The Epistle to the Philippians — Joy in Chains and the Quietest Road into the Canon

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

Some books fought their way into the New Testament. Second Peter clawed through three centuries of doubt; Revelation was accepted, rejected, and accepted again. The Epistle to the Philippians did something rarer and much harder to write about: it simply walked in. No father questioned it, no council hesitated over it, no rival tradition omitted it, and—apart from one nineteenth-century critic who doubted nearly everything—no modern scholar has seriously denied that Paul wrote it.⁠¹ A canon series could skip such a letter, if the only interesting question about a book were whether it survived.

But the quiet books repay attention precisely because their evidence is so early and so good—Philippians is one of the measuring rods by which the disputed books get measured—and because this particular quiet book carries three of the most consequential puzzles in the Pauline corpus inside it. A bishop who knew the apostles’ generation spoke of Paul’s “letters” to Philippi, in the plural, and critics have been trying to find the seams in our single letter ever since. Six verses in its second chapter preserve what may be the oldest surviving Christian hymn, a text the church’s councils would lean on for five hundred years. And its opening verse contains a phrase found nowhere else in Paul’s greetings—“with the overseers and ministers”—the earliest address to what would become the ordered hierarchy of bishop and deacon. The letter of joy, written in chains, turns out to be a load-bearing wall of the whole New Testament. This is its story.

A Colony of Heaven

Philippi was not a typical Greek city. Refounded as a Roman colony after the battle fought on its plain in 42 BC—where Antony and Octavian broke Brutus and Cassius—and settled with army veterans, it sat on the Via Egnatia, the great east-west road of the empire, and governed itself under Roman law as a miniature Rome in Macedonia.⁠² Paul arrived around the year 50, and the Acts of the Apostles remembers the visit vividly: Lydia the dealer in purple cloth, baptized with her household by the river; the earthquake at midnight; the jailer washing the apostle’s wounds and being washed himself in baptism before dawn. It was, by the traditional counting, the first church Paul founded on European soil—a distinction the ancients would not have drawn quite that way, but a real hinge in the gospel’s westward movement all the same.⁠³

No church stood on warmer terms with Paul. The Philippians alone, he reminds them, entered into “an account of giving and receiving” with him—“not a single church shared with me in an account of giving and receiving, except you alone”—sending support to Thessalonica “not only once but more than once,” and sending it again, years later, to his prison by the hand of their messenger Epaphroditus, who nearly died in the errand.⁠⁴ The letter Paul wrote back is the most affectionate in the corpus: “my joy and crown,” he calls them.⁠⁵ And to these residents of a proud Roman colony he addressed the letter’s most pointed image: “our citizenship is in heaven.”⁠⁶ The Philippians knew exactly what a colony was—an outpost of a distant capital, living by its laws while surrounded by another world. Paul told them they belonged to one.

A Letter from Chains

Paul wrote from prison; the letter says so repeatedly. His imprisonment, he reports, “has become well known in Christ throughout the whole praetorium,” and he closes with greetings from “those of Caesar’s household.”⁠⁷ The traditional reading places the letter in Rome, during the two-year custody with which Acts ends, around AD 60 to 62—praetorium and Caesar’s household sit most naturally there, and the tradition is as old as our oldest prologues to the letter.⁠⁸ The difficulty is distance: the letter presupposes a brisk traffic of messengers between Paul and Philippi—news of his imprisonment out, Epaphroditus in, news of Epaphroditus’s illness back to Philippi, the Philippians’ distress back to Paul—and Rome is some twelve hundred kilometers from Philippi by the fastest roads and crossings.

So the moderns proposed alternatives. An Ephesian imprisonment—unrecorded in Acts but plausible given Paul’s own catalog of “far more imprisonments” than his rivals—would put the correspondence a week’s travel from Philippi and date the letter to the mid-50s; the hypothesis was floated by Heinrich Lisco in 1900, championed by Adolf Deissmann, and given its fullest classic case by George Duncan in 1929.⁠⁹ Caesarea, where Acts parks Paul for two years, has had advocates since H. E. G. Paulus proposed it in 1799, though few follow him today.⁠¹⁰ The question remains open, and I hold it loosely; nothing doctrinal rides on it. What rides on it is only the letter’s place in Paul’s biography—whether the serenity of “to me life is Christ, and death is gain” was written by a man in his fifties looking at a provincial magistrate’s sword, or by the old apostle within sight of the end.⁠¹¹

The Paper Trail

The external evidence for Philippians begins earlier, and lands closer, than for almost any book in the canon. Within a generation or two of the letter’s arrival, the church of Philippi wrote to Polycarp of Smyrna—the bishop who, tradition holds, had known the apostle John—and Polycarp’s reply survives. It is, in substance, a meditation on the privilege of being the church that Paul wrote to. “For neither I, nor any other such one, can come up to the wisdom of the blessed and glorified Paul,” Polycarp tells them. “He, when among you, accurately and steadfastly taught the word of truth in the presence of those who were then alive. And when absent from you, he wrote you a letter, which, if you carefully study, you will find to be the means of building you up in that faith which has been given you.”⁠¹² Later in the same epistle he returns to the theme: the Philippians are those “commended in the beginning of his Epistle,” for Paul “boasts of you in all those Churches which alone then knew the Lord.”⁠¹³ A church one generation removed from the apostles is already reading its letter from Paul as a permanent possession—something to be studied, something that builds up faith. That is canonical consciousness in embryo, decades before anyone drew up a list.

From there the trail runs straight. Marcion’s truncated canon of ten Pauline letters, published around 144, included Philippians; Tertullian, refuting Marcion letter by letter, works through it—Paul’s rivals who “preached Christ even out of envy and strife,” the one Christ and His one God—without recording any Marcionite mutilation worth cataloguing.⁠¹⁴ The Muratorian Fragment places it third in Paul’s letters to the seven churches—“to the Corinthians first, to the Ephesians second, to the Philippians third”—among the letters that witness to “one Church spread throughout the whole extent of the earth.”⁠¹⁵ Papyrus 46 contains it, in company with the collected letters, around the year 200.⁠¹⁶ Eusebius files Paul’s letters among the acknowledged books; Athanasius’s Festal Letter lists Philippians in its place; the councils of the late fourth century confirm what no one had questioned.⁠¹⁷

Even the modern academy, which has doubted nearly everything else, leaves Philippians standing. The lone significant exception proves the rule: Ferdinand Christian Baur, who in 1845 reduced the authentic Paul to four letters—Romans, the two Corinthian letters, and Galatians—rejected Philippians with the rest of the corpus. Virtually no one followed him on this point, and the letter has stood ever since among the seven “undisputed” epistles that even the most skeptical criticism accepts as Paul’s own.⁠¹⁸ When the letter that praises humility survived the acid of Tübingen intact, the irony was complete: the book nobody defended turned out to be the book nobody could attack.

One Letter or Three?

There is, however, one genuine puzzle in the letter’s history, and it starts with a plural. Polycarp, in the passage quoted above, wrote that Paul, when absent, “wrote you a letter”—so the standard English translation renders it; but the Greek says epistolas, letters, in the plural.⁠¹⁹ Did the church of Philippi possess more than one letter from Paul? The plural could be generic—Greek sometimes uses the plural of a single dispatch, and Polycarp may simply be speaking loosely—but it could equally be a genuine memory of a fuller correspondence, most of it lost. The question would be a curiosity, except that the canonical letter itself has a visible seam in exactly the place such a memory would predict.

Read Philippians straight through and you will feel it. Three chapters of warmth, thanksgiving, and travel plans wind down with what sounds like a closing formula—“Finally, my brothers, rejoice in the Lord”—and then, without warning: “Beware of the dogs! Beware of the evil-workers! Beware of the mutilation!”⁠²⁰ The tonal cliff between 3:1 and 3:2 is the sharpest in the Pauline corpus. Mid-century critics built on it a theory of partition: the canonical Philippians, they argued, is a compilation of two or three originally separate letters—a warm thank-you note for the gift Epaphroditus carried, a longer letter of news and exhortation, and a fierce polemical fragment against the circumcisers—stitched together by the Philippian church when the corpus was collected. B. D. Rahtjen gave the three-letter theory its classic form in 1960; F. W. Beare built his commentary on a version of it; Helmut Koester favored partition as well, and for a generation it was close to a critical consensus.⁠²¹ Polycarp’s plural served the theory as its one piece of external evidence.

The tide has since turned, and it is worth recording why. Beginning in the 1980s, scholars such as David Garland and Duane Watson demonstrated that the letter’s vocabulary, themes, and rhetorical structure run continuously across the supposed seams—the “same things” of 3:1 pointing forward as naturally as backward, the athletic and civic imagery of chapter 3 already seeded in chapters 1 and 2—and that ancient letters, like ancient speeches, tolerated abrupt digressions that modern editors mistake for sutures.⁠²² The unity of Philippians is now at least as defensible as its partition, and probably the better view. For the purposes of this series, though, the deeper point is the one the partition debate obscures: nothing canonical hangs on it. What the church canonized, and what Trent ratified, is the letter as received—the four-chapter Philippians that Marcion published and that Papyrus 46 preserves. If a first-century editor assembled it from Paul’s own letters, the church received the assembly as Scripture, exactly as it received a Gospel that Luke openly says he compiled from prior accounts. The seam, if it is one, is inside the canon.

The Hymn

Whatever else Philippians secured for the church, its second chapter secured the vocabulary of the Incarnation. Urging the Philippians to humility, Paul reaches—perhaps—for something they already sang:

Who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross. Because of this, God greatly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.⁠²³

Since Ernst Lohmeyer’s 1928 study, most scholars have regarded these verses as a pre-Pauline hymn—an already-traditional composition Paul quotes, which would make it older than the letter, older than any Gospel, one of the earliest surviving articulations of Christian faith.⁠²⁴ The hypothesis is attractive rather than certain, and I hold it the way I hold most source-critical proposals: with interest and without anxiety. What is certain is the freight the verses carry. He was “in the form of God” before he took “the form of a slave”—pre-existence and Incarnation in two clauses. The famous crux is the word the NABRE renders “something to be grasped”: Greek harpagmos, a word so rare that its sense was disputed until Roy Hoover’s philological study established the idiom as “something to use for one’s own advantage.”⁠²⁵ Equality with God was not, for Christ, a prize to exploit; and so he “emptied himself”—ekenōsen, the root of the theological term kenosis—not by subtracting divinity but by adding servanthood. And the hymn’s climax quietly detonates the highest claim in the New Testament: the universal homage of Isaiah 45:23, which the Lord God of Israel swears will be rendered to himself alone—every knee bending, every tongue confessing—is transferred, whole, to Jesus, with the divine title Kyrios attached.⁠²⁶ The hymn does not argue that Jesus is Lord; it sings it as a thing already confessed.

The church’s councils spent centuries drawing out what the hymn compressed. When Leo the Great wrote his Tome against Eutyches in 449, the “form of God” and “form of a slave” supplied his central grammar: He who remained in the form of God was made man in the form of a slave, “for both natures retain their own proper character without loss… as the form of God did not do away with the form of a slave, so the form of a slave did not impair the form of God.”⁠²⁷ Two years later the Council of Chalcedon received Leo’s letter as a standard of orthodoxy, “because it is in agreement with great Peter’s confession”—and the two-natures definition that followed is, in one real sense, a conciliar commentary on Philippians 2.⁠²⁸ The liturgy has kept the hymn at the center ever since: Philippians 2:6–11 is the second reading every Palm Sunday, in all three years of the lectionary cycle, the church singing Christ’s descent and exaltation at the very threshold of Holy Week.⁠²⁹

Bishops and Deacons

The letter’s first verse contains a phrase easy to read past and impossible, once noticed, to forget: “Paul and Timothy, slaves of Christ Jesus, to all the holy ones in Christ Jesus who are in Philippi, with the overseers and ministers.”⁠³⁰ No other Pauline letter opens by naming office-holders by title. The Greek terms are episkopoi and diakonoi—the words that would become “bishops” and “deacons”—and their appearance here, in a letter to a church barely a decade old, is the earliest address to the offices in Christian literature.

Honesty about what the verse does and does not show is the better apologetic. The NABRE’s note says it plainly: episkopos “since the second century… has come to designate the ‘bishop,’” but “in New Testament times this office had not yet developed into the form that it later assumed,” and at Philippi “there was more than one episkopos, and the precise function of these officials is uncertain.”⁠³¹ There is no monarchical bishop of Philippi in this verse; there is a college of overseers and a body of ministers, the ordered ministry caught in the act of becoming what it would be. A Catholic needs nothing more. The claim of the Church has never been that the episcopate sprang fully formed from the year 50, but that the apostolic ministry was real, ordered, and continuous—that the episkopoi and diakonoi whom Paul greets grew, under the same Spirit, into the bishops Ignatius of Antioch could describe half a century later as the visible center of every local church. Development is not invention. The seed in Philippians 1:1 is the thing the tree came from, and the letter shows the planting.

There is even a small patristic postscript. Among the co-workers Paul greets in chapter 4 is one Clement—“along with Clement and my other co-workers, whose names are in the book of life”—and later church writers, as the NABRE notes, sought to identify him with Clement, bishop of Rome, whose letter to Corinth this series has met repeatedly as the earliest witness to Paul’s epistles.⁠³² The identification is unprovable and probably romantic. But it is a fitting emblem of how the ancients read Philippians: as a living link between the apostle and the ordered church that received his letters and, in time, canonized them.

Work Out Your Salvation

If the hymn gave the councils their Christology, the paragraph that follows it gave the church its grammar of grace. “So then, my beloved,” Paul writes, ”… work out your salvation with fear and trembling. For God is the one who, for his good purpose, works in you both to desire and to work.”⁠³³ Centuries of controversy over faith and works are compressed into the hinge between those two sentences. Work out your salvation—the imperative is real, addressed to human wills, expecting effort. For God is the one working in you—the indicative is total, reaching even to the desire itself. Paul saw no contradiction, and neither has the Catholic Church: grace is not a rival to human action but its source, and human action is not a rival to grace but its fruit.

The Council of Trent, answering the Reformation’s reading of Paul, reached for exactly these verses. In its Decree on Justification, in the chapter on perseverance, the council wove Philippians together into a single teaching: God, “unless men be themselves wanting to His grace, as he has begun the good work, so will he perfect it, working (in them) to will and to accomplish”; and yet let those who stand take heed lest they fall, and “with fear and trembling work out their salvation, in labours, in watchings, in almsdeeds, in prayers.”⁠³⁴ The begun good work is Philippians 1:6; the willing and accomplishing is 2:13; the fear and trembling is 2:12. The Catechism still teaches the moral life under the same banner, quoting the two verses in sequence.⁠³⁵ It is worth pausing over the fact that the proof-text is not a Catholic gloss on Paul but Paul verbatim. The synergy Protestants suspect of smuggling works into grace is the apostle’s own sentence structure.

And the letter never lets the effort turn grim. Its keynote, sounded more often than in any other epistle, is joy—“Rejoice in the Lord always. I shall say it again: rejoice!”—joy from a man writing in chains, who has “learned, in whatever situation I find myself, to be self-sufficient,” content in abundance and in hunger, able to do all things “through him who empowers me.”⁠³⁶ The letter of joy is a prison letter. The church has never found a better argument for the gospel than that conjunction, and it is no accident that the Sunday of joy in the middle of Advent—Gaudete Sunday—takes its name, and in Year C its reading, from Philippians.⁠³⁷

Into the Canon

The later history of Philippians in the church is a history of affection. John Chrysostom preached through it in fifteen homilies, and his treatment of the hymn still reads like a man staggered by what he is expounding: “That God should become man, is great, unspeakable, inexpressible humility”—and yet more staggering still, that He became a servant and underwent the most ignominious of deaths.⁠³⁸ Marius Victorinus, the aged Roman rhetorician whose conversion astonished Augustine, wrote on Philippians one of the first Latin commentaries on any Pauline letter; Thomas Aquinas lectured through it in the thirteenth century; Calvin published his commentary in 1548.⁠³⁹ The lectionary reads the letter semicontinuously in the autumn Sundays of Year A, and its fourth chapter—“Have no anxiety at all… Then the peace of God that surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus”—may be the most prescribed passage of Scripture in Christian pastoral practice.⁠⁴⁰

Its road into the canon, then, needs no dramatic telling, and that is precisely its value to this series. Here is what the paper trail looks like when nothing goes wrong: a letter received with love, read aloud, copied, quoted by a bishop within living memory of the apostles, included even by the heretics, listed by every council, doubted by no one. The disputed books of this series—the 2 Peters and Hebrews and Revelations—had to be measured against something. They were measured against books like this. Philippians is part of the canon’s measuring rod, the kanōn in the word’s oldest sense. That the measuring rod happens to sing—that the standard of canonicity here is a hymn about a God who emptied himself—is the kind of joke providence seems to enjoy. The letter of joy would not have it any other way.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who wrote the Epistle to the Philippians, and when? The Apostle Paul, writing from prison with Timothy at his side—this is among the least disputed facts in New Testament scholarship, and Philippians stands with the seven letters virtually all critics accept as authentically Pauline. Where the prison was remains open: the traditional view is Rome, around AD 60–62; many modern scholars favor an unrecorded imprisonment at Ephesus in the mid-50s, which would fit the busy messenger traffic the letter presupposes; a few have argued for Caesarea.

Was Philippians ever doubted as part of the New Testament? Effectively never. Polycarp of Smyrna praised it to the Philippians themselves within a generation or two of its writing; Marcion included it in his canon around 144; the Muratorian Fragment lists it third among Paul’s letters to the seven churches; and it appears in effectively every subsequent canon list and codex. The only notable denial came from F. C. Baur in 1845, whose radical reduction of Paul to four letters was rejected on this point by essentially the entire field.

Is Philippians actually several letters combined? Some scholars have thought so. The abrupt break at Philippians 3:1–2—from “rejoice in the Lord” to “Beware of the dogs!”—plus Polycarp’s reference to Paul’s “letters” (plural) to Philippi led mid-twentieth-century critics to propose that our letter combines two or three Pauline originals. Since the 1980s, detailed studies of the letter’s language and rhetoric have swung scholarship back toward its unity. Either way, the canonical status of the letter is untouched: what the church received and canonized is the four-chapter letter as it stands.

What is the “Christ hymn” of Philippians 2? Philippians 2:6–11 is a poetic passage describing Christ’s self-emptying descent from “the form of God” to “the form of a slave,” to death on a cross, and his exaltation with “the name that is above every name.” Many scholars since Lohmeyer (1928) regard it as a pre-Pauline hymn quoted by Paul, which would make it one of the earliest surviving statements of Christian faith. Its language—form of God, emptied himself, every knee shall bend—became the working vocabulary of the church’s Christological councils, and it is read at Mass every Palm Sunday.

What are the “overseers and ministers” of Philippians 1:1? The Greek terms are episkopoi and diakonoi—the words that became “bishops” and “deacons.” Philippians is the only Pauline letter addressed to office-holders by title, making 1:1 the earliest greeting to the church’s ordered ministry. At this date the offices had not yet developed their later form—Philippi had several overseers, not one monarchical bishop—but the verse shows the ordained structure of the church already present in seed within a generation of the Resurrection.

Does “work out your salvation with fear and trembling” contradict salvation by grace? Not in Paul’s sentence. The command to work out one’s salvation (Philippians 2:12) is immediately grounded in grace: “For God is the one who, for his good purpose, works in you both to desire and to work” (2:13). Human effort is real, and it is itself God’s gift in operation. The Council of Trent quoted these verses together in its Decree on Justification, and the Catechism still quotes them: grace and human cooperation are not rivals but cause and effect.

Footnotes

1. 1. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.25.1–2 (NPNF, 2nd ser., 1, trans. Arthur Cushman McGiffert), places "the epistles of Paul" among the acknowledged books (homologoumena); newadvent.org. Scripture quotations in this essay follow the New American Bible, Revised Edition (NABRE) unless otherwise noted; bible.usccb.org/bible/philippians.

2. 2. Philippi was colonized by Antony and Octavian after the battles of Philippi (42 BC) and reorganized under Augustus after Actium as Colonia Augusta Iulia Philippensis; it lay on the Via Egnatia. Acts 16:12 calls it "a leading city in that district of Macedonia and a Roman colony" (NABRE).

3. 3. Acts 16:11–40 (Lydia, 16:14–15; the jailer, 16:25–34). On Paul's founding visit, c. AD 49–50, see the NABRE introduction to Philippians and the companion essay on the Book of Acts. "First church on European soil" is the traditional characterization; the ancients did not draw the continental boundary with modern sharpness.

4. 4. Philippians 4:15–16 (NABRE); Epaphroditus: 2:25–30 ("he was ill, close to death... for the sake of the work of Christ he came close to death, risking his life").

5. 5. Philippians 4:1 (NABRE).

6. 6. Philippians 3:20 (NABRE). The NABRE note on 3:20: "Christians constitute a colony of heaven, as Philippi was a colonia of Rome."

7. 7. Philippians 1:13; 4:22 (NABRE).

8. 8. Acts 28:16, 30–31 (the two years of Roman custody). The USCCB's NABRE introduction to Philippians gives the traditional Roman dating "between A.D. 59 and 63"; the conventional narrower range is c. 60–62. The Roman provenance is at least as old as the ancient prologues to the letter.

9. 9. 2 Corinthians 11:23 ("far more imprisonments"); cf. 1 Corinthians 15:32 ("If at Ephesus I fought with beasts, so to speak," NABRE). Heinrich Lisco, Vincula Sanctorum (Berlin, 1900); Adolf Deissmann advocated the Ephesian hypothesis; George S. Duncan, St Paul's Ephesian Ministry (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1929), gave it the fullest classic statement. The USCCB introduction notes that "much recent scholarship favors Ephesus, around A.D. 55."

10. 10. Acts 23:33–26:32 (the Caesarean custody). The Caesarean hypothesis was first propounded by H. E. G. Paulus in 1799; Ernst Lohmeyer was its most notable later advocate.

11. 11. Philippians 1:21 (NABRE).

12. 12. Polycarp, To the Philippians 3.1–2, in ANF 1, trans. Roberts and Donaldson; newadvent.org. Polycarp's letter is usually dated c. 110–135. The scholarly standard text is Michael W. Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007).

13. 13. Polycarp, To the Philippians 11.3, ANF 1. Chapters 10–12 survive only in a Latin translation; the Greek text breaks off at 9.2, and chapter 13 is preserved in Greek by Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.36. Scholars note that "he boasts of you in all those Churches" resembles what Paul says of the Thessalonians (2 Thessalonians 1:4); Polycarp may be compressing his Pauline memories.

14. 14. Tertullian, Against Marcion 5.20, in ANF 3, trans. Peter Holmes, working through Philippians 1:14–17 and concluding that Paul "affirms that there is, notwithstanding, but one Christ and His one God"; newadvent.org. On Marcion's ten-letter Apostolikon, see the companion essay on Galatians.

15. 15. The Muratorian Fragment, lines 47–57, trans. Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), Appendix IV; text at earlychristianwritings.com. On the fragment's dating, see the Galatians essay, n. 16.

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

17. 17. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.25.1–2; Athanasius, Festal Letter 39.5 (AD 367): "next, to the Ephesians; 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), Decree Concerning the Canonical Scriptures (Denzinger–Hünermann 1502–1503).

18. 18. F. C. Baur, Paulus, der Apostel Jesu Christi (Stuttgart, 1845), confined the authentic Paul to the four Hauptbriefe; his rejection of Philippians found virtually no following, and the letter stands among the seven undisputed epistles (Romans, 1–2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, Philemon).

19. 19. Polycarp, To the Philippians 3.2: the Greek is ἔγραψεν ἐπιστολάς, "wrote letters"; the ANF translation renders the sense as "a letter," and Lightfoot likewise took the plural as epistolary idiom for a single dispatch. Holmes, Apostolic Fathers, 3rd ed., renders "letters." The plural is the partition theory's one piece of external evidence; it can also be read generically, or as embracing other Pauline letters known at Philippi (such as the Thessalonian correspondence).

20. 20. Philippians 3:1–2 (NABRE). "The mutilation" (katatomē) is Paul's bitter pun on circumcision (peritomē), aimed at those demanding it of Gentile converts—the same fight documented in the companion essay on Galatians.

21. 21. B. D. Rahtjen, "The Three Letters of Paul to the Philippians," New Testament Studies 6 (1959–60): 167–173; F. W. Beare, A Commentary on the Epistle to the Philippians (London: A. & C. Black, 1959); Helmut Koester likewise favored partition (cf. his "The Purpose of the Polemic of a Pauline Fragment (Philippians III)," New Testament Studies 8 [1961–62]: 317–332).

22. 22. David E. Garland, "The Composition and Unity of Philippians: Some Neglected Literary Factors," Novum Testamentum 27 (1985): 141–173; Duane F. Watson, "A Rhetorical Analysis of Philippians and Its Implications for the Unity Question," Novum Testamentum 30 (1988): 57–88.

23. 23. Philippians 2:6–11 (NABRE). The NABRE note on 2:6–11 describes the passage as "perhaps an early Christian hymn quoted here by Paul," with a pattern "of Christ's humiliation and then exaltation," and suggests "even death on a cross" may be Paul's own addition to the traditional text.

24. 24. Ernst Lohmeyer, Kyrios Jesus: Eine Untersuchung zu Phil. 2,5–11, Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-historische Klasse 1927/28, 4. Abhandlung (Heidelberg: Winter, 1928)—the fountainhead of the pre-Pauline hymn hypothesis.

25. 25. Roy W. Hoover, "The Harpagmos Enigma: A Philological Solution," Harvard Theological Review 64 (1971): 95–119; engaged and extended by N. T. Wright, "ἁρπαγμός and the Meaning of Philippians 2:5–11," Journal of Theological Studies n.s. 37 (1986): 321–352. Hoover's idiom—"something to use for one's own advantage"—underlies the NRSV's "something to be exploited"; the NABRE keeps "something to be grasped."

26. 26. Isaiah 45:23 ("To me every knee shall bend; by me every tongue shall swear," NABRE). The NABRE note on Philippians 2:10–11 observes that "into this language of Is 45:23 there has been inserted a reference to the three levels in the universe"—heaven, earth, and under the earth.

27. 27. Leo the Great, Letter 28 (the Tome, to Flavian of Constantinople, 13 June 449), chs. 3–4, NPNF, 2nd ser., 12: "He who while remaining in the form of God made man, was also made man in the form of a slave. For both natures retain their own proper character without loss... as the form of God did not do away with the form of a slave, so the form of a slave did not impair the form of God"; newadvent.org.

28. 28. Council of Chalcedon (451), Definition of Faith, receiving "the letter of the primate of greatest and older Rome, the most blessed and most saintly Archbishop Leo... because it is in agreement with great Peter's confession and represents a support we have in common"; trans. in Norman P. Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils (London: Sheed & Ward, 1990), text at papalencyclicals.net.

29. 29. Philippians 2:6–11 is the second reading for Palm Sunday of the Lord's Passion in Years A, B, and C of the Roman lectionary.

30. 30. Philippians 1:1 (NABRE).

31. 31. NABRE note on Philippians 1:1; bible.usccb.org. The note adds that the office "seems to be well on the way to such development in the Pastorals," and that the diakonoi at Philippi likewise "represent an earlier stage of development of the office."

32. 32. Philippians 4:3 (NABRE); the NABRE note: "Clement: otherwise unknown, although later writers sought to identify him with Clement, bishop of Rome (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.15.1)." On 1 Clement as the earliest witness to Paul's letters, see the companion essays on Romans and 1 Corinthians.

33. 33. Philippians 2:12–13 (NABRE). The NABRE note on 2:12 observes that "fear and trembling" is "a common Old Testament expression indicating awe and seriousness in the service of God."

34. 34. Council of Trent, Session VI (13 January 1547), Decree on Justification, ch. 13 ("On the gift of Perseverance"), trans. James Waterworth (London, 1848), weaving Philippians 1:6, 2:13, and 2:12 across two adjacent sentences; papalencyclicals.net. On the decree as a whole, see What Trent Actually Said About Justification.

35. 35. Catechism of the Catholic Church 1949, quoting Philippians 2:12–13; vatican.va; cf. CCC 308 on God working in every creature's acting.

36. 36. Philippians 4:4, 11–13 (NABRE): "I have learned, in whatever situation I find myself, to be self-sufficient... I have the strength for everything through him who empowers me." Forms of "joy" and "rejoice" recur throughout the letter (1:4, 18, 25; 2:2, 17–18, 28–29; 3:1; 4:1, 4, 10).

37. 37. The Third Sunday of Advent takes its entrance antiphon from Philippians 4:4–5 ("Gaudete in Domino semper"), and Philippians 4:4–7 is the second reading in Year C.

38. 38. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Philippians, Homily 7 (on Philippians 2:5–11), in NPNF, 1st ser., 13 (Oxford translation, rev. John A. Broadus): "That God should become man, is great, unspeakable, inexpressible humility"; newadvent.org. The NPNF set comprises an Introductory Discourse and fifteen homilies; editions that count the discourse as the first homily number sixteen.

39. 39. Marius Victorinus's surviving Pauline commentaries—the earliest in Latin—cover Galatians, Ephesians, and Philippians (the last missing its treatment of the opening verses); see Stephen A. Cooper, Marius Victorinus' Commentary on Galatians, Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Thomas Aquinas, Super Epistolam ad Philippenses lectura; Calvin's commentary on Philippians appeared with Galatians, Ephesians, and Colossians (Geneva, 1548).

40. 40. Philippians 4:6–7 (NABRE). In the Sunday lectionary Philippians is read semicontinuously on the Twenty-Fifth through Twenty-Eighth Sundays in Ordinary Time, Year A.