The Epistle to the Colossians — The Least Important Church, an Early Heresy, and a Ghost Letter

Part of the series: The New Testament Canon—How 27 Books Survived the Ancient Gauntlet

Every other letter in this series went somewhere that mattered. Rome was the capital of the world, Corinth and Ephesus were the crossroads of the Aegean, Philippi sat on the empire’s great highway with a colony’s charter. And then there is Colossae—a once-notable wool town in the Lycus valley of Phrygia, well past its prime by the time Paul wrote, overshadowed by its prosperous neighbors Laodicea and Hierapolis, soon to be shaken half to death by an earthquake and eventually abandoned altogether. J. B. Lightfoot, who wrote the great commentary on this letter, put it flatly: without doubt Colossae was the least important church to which any epistle of St. Paul was addressed.⁠¹ Paul had never even been there. The church was the work of his Colossian co-worker Epaphras, and Paul writes to Christians who had never seen his face.⁠²

Yet this letter to a minor church Paul never visited entered the canon without a ripple of ancient doubt, carried inside it the church’s first recorded battle against a homegrown rival philosophy, produced one of the two great Christological hymns of the Pauline corpus, and—through a single sentence in its final chapter—conjured into existence a forged epistle that haunted the Bible’s margins for the better part of a thousand years. The least important address on Paul’s mailing list turns out to have one of the most instructive stories in the whole history of the canon. That combination of insignificance and consequence is, I suspect, the point. The canon was never a collection of letters to important places.

The Least Important Church

The Lycus valley held three churches, and the letter names the other two: Epaphras, Paul writes, “works very hard for you and for those in Laodicea and those in Hierapolis.”⁠³ Laodicea was the banking center whose lukewarm church the Book of Revelation would soon rebuke; Hierapolis had its hot springs and, in Christian memory, the grave of the apostle Philip. Colossae, ten miles or so up the valley, had been a “great city of Phrygia” in Xerxes’ day; by Paul’s, the geographers were calling it a small town, when they mentioned it at all.⁠⁴

Then the ground moved. Tacitus records that in Nero’s reign “one of the famous cities of Asia, Laodicea, was that same year overthrown by an earthquake, and, without any relief from us, recovered itself by its own resources”—a notice that falls in his narrative of the year 60.⁠⁵ The chronicle tradition preserved by Eusebius and Jerome remembers the catastrophe as wider and slightly later, reporting that “three cities were ruined in an earthquake; Laodicea, Hierapolis and Colossae,” under the same emperor.⁠⁶ Whether these are two records of one quake or memories of two, the upshot for Colossae was the same: rich Laodicea rebuilt itself and grew; poor Colossae dwindled, and in later centuries the site was abandoned. The town that received this letter barely outlived it. It is hard to think of a stronger proof that the church did not canonize letters for their addressees’ prestige.

The Colossian Heresy

What provoked the letter was trouble inside the church—not factions or moral failure, as at Corinth, but the first time we can watch an apostle fight a rival religious system, with the opponents’ slogans still embedded in his prose. Epaphras had evidently brought Paul a report, and Paul’s response bristles with quoted material: “See to it that no one captivate you with an empty, seductive philosophy according to human tradition, according to the elemental powers of the world and not according to Christ.”⁠⁷ Someone at Colossae was passing judgment “in matters of food and drink or with regard to a festival or new moon or sabbath.”⁠⁸ Someone delighted “in self-abasement and worship of angels, taking his stand on visions.”⁠⁹ Someone was issuing rules Paul quotes with audible contempt: “Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!”⁠¹⁰

What exactly this “philosophy” was is one of the long-running puzzles of New Testament scholarship, and honesty requires saying that no reconstruction commands consensus. The old Tübingen critics read it as full-blown second-century Gnosticism and dated the letter accordingly—an argument that collapsed as scholars recognized that everything in the polemic fits first-century Jewish ascetic and mystical currents. Lightfoot connected it to an Essene type of Jewish mysticism, carefully claiming “not a precise identity of origin, but only an essential affinity of type” with the Essenes.⁠¹¹ Fred Francis reoriented the whole debate by arguing that the “worship of angels” is not worship offered to angels but the worship the angels themselves perform in heaven—which the Colossian visionaries, by fasting and “self-abasement,” sought to ascend and join.⁠¹² Morna Hooker asked the discipline’s most deflating question: were there false teachers at Colossae at all, or was Paul inoculating a young church against the ordinary pressures of its pagan and Jewish environment?⁠¹³ I find the older view more persuasive than the skeptical one—the polemic is too specific, too quotable, to be shadowboxing—but the debate itself is instructive: we are overhearing one side of a local argument whose other side is lost.

What is not lost is the region’s long memory of the problem. Three centuries later, a synod held at Laodicea itself—the next town down the valley—found it necessary to decree that “Christians must not forsake the Church of God, and go away and invoke angels and gather assemblies,” branding the practice “covert idolatry.”⁠¹⁴ Theodoret, commenting on Colossians in the fifth century, testified that this “disease” had “long remained in Phrygia and Pisidia,” and that oratories of St. Michael could still be seen in the district.⁠¹⁵ Whatever the Colossian philosophy was, Paul did not invent it, and it did not die quickly. His answer to it, as we will see, was not a counter-rule but a Christology.

The Paper Trail

The letter’s external history is brief to tell because nothing in it ever went wrong. Marcion included Colossians in his ten-letter collection around 144, and when Tertullian worked through Marcion’s text of it, he opened with a methodological flourish—truth precedes heresy as the seed precedes the weed—and proceeded to beat Marcion with the letter’s own words, finding nothing in it that served the heretic’s two-God system.⁠¹⁶ The Muratorian Fragment lists Colossians fourth among Paul’s letters to the seven churches.⁠¹⁷ Papyrus 46 preserves it among the collected letters around the year 200.⁠¹⁸ Clement of Alexandria quotes it by name—“Also in the Epistle to the Colossians he writes, ‘Admonishing every man, and teaching every man in all wisdom…’”—and, with a philosopher’s relish, turns Colossians 2:8 into a charter for discriminating philosophical study rather than a ban on it, insisting that Paul brands “not all philosophy” but the kind that dethrones the Creator.⁠¹⁹ Eusebius files Paul’s letters among the acknowledged books; Athanasius lists Colossians in its place in 367; the councils of the late fourth century ratify what no one had contested.⁠²⁰ On the ancient evidence, Colossians is simply secure.

The modern evidence is where the argument lives. In 1838 Ernst Theodor Mayerhoff became the first to deny that Paul wrote Colossians, judging it dependent on Ephesians—which he accepted—and full of un-Pauline ideas.⁠²¹ The debate he started has never closed. The style is measurably different from the undisputed letters—longer sentences, piled genitives, liturgical redundancy—and the theology reaches heights the earlier letters only gesture toward: a cosmic Christ, a realized resurrection (“you were raised with him”), a church that is his body in the universe.⁠²² Raymond Brown’s honest tally: “At the present moment about 60 percent of critical scholarship holds that Paul did not write the letter.”⁠²³

The defense rests on a fact the doubters have never adequately explained: Colossians is welded to Philemon, a letter virtually no one disputes. The two share Timothy as co-sender; greetings from the same five men—Epaphras, Mark, Aristarchus, Demas, and Luke; the same Onesimus traveling in both; even a word for the same Archippus.⁠²⁴ A forger writing a generation after Paul would have needed not merely to imitate the apostle’s voice but to engineer eight interlocking personal details around a private note about a runaway slave—and to do it so well that no ancient reader ever noticed. Some scholars split the difference: James Dunn, in the fullest modern commentary on the Greek text, proposed that Timothy actually drafted the letter under Paul’s direction, with Paul adding the greeting “in my own hand” at the end—which would make Colossians both genuinely Pauline and audibly different from letters Paul dictated syllable by syllable.⁠²⁵ I have set out in the Ephesians essay why these authorship debates, interesting as history, decide nothing about canonicity; the church received Colossians as apostolic Scripture, and Trent ratified that reception.⁠²⁶ The argument about the hand that held the pen continues. The letter’s authority does not depend on its outcome.

The Image of the Invisible God

Paul’s answer to the Colossian philosophy was to raise the subject over its head. Against a piety of rules, calendars, and angelic intermediaries, the letter’s first chapter sets a hymn—like the one in Philippians, possibly older than the letter that quotes it:

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For in him were created all things in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things he himself might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile all things for him, making peace by the blood of his cross [through him], whether those on earth or those in heaven.⁠²⁷

Every clause lands on the Colossian error. Fascinated by angels? He created the thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers. Anxious about the elemental powers of the cosmos? In him all things hold together. Seeking fullness through ascetic technique? In him all the fullness was pleased to dwell. The hymn does not argue the philosophy down; it makes it superfluous.

One phrase, however, would cost the church three centuries of controversy: “the firstborn of all creation.” In the fourth century the Arians seized on prōtotokos as proof that the Son, however exalted, was a creature—the first and greatest of things made. Athanasius spent sections of his Discourses Against the Arians dismantling the reading, and his counter-argument turns on the hymn’s own grammar: “If He is simply ‘First-born of the whole creation,’ then He is other than the whole creation”—for the one through whom “all things were created” cannot be one of the things created, else, as Athanasius pressed the point, he would be firstborn of himself.⁠²⁸ Firstborn, in the Scriptural idiom, is a title of rank and inheritance, not a birth certificate; the hymn’s next line already says he is “before all things.” The Catholic reading—Nicaea’s reading—was not imposed on Colossians. It was extracted from it, under pressure, by men who read the Greek more carefully than their opponents. Readers who have met the Jehovah’s Witnesses at their door have met the Arian exegesis alive and well; the answer to it is still Athanasius’s, and it is still in the text.⁠²⁹

The letter’s second chapter draws baptism into the same orbit. In Christ, Paul tells the Colossians, “you were also circumcised with a circumcision not administered by hand”; “you were buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the power of God.”⁠³⁰ Baptism, that is, stands to the new covenant as circumcision stood to the old—the rite of incorporation into the people of God. The Catechism reads the typology exactly this way, teaching that Jesus’ own circumcision “prefigures that ‘circumcision of Christ’ which is Baptism”—and Catholic and Reformed theologians alike have long drawn from the parallel an argument for baptizing the children of believers, since no one waited until a son of Israel could speak for himself to give him the covenant sign.⁠³¹ The argument is not airtight—arguments from typology rarely are—but it is ancient, serious, and drawn from this letter.

What Is Lacking in the Afflictions of Christ

Then there is the sentence that has startled Protestant readers for five centuries. “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake,” Paul writes, “and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ on behalf of his body, which is the church.”⁠³² Lacking? What could be lacking in the afflictions of Christ? The New American Bible’s note moves quickly to say what the verse cannot mean: the phrase “does not imply that Christ’s atoning death on the cross was defective.”⁠³³ Chrysostom, preaching on the verse in the fourth century, already felt the difficulty and resolved it in the direction of love: it seems “a great thing” for Paul to say, “but it is not of arrogancy, far be it, but even of much tender love towards Christ; for he will not have the sufferings to be his own, but His”—Christ, having died for the church, remains so united to it that he counts its afflictions as his own.⁠³⁴

The Catholic doctrine of redemptive suffering is essentially an exposition of this verse, and its modern charter is John Paul II’s apostolic letter Salvifici Doloris, which opens with Colossians 1:24 and works out its logic with lawyerly care. “The sufferings of Christ created the good of the world’s redemption,” the pope wrote. “This good in itself is inexhaustible and infinite. No man can add anything to it. But at the same time, in the mystery of the Church as his Body, Christ has in a sense opened his own redemptive suffering to all human suffering.”⁠³⁵ Nothing is lacking in the cross’s worth; what remains outstanding is its application in time, in the members of the body—and into that application Christ has invited his members’ own sufferings. The Catechism cites the verse in exactly this key, for the sick who unite their sufferings to Christ’s and for the disciples called to take up the cross.⁠³⁶ The verse Protestants find alarming is, on the Catholic reading, one of the most consoling in Scripture: suffering, the most useless-seeming thing in human experience, can be joined to the one act that redeemed the world. A letter written to comfort a small, frightened church has been doing precisely that work ever since.

The Ghost Letter of Laodicea

And then, in the letter’s final greetings, Paul wrote a sentence that would haunt the Bible for a millennium: “And when this letter is read before you, have it read also in the church of the Laodiceans, and you yourselves read the one from Laodicea.”⁠³⁷ The one from Laodicea. There was, then, another letter—circulating ten miles away, expected at Colossae—and it does not survive. Or does it? I have argued in the Ephesians essay that the best candidate is Ephesians itself, a circular letter of which the Laodicean copy was one address among several; Marcion, tellingly, published Ephesians under the title “To the Laodiceans.” However the identification falls out, the canonical fact is a vacancy: a letter of Paul that the church of the second century could not produce.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and so did the ancient book trade. At some point in the early centuries—the date is genuinely uncertain—someone composed, in the plainest Latin, a twenty-verse “Epistle of Paul to the Laodiceans,” stitched together almost entirely from phrases of Philippians with a seasoning of Galatians. Lightfoot, who edited the thing with more care than it deserves, describes it as “a cento of Pauline phrases strung together without any definite connexion or any clear object,” and delivers the driest verdict in his commentary: “It has no doctrinal peculiarities. Thus it is quite harmless, so far as falsity and stupidity combined can ever be regarded as harmless.”⁠³⁸ M. R. James, who translated it, was no kinder: “It is not easy to imagine a more feebly constructed cento of Pauline phrases.”⁠³⁹ Whether this Latin cento is the same “epistle to the Laodiceans” that the Muratorian Fragment condemns as “forged in Paul’s name to [further] the heresy of Marcion” is doubtful—our text contains no Marcionite theology, and most scholars think the fragment aims at Marcion’s retitled Ephesians or a lost forgery—though Harnack, characteristically, argued for the identification.⁠⁴⁰

What makes the ghost instructive is not its composition but its career. Jerome, cataloguing Paul’s letters in 392, dismissed it in a sentence: “Some read one also to the Laodiceans but it is rejected by everyone.”⁠⁴¹ Rejected by everyone—and yet there it sits, a century and a half later, copied between Colossians and 1 Timothy in Codex Fuldensis, one of the oldest and best manuscripts of the Latin Vulgate, corrected by the bishop of Capua himself in 546 and 547.⁠⁴² The Second Council of Nicaea in 787 found it necessary to warn the faithful against “a forged epistle to the Laodiceans” still “circulated, having a place in some copies of the Apostle.”⁠⁴³ It kept its place anyway—in the Book of Armagh, in scores of medieval Latin Bibles, wherever scribes hesitated to omit something that might be apostolic. Lightfoot’s summary is the epitaph the whole episode deserves: “for more than nine centuries this forged epistle hovered about the doors of the sacred Canon, without either finding admission or being peremptorily excluded.”⁠⁴⁴ Even the first English Bibles felt the pull. Wycliffe and Purvey excluded it, but later Wycliffite manuscripts carried it in two independent Middle English versions, with a prologue solemnly explaining that “this pistil is not in comyn Latyn bookis, and therfor it was but late translatid into Englisch tunge.”⁠⁴⁵

The Renaissance killed it with laughter. Erasmus, reviewing the forgery, refused even to translate his own contempt into moderation: it has nothing of Paul beyond a few begged words, he wrote, and then—Tonat, fulgurat, meras flammas loquitur Paulus—“Paul thunders, hurls lightning, speaks sheer flames. But this letter, besides being extremely short, how cold it is, how lifeless!”⁠⁴⁶ Trent’s definitive canon of 1546, listing fourteen epistles of Paul, closed the door without mentioning the ghost by name.⁠⁴⁷ For this series, the episode is a nine-century experiment in how the canon actually worked. A text with a perfect pedigree on its face—Paul’s name, an address supplied by Colossians itself, a place in venerable manuscripts—never achieved canonicity, because the church’s discernment was never really about pedigree on paper. The cento had no voice. Readers who knew Paul—Jerome in the fourth century, Erasmus in the sixteenth—recognized instantly that this was not he. The same instinct that admitted a letter to an unimportant church without a quarrel excluded a plausible forgery without a formal trial. The canon, it turns out, was guarded less by decrees than by ears.

Into the Canon

The letter’s afterlife among the commentators is smaller than Ephesians’ but distinguished. Chrysostom preached twelve homilies on it at the end of the fourth century, wringing from Colossians 1:24 the pastoral gold quoted above.⁠⁴⁸ Theodore of Mopsuestia and Ambrosiaster expounded it; Aquinas lectured through it, and his prologue reads the three Prison Epistles of this batch as a single ecclesiology in three movements: in Ephesians the Apostle described the nature of the Church’s unity, in Philippians its growth and preservation, and in Colossians its protection from the heretics corrupting it.⁠⁴⁹ Calvin published his commentary in 1548. The lectionary reads Colossians semicontinuously in the summer Sundays of Year C, and—more tellingly—assigns Colossians 3:1–4 as an option for the second reading of Easter Sunday itself: “If then you were raised with Christ, seek what is above.”⁠⁵⁰ The letter that told a frightened Phrygian church it had already died and risen with Christ is the church’s own Easter morning text.

Colossae never recovered; its mound in southwestern Turkey lay unexcavated for nineteen centuries, until archaeologists opened the first systematic digs in 2025. Its letter did rather better. The least important church on Paul’s list received the epistle in which “all things hold together,” watched it outlast the town, the earthquake, the philosophy, the forgers, and the critics, and bequeathed it to a canon that never once questioned it. Lightfoot’s verdict about the town’s insignificance is the setup; the letter’s history is the punch line. The canon of Scripture was assembled by a church that could tell the voice of an apostle from a forger’s cento at a thousand years’ distance—and that never confused the importance of an address with the authority of what was addressed to it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who wrote the Epistle to the Colossians? The letter names Paul and Timothy, and no ancient reader doubted Pauline authorship. Since Ernst Theodor Mayerhoff first denied it in 1838, critical scholars have debated the question—Raymond Brown estimated that about 60 percent of critical scholarship now holds that Paul did not write it—citing the letter’s distinctive style and elevated Christology. The strongest defense is the letter’s eight interlocking personal links with Philemon, which virtually everyone accepts as Paul’s; a respected mediating view (James Dunn’s) has Timothy drafting the letter under Paul’s authority. Catholic teaching does not stake the letter’s inspiration on the debate: the Church received Colossians as apostolic Scripture, and that reception fixed its canonical status.

Was Colossians ever doubted in the early church? No. Marcion included it in his canon around 144, Tertullian used it against him, the Muratorian Fragment lists it fourth among Paul’s letters to the seven churches, Papyrus 46 preserves it, Clement of Alexandria quotes it by name, and every canon list from Athanasius to Trent includes it. The doubts are entirely modern and concern authorship, not canonicity.

What was the Colossian heresy? Paul opposes a “philosophy” at Colossae involving ascetic rules (“Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!”), observance of festivals, new moons, and sabbaths, and “self-abasement and worship of angels” grounded in visions. Scholars debate its identity: Lightfoot saw an Essene-like Jewish mysticism; Fred Francis argued the “worship of angels” was the heavenly worship performed by angels, which visionaries sought to join through ascetic practice; Morna Hooker questioned whether organized false teachers existed at all. The region’s fascination with angels persisted for centuries—a fourth-century synod at neighboring Laodicea had to forbid invoking angels, and Theodoret still knew oratories of St. Michael in the district.

What is the “letter from Laodicea” in Colossians 4:16? Paul instructs the Colossians to exchange letters with the church of Laodicea, including “the one from Laodicea”—a Pauline letter that does not survive under that name. The most economical explanation identifies it with Ephesians, which was likely a circular letter and which Marcion’s canon titled “To the Laodiceans.” The verse also inspired a short Latin forgery, the “Epistle to the Laodiceans,” a cento of Pauline phrases that circulated in Latin Bibles for roughly nine centuries—dismissed by Jerome and warned against by the Second Council of Nicaea, yet still being copied into Wycliffite English Bibles in the fifteenth century. It was never received into any canon.

What does “I am filling up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ” mean? Not that the cross was insufficient—the NABRE’s own note rules that reading out. Christ’s atoning sacrifice is complete and infinite; what remains “lacking” is its application in the life of his body, the church, across time. Because Christ has united believers to himself, their sufferings can be joined to his and made fruitful for the church. This is the Scriptural foundation of the Catholic doctrine of redemptive suffering, expounded most fully in John Paul II’s Salvifici Doloris (1984) and echoed in the Catechism’s teaching on the anointing of the sick.

Does “firstborn of all creation” mean Christ was created? No—and the debate over this phrase is ancient. The fourth-century Arians read prōtotokos (“firstborn”) as proof the Son was the first creature; Athanasius answered that the hymn itself refutes them, since the one in whom and through whom “all things were created” cannot be one of the things created, and the text immediately adds that “he is before all things.” In Scripture “firstborn” is a title of rank and inheritance—as David, the youngest son, is made God’s “firstborn” in Psalm 89—not a statement of origin. The same exegetical argument answers the identical reading advanced by Jehovah’s Witnesses today.

Footnotes

1. 1. J. B. Lightfoot, Saint Paul's Epistles to the Colossians and to Philemon (London: Macmillan, 1875): "Without doubt Colossæ was the least important Church, to which any epistle of St Paul was addressed." Scripture quotations in this essay follow the New American Bible, Revised Edition (NABRE) unless otherwise noted; bible.usccb.org/bible/colossians.

2. 2. Colossians 1:7 (Epaphras, "our beloved fellow slave... a trustworthy minister of Christ on your behalf"); 2:1 ("for you and for those in Laodicea and all who have not seen me face to face," NABRE); cf. 4:12–13.

3. 3. Colossians 4:13 (NABRE), with 4:12 (Epaphras "who is one of you").

4. 4. Herodotus calls Colossae "a great city of Phrygia" in recounting Xerxes' march; Strabo, writing about two generations before Paul, describes it as a "small town" in a district of which Laodicea was the capital. Lightfoot, Colossians, assembles the evidence, noting that Ptolemy's enumeration of the region's towns omits Colossae altogether. On Laodicea's church, Revelation 3:14–22—see the companion essay on Revelation; on Philip at Hierapolis, Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.31.

5. 5. Tacitus, Annals 14.27, trans. Church and Brodribb. The notice stands in Tacitus's narrative of AD 60; the year is conventionally cited as 60/61.

6. 6. Eusebius–Jerome, Chronicle, under Nero: "In Asia, three cities were ruined in an earthquake; Laodicea, Hierapolis and Colossae"—an entry conventionally placed at AD 64. Whether the chronicle preserves a second quake or a displaced memory of the one Tacitus records is disputed; Lightfoot, Colossians, discusses the evidence.

7. 7. Colossians 2:8 (NABRE). Greek: philosophias kai kenēs apatēs, "philosophy and empty deceit"; ta stoicheia tou kosmou, "the elemental powers of the world."

8. 8. Colossians 2:16 (NABRE).

9. 9. Colossians 2:18 (NABRE). Greek: thrēskeia tōn angelōn, "worship of angels."

10. 10. Colossians 2:21 (NABRE).

11. 11. Lightfoot, Colossians, in the dissertation on the Colossian heresy: "when I speak of the Judaism in the Colossian Church as Essene, I do not assume a precise identity of origin, but only an essential affinity of type, with the Essenes of the mother country."

12. 12. Fred O. Francis, "Humility and Angelic Worship in Col 2:18," Studia Theologica 16 (1962): 109–134; reprinted in Fred O. Francis and Wayne A. Meeks, eds., Conflict at Colossae, rev. ed. (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1975).

13. 13. Morna D. Hooker, "Were there false teachers in Colossae?," in Barnabas Lindars and Stephen S. Smalley, eds., Christ and Spirit in the New Testament: Studies in Honour of Charles Francis Digby Moule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 315–331.

14. 14. Council of Laodicea, canon 35, in NPNF, 2nd ser., 14, trans. Henry Percival: "Christians must not forsake the Church of God, and go away and invoke angels and gather assemblies, which things are forbidden. If, therefore, any one shall be found engaged in this covert idolatry, let him be anathema"; newadvent.org. The synod met at some point between 343 and 381.

15. 15. Theodoret, commenting on Colossians 2:18, as quoted in Lightfoot, Colossians: the disease "long remained in Phrygia and Pisidia," and "even to the present time oratories of the holy Michael may be seen among them and their neighbours."

16. 16. Tertullian, Against Marcion 5.19, in ANF 3, trans. Peter Holmes: "I am accustomed in my prescription against all heresies, to fix my compendious criterion (of truth) in the testimony of time; claiming priority therein as our rule, and alleging lateness to be the characteristic of every heresy"; newadvent.org. On Marcion's ten-letter Apostolikon, see the companion essay on Galatians.

17. 17. The Muratorian Fragment, lines 47–57 ("to the Colossians fourth"), trans. Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), Appendix IV; earlychristianwritings.com.

18. 18. Papyrus 46 (P. Chester Beatty II; P. Mich. inv. 6238), palaeographically dated c. 175–225 (commonly "c. 200"), contains the letters in the order Romans, Hebrews, 1–2 Corinthians, Ephesians, Galatians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 Thessalonians.

19. 19. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 1.1 (quoting Colossians 1:28 by name) and 1.11: "branding not all philosophy, but the Epicurean... and whatever other philosophy honours the elements, but places not over them the efficient cause, nor apprehends the Creator"; ANF 2, trans. William Wilson; newadvent.org.

20. 20. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.25.1–2 (NPNF, 2nd ser., 1, trans. McGiffert); Athanasius, Festal Letter 39.5 (AD 367): "then to the Philippians; then to the Colossians"; newadvent.org. Councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397); Council of Trent, Session IV (8 April 1546).

21. 21. Ernst Theodor Mayerhoff, Der Brief an die Colosser (Berlin, 1838)—the first denial of Pauline authorship, arguing dependence on Ephesians (which Mayerhoff accepted) and un-Pauline content.

22. 22. Colossians 2:12; 3:1 ("If then you were raised with Christ," NABRE)—contrast the future tense of the resurrection in Romans 6:5, 8. The stylistic case is summarized in any critical introduction; see Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament, Anchor Bible Reference Library (New York: Doubleday, 1997), 599–619.

23. 23. Brown, Introduction, 610.

24. 24. Timothy: Colossians 1:1 // Philemon 1. The five greeters: Colossians 4:10–14 // Philemon 23–24 (Epaphras, Mark, Aristarchus, Demas, Luke). Onesimus: Colossians 4:9 // Philemon 12. Archippus: Colossians 4:17 // Philemon 2. Werner Kümmel pressed the point that a forger imitating the authentic Philemon only in these personal remarks strains belief; W. G. Kümmel, Introduction to the New Testament, rev. ed., trans. Howard Clark Kee (Nashville: Abingdon, 1975).

25. 25. James D. G. Dunn, The Epistles to the Colossians and to Philemon: A Commentary on the Greek Text, New International Greek Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 35–39; Colossians 4:18 ("The greeting is in my own hand, Paul's," NABRE).

26. 26. Council of Trent, Session IV (8 April 1546), Decree Concerning the Canonical Scriptures (Denzinger–Hünermann 1502–1503).

27. 27. Colossians 1:15–20 (NABRE), brackets original to the translation. The NABRE note on 1:15–20 describes the passage as "probably an early Christian hymn, known to the Colossians and taken up into the letter," with background in the Old Testament wisdom literature (Proverbs 8:22–31; Wisdom 7:22–8:1).

28. 28. Athanasius, Four Discourses Against the Arians, Discourse 2.63 (the argument spans 2.62–64), in NPNF, 2nd ser., 4: "Senseless men! If He is simply 'First-born of the whole creation,' then He is other than the whole creation"; and "if He is a creature, He will be First-born of Himself"; newadvent.org.

29. 29. Colossians 1:17 ("He is before all things," NABRE). On "firstborn" as a title of rank, cf. Psalm 89:28, where David—the youngest of Jesse's sons—is appointed God's "firstborn, Most High over the kings of the earth" (NABRE).

30. 30. Colossians 2:11–12 (NABRE). The NABRE note on 2:11 calls this "a description of baptism (Col 2:12) in symbolic terms of the Old Testament rite for entry into the community."

31. 31. Catechism of the Catholic Church 527 (citing Colossians 2:11–13): Jesus' circumcision "prefigures that 'circumcision of Christ' which is Baptism"; vatican.va.

32. 32. Colossians 1:24 (NABRE).

33. 33. NABRE note on Colossians 1:24: "although variously interpreted, this phrase does not imply that Christ's atoning death on the cross was defective."

34. 34. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Colossians, Homily 4 (headed Colossians 1:21–22, expounding through 1:24), in NPNF, 1st ser., 13 (Oxford translation, rev. John A. Broadus): "It seems indeed to be a great thing he has said; but it is not of arrogancy, far be it, but even of much tender love towards Christ; for he will not have the sufferings to be his own, but His... For He did not only die for us, but even after His death He is ready to be afflicted for your sakes"; newadvent.org.

35. 35. John Paul II, Salvifici Doloris (11 February 1984), 24; vatican.va. The letter opens (§1) with Colossians 1:24.

36. 36. CCC 1508 (quoting Colossians 1:24, on sharing in Christ's redemptive suffering in sickness); vatican.va; cf. CCC 618 (citing Colossians 1:24 among the texts on the disciples' participation in Christ's sacrifice); vatican.va.

37. 37. Colossians 4:16 (NABRE).

38. 38. Lightfoot, Colossians, in the dissertation on the Laodicean epistle: "The apocryphal Epistle to the Laodiceans is a cento of Pauline phrases strung together without any definite connexion or any clear object. They are taken chiefly from the Epistle to the Philippians... It has no doctrinal peculiarities. Thus it is quite harmless, so far as falsity and stupidity combined can ever be regarded as harmless."

39. 39. M. R. James, The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), following his translation of the letter.

40. 40. The Muratorian Fragment, lines 63–67, trans. Metzger, Canon, Appendix IV. That the surviving Latin cento is not the Marcionite forgery is the majority view—it is, as M. R. James put it, "entirely colourless in doctrine"; see J. K. Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), and Bart D. Ehrman, Forgery and Counterforgery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). Harnack argued the contrary.

41. 41. Jerome, De viris illustribus 5 (AD 392–393), trans. Ernest Cushing Richardson, NPNF, 2nd ser., 3; newadvent.org.

42. 42. Codex Fuldensis, written for Victor, bishop of Capua, and corrected by him in 546–547; the Laodicean epistle stands between Colossians and 1 Timothy. Lightfoot, Colossians, catalogs the manuscript evidence.

43. 43. Second Council of Nicaea (787), Session 6, warning against "a forged epistle to the Laodiceans" circulated "having a place in some copies of the Apostle," which, the council's Greek adds, the fathers had rejected as alien to Paul; quoted (with the Greek) in Lightfoot, Colossians; the rendering of the Greek clause is mine.

44. 44. Lightfoot, Colossians, same dissertation. The Book of Armagh (early ninth century) is among the manuscripts containing the epistle.

45. 45. Lightfoot, Colossians, on the Middle English versions of the Laodicean epistle (see Forshall and Madden, eds., The Holy Bible... in the Earliest English Versions Made... by John Wycliffe and His Followers, Oxford, 1850): "it was excluded by both Wycliffe and Purvey, yet it did not long remain untranslated and appears in two different and quite independent versions."

46. 46. Erasmus, annotation on Colossians 4:16, quoted (in Latin) in Lightfoot, Colossians: "Nihil habet Pauli præter voculas aliquot ex cæteris ejus epistolis mendicatas... Non est cujusvis hominis Paulinum pectus effingere. Tonat, fulgurat, meras flammas loquitur Paulus. At hæc, præterquam quod brevissima est, quam friget, quam jacet!" The English rendering above is mine.

47. 47. Council of Trent, Session IV (8 April 1546), Decree Concerning the Canonical Scriptures, listing "fourteen epistles of Paul the apostle."

48. 48. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Colossians, twelve homilies, in NPNF, 1st ser., 13 (Oxford translation, rev. John A. Broadus); newadvent.org.

49. 49. Thomas Aquinas, Super Epistolam ad Colossenses lectura, prologue: "In his letter to the Ephesians, the Apostle described the nature of the Church's unity; and in the letter to the Philippians, he showed its growth and preservation; but in this letter he is dealing with its protection from those heretics who were corrupting and misleading the Colossians"; Latin–English text at aquinas.cc. Theodore of Mopsuestia's commentary survives in Latin (ed. H. B. Swete, 2 vols., Cambridge, 1880–1882); Ambrosiaster commented on all thirteen epistles.

50. 50. Colossians 3:1 (NABRE). In the Sunday lectionary, Colossians is read semicontinuously on the Fifteenth through Eighteenth Sundays in Ordinary Time, Year C; Colossians 3:1–4 is an option (with 1 Corinthians 5:6b–8) for the second reading at the Mass of Easter Day in all three years.