of the so-called epistolary handbooks one discovers that they were too late to have influenced Paul (e.g., Libanius in the fourth century A.D. and probably pseudo-Demetrius in the late first or second centuries A.D.). The rhetorical handbooks and discussions by contrast go back to Aristotle, who not incidentally did a considerable amount of teaching in Macedonia long before Paul ever arrived there.

In short, though when I went to graduate school I was taught to mainly do epistolary analysis of Paul’s documents, the more I have learned about the dominant rhetorical character of Paul’s world and cultures, the more I have realized that what we are dealing with in Paul’s documents are rhetorical discourses with some epistolary features at the beginning and conclusion because they had to be sent from a distance. We are not primarily dealing with letters that use occasional rhetorical devices such as rhetorical questions. Paul’s letters are hybrid vehicles, but the epistolary framework only provides the outer body of the letter. The hybrid engine which empowers and drives the vehicle is rhetoric.³³ It is high time that the emphasis is placed in the right spot when analyzing Paul’s documents, and the analysis should be done primarily on the basis of rhetorical paradigms and conventions.³⁴

Somehow my previous Philippians commentary seems to have given the impression that I saw Philippians as a friendship letter reflecting the (later) conventions of that sort of document. I did not. Perhaps it was the title, Friendship and Finances. And as time has gone on I have found the analysis of Philippians as a friendship letter less and less persuasive, not least because the key Greek terms for friend and friendship are entirely absent from this document. Paul does not call the Philippians his friends. He is very happy to call them his brothers and sisters. Loveday Alexander is right that this document is far more like a letter written from one family member to the rest of the family than it is like friendship letters.³⁵ Thus while I certainly agree that Philippians is a friendly letter, it is not a friendship letter in form, nor is that the essence of its content either.³⁶ On the contrary, this document is a clarion call to imitate good examples and avoid bad ones, and so to a unity of mind and purpose in the Philippian church.

One more point should be made here at the outset. While I certainly still believe that what we have in Philippians is an excellent example of deliberative rhetoric, I have become increasingly persuaded by the increasingly refined rhetorical studies of this document that, like 1 Corinthians, Philippians also has some epideictic elements in it, a fact which I allowed for in my earlier commentary but have become more convinced of. Philippians is in part concerned with matters of praise and blame or what is honorable and noble and worthy of emulation. Paul is not so much trying to change the course of the Philippian Christians’ behavior as to keep them united and on track by providing good examples (and pointing out negative examples), the chief good exemplum being Christ himself. This discourse is a call to careful reflection and hard thinking, with beliefs sparking appropriate behavior — hence all the language about mind and thinking.

Paul in Philippians is not mainly correcting problems but rather ensuring progress in Christian maturity, progress in working out one’s salvation with fear and trembling, progress in leaving the pagan past behind and striving for the goal of being fully conformed to the image of the crucified, risen, and glorified Savior. The Philippian Christians need to be walking in the right direction, striving to go on to perfection or completion or full maturity, with Paul himself modeling how that ought to be done. The general character of the letter makes clear that Paul is not mainly concerned about opponents, whether in Rome or in Philippi. Fee is right to caution against too much mirror-reading of Philippians and against attempts to connect all the dots between Paul’s own problems and those the Philippians face. He is also right that the dogs in Philippians 3 are named as a potential threat. What Paul and his converts face in common is pagan, more specifically Roman, opposition to the promulgation and practice of what Romans would regard as a superstitio and a novum, a new and unapproved religion.³⁷

Partition Theories

Before the rise of modern historical criticism, no one suggested that Philippians was a combination of several Pauline letters. And even in modernity none of those who have made such suggestions have, until very recently, analyzed Philippians using rhetorical analysis. Partition theories always arose due to some perceived literary or other incongruities in the text. If there can be said to be a trend in the last ten years among writers on Philippians, it is increasing skepticism about such attempts to divide a small document like Philippians into two or three original letters of Paul. This skepticism is well founded on several grounds.

Phil. 3.1-2 presents us with an abrupt turn or transition in the discourse, which is taken as an indicator that we have here a seam between what were originally two documents. Often this suggestion is coupled with the observation that Paul in 3.1 says and now finally, and then goes on for a considerable time thereafter, as the document now stands. We will discuss in the commentary itself whether to loipon should in fact be translated and finally or rather as for the rest or something else, but even supposing that it does mean and finally here (and in 4.8 as well?), partition theories fail to take into account how many ancient and modern orators tend to say finally and then carry on for a good while thereafter.³⁸ Philippians is an ad hoc document, likely dictated to a scribe, and it partakes of various of the traits of oral and rhetorical speech, not the least of which in the case of loquacious people like Paul is to carry on considerably after a signal that one is in the home stretch.

But what about that abrupt transition from 3.1 to 3.2? There are plenty of dramatic shifts in Pauline discourse. For example, at the end of Romans 8 we have something of a dramatic doxology which could suggest that Paul is coming to a conclusion, and then we are suddenly hit with an entirely new topic, an entirely new argument, in Romans 9-11, which has little contact or similarity with what has gone before. And there is a good rhetorical explanation for this seemingly abrupt change of direction: Paul has moved from his probatio to his refutatio. The same thing could be happening in Philippians. In Phil. 3.2-6 Paul turns to deal with negative examples he wants his audience to avoid emulating, including that of his own pre-Christian behavior. We will say more about the rhetorical analysis of this so-called seam later, but even if one is totally skeptical about rhetorical analysis of Paul’s discourse, there are other excellent reasons to conclude that the partition theories are both unnecessary and wrong.

First, it has been rightly asked by various scholars which is more difficult to believe — that Paul dictating a discourse might quickly move from one argument to a rather different one, or that a scribe weaving together two or three documents, who has all his materials in front of him and plenty of time to reflect on how to edit them together, would be so inept as to create an awkward transition or seam when he could have just left out more material and made the transition less abrupt? Various recent commentators on Philippians have quite rightly said that the latter is less historically plausible than the former. On the showing of the partition theorists, the scribe has already edited out prescripts and postscripts of one or more letters in order to incorporate them into the single document we call Philippians. What would have constrained them from doing a better job of editing than apparently we find them doing at 3.1-2?³⁹ I can think of no good reason.⁴⁰

Second, there is the growing body of evidence that all the different arguments in this discourse, all its major sections, contain certain common terms, themes, phrases, and ideas, which suggests a unified composition. David Garland, Peter Wick, and others have done an excellent job of amassing some of the evidence, to which we can only give a cursory glimpse here. Wick, for example, notices striking parallels between Phil. 1.12-26 and 3.1-16, between 1.27-30 and 3.17-21, between 2.1-11 and 4.1-3, between 2.12-18 and 4.4-9, and between 2.19-30 and 4.10-20.⁴¹ Even if he is only partially right about some of these parallels and similarities, it must count against the partition theories. Garland and others have pointed out how words for joy and rejoicing, partnership, and thinking appear in all the different portions of this discourse, and we may also note how many of the words in the Christ hymn in 2.5-11 resurface in 3.2-21.⁴²

Finally, as G. D. Fee rightly stresses, we have no historical evidence that ancient scribes edited letters together in such a poor and piecemeal fashion. In fact, do we have any historical evidence at all that scribes edited personal letters together? I know of none.⁴³

A Letter of Friendship or a Family Letter?

A good number of scholars have presented extensive arguments that what we have in Philippians is a letter of friendship, conforming to the conventions of such letters.⁴⁴ Their case is extensively argued and many have become convinced by these arguments.⁴⁵

Before one accepts such arguments, however, I must say that there are some serious flaws in this whole line of approach to Philippians. We have already noted that the specific language of friendship — philos and philia — is entirely absent from Philippians. There is a good reason it is absent. That sort of language was used in two different sorts of social contexts in Paul’s world, neither of which suits Paul’s relationship with the Philippians. First, that language could be used by a higher status person speaking to lower status persons in a euphemistic way. The lower status persons were the friends of the higher status person because they promoted the honor of their friend, did his bidding, supported his candidacy for some office, and so on. In this context friendship language did not connote a parity relationship but rather ironically masked the opposite in polite language. Second, friendship letters were sometimes written between elite and literate persons who really did have a sort of social equality, one person to another.

Neither of these uses of the language and conventions of ancient friendship apply in Paul’s relationship with his converts in Philippi. Paul addresses them as his brothers in the gospel, not as his friends. The language of family is used of this relationship. The language of affection was not used just of relationships between friends. For example, agapētos, beloved, what God calls his Son in the Gospels, is primarily family language. When Paul calls his converts his beloved in Phil. 4.1 (twice), he is claiming them as family, his Christian family.

In several of his letters Paul talks about being the parent of his converts, whether father or mother (e.g., Galatians 4). Paul calls some of his converts in Philippi his coworkers in the gospel, including Euodia and Syntyche. When the language of partnership (koinōnia) comes into play in this discourse, it has to do not with Paul being friends with the Philippians but with their common and shared tasks for the sake of the gospel. Were Paul concerned to set his relationship with his converts on some sort of equal footing, or to make clear the parity among all converts in Philippi, then greeting to bishops (or overseers) and elders, distinguished from the rest of the converts, was not the way to begin.

What of the reference to Paul’s true yokefellow in Philippians 4? Here it is possible that Paul is appealing to a friend