The Letter to the Colossians

By Scot McKnight

The Letter to the Colossians offers a compelling vision of the Christian life; its claims transcend religion and bring politics, culture, spirituality, power, ethnicity, and more into play. Delving deeply into the message of Colossians, this exegetical and theological commentary by Scot McKnight will be welcomed by preachers, teachers, and students everywhere.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Feb 26, 2018
• ISBN: 9781467447065

Scot McKnight

Scot McKnight (Ph.D., University of Nottingham) is professor of New Testament at Northern Seminary in Lombard, Illinois. He is the author of The Jesus Creed, The King Jesus Gospel, A Community Called Atonement, Embracing Grace, The Real Mary and commentaries on James, Galatians and 1 Peter, and coeditor of the award-winning Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels. He is also a widely recognized blogger at the Jesus Creed blog. His other interests include golfing, gardening and traveling.

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2002.

Introduction

There were options in the religious environment of earliest Christianity. The apostle Paul—or, for now, the author of Colossians—took a firm position in his taxonomy of world religions, even if he knew nothing about some of the options but, at the same time, plenty about the smorgasbord of religions taking various poses in the Roman Empire. For Paul there was but one true Lord of the empire; his name was Jesus, and he was the Jewish Messiah. Everything in the letter before us, Colossians, flows from those claims about Jesus. Paul’s claims transcend what we in the Western world call religion. Politics, culture, cult, spirituality, power, ethnicity, and one’s moral-religious heritage all come into play for Paul, and at the top of the heap, ruling over all, is Jesus as Messiah and Lord. If Paul does not have a metanarrative, he certainly has a meganarrative, one that offers a wide-ranging explanation of all that has been, is, and will be—and why and how.¹ The entire narrative boasts one central substance: Jesus of Nazareth is the Lord of all. That boast flowed from one and only one source: the resurrection of Jesus.²

In the Letter to the Colossians we encounter an apostle’s vision that sought to redesign the Roman Empire. In an earlier version, that vision had flourished on Jewish soil in variant forms of Judaism.³ Paul offers not a new religion one can locate in the privacies of a life but a new vision that challenges the agora, the forum, and the worship centers. In this sense, Paul offers not a soteriological system alone but a comprehensive vision of life under King Jesus. Paul sketched out his missional theology in the Roman world,⁴ doing so in specific contexts for specific churches at specific moments in his own life.⁵ When the original lector read Colossians aloud to the church, the letter was more than read; it was performed by that lector. In fact, as Loveday Alexander concluded, "The primary means of publication in the Greco-Roman world was oral performance."⁶ We perhaps need to remind ourselves that a majority at Colossae would have been unable to read this letter and that the letter was sent by Paul and Timothy to them along with someone with directions on how to read it publicly. It was not read privately but—and this is our point—was read publicly, and a public reading of the things said in Colossians is a forthright social, economic, and political announcement that King Jesus rules the cosmos.⁷ The letter claims that Jesus is the originator and telos of the creation, as well as of all political orders, including, yes, Rome’s. In four relatively brief chapters, then, we get a worldview, not one in all its fullness and particulars, but a worldview nonetheless.

This vision, as we have already indicated, begins and ends with King Jesus. Paul’s Christo-theological message of Colossians can be reduced to God has conquered the powers, delivered all humans from sin and its powers, and reconciled the entire cosmos to himself in, through, and under Christ. That statement can be sorted out into others:

Humans of all sorts—Jews and Gentiles—are alienated from God and one another and have formed themselves into tribes and nations and empires.

At work in all tribalisms and nationalisms and cosmopolitan imperial designs are the dark powers of death, the gods, powers, and forces of this age.

In Christ, God entered Israel’s story, defeated sin and death, and conquered the powers through his life, death on the cross, resurrection, and ascension to the throne of the one true God.

In union with Christ in baptism, humans of all sorts can break free of their sin and captivities to become the one reconciled family of God and so dwell in love, peace, and justice.⁸

The message of Colossians, then, is about unraveling the systemic forces of the cosmos and living in the freedom of a new kind of community.⁹ Or as Margaret MacDonald has expressed this view, The central aspect of the religious significance of Colossians is that it offers a vision of human victory in the face of an evil that can reach cosmic proportions.¹⁰

Paul communicates his message not as a professional theologian or a philosopher or a rabbi. He does so as an apostle and missionary and pastor, hence, as a missional, pastoral theologian.¹¹ This approach reconfigures all of Paul’s letters into manifestations of gospel ministry: evangelism, church formation, and pastoral visitation. His letters focus on the second and third, but they do so, we must remind ourselves, as exercises of apostolic, pastoral care for churches and people. Let this be said: Paul’s Spirit-draped robust self-consciousness gave him the confidence to see his pastoral work in the context of what God was doing in the world, and recent scholarship has drawn attention to Rom 15:15–16 as a window into that self-consciousness:¹² Yet I have written you quite boldly on some points to remind you of them again, because of the grace God gave me to be a minister of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles. He gave me the priestly duty of proclaiming the gospel of God, so that the Gentiles might become an offering acceptable to God, sanctified by the Holy Spirit. Paul perceives his mission as a priestly duty generated by God’s grace of calling him to be a minister of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles.

Vision for the cosmos with Christ as center—these two motifs strike the reader of Paul’s letters with their breathtaking expanse. Yet, Colossians reveals something profoundly interesting that complements, or fits into, what has already been said: Paul hermeneuts his own apostolic mission as part of what God is doing in his inherited narrative about Christ, that is, the gospel itself. His hermeneutic can be reduced at this point in the commentary to the term mystery, his term in this letter for God’s plan to reconcile Gentiles with Jews, slaves with free, and all manner of social identities into one large family called church.¹³ The impulse to tribalism and nationalism and imperialism at work in the dark powers of this age, then, is what Paul counters in his claim that these powers have been taken captive by Christ—paradoxically, at the cross.

It is a pity that so much scholarship focuses on the genuineness of the letter or on the opponents of Paul in Colossae. It is more profitable to recognize that this brief letter reveals a cosmic theology that deserves the attention of both scholars and the church. If anything, this little letter provides a pristine look into what life in a first-century church was really like and how its cosmic Christ turned the empire upside down. Yet, plenty of questions are provoked in a careful examination of this letter of Paul’s, if it was his—that is, if his means his or theirs.

I. AUTHORSHIP: THE LOGIC OF THE KNOWN TO THE UNKNOWN

No one disputes that the Letter to the Colossians appears to have been written by the apostle Paul and Timothy, for it begins, Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and Timothy our brother (1:1). Adding and Timothy, who was Paul’s closest companion in ministry (see 2 Cor 1:19), leads to disputes about who said what, but the traditional reading has it that Paul wrote this letter because it says so.¹⁴ Indications of the author bleed through the text in 1:23 (I, Paul) and then expand in 1:24–2:5, where the same person of 1:23 is speaking. And it is not unreasonable to think that the prayer requests of 4:3–4 sound like Paul and his mission concerns, while the personal names in 4:7–15 are the sorts of people in Paul’s own circle. The letter closes with clarity: I, Paul, write this greeting in my own hand (4:18); this closure sounds like Gal 6:11, and everyone agrees that Paul wrote Galatians. At the biggest levels of comparison—greetings, farewells, contents with pastoral asides—the letter sounds like other Pauline letters.¹⁵ Thus, Col 1:1 sounds like other openings (2 Cor 1:1; Phil 1:1), and the I, Paul, became a servant of the gospel of Col 1:23 echoes similar ideas in 2 Cor 10:1 about service, and the ending of Col (4:18) is very similar to what we find in other Pauline letters (e.g., Gal 6:11; Phlm 19; 1 Cor 16:21).¹⁶ At some level the grammar and style of Colossians are similar to those of other Pauline letters. Saying that Colossians does not sound Pauline would be similar to saying Death Comes for the Archbishop does not sound like the Willa Cather of O Pioneers!¹⁷

This traditional view of the letter is joined in most studies to three others—Ephesians, Philippians, and Philemon—together called the Prison Epistles. Adding to their stature is a robust history of interpretation of each as written from prison by Paul, and that interpretation of the Prison Letters has allowed the letters to feed on one another. Until the modern era and the seminal critical work of F. C. Baur, no one questioned the Pauline authorship of this letter.¹⁸ Scholarship today, however, is jittery about claiming that Paul wrote this letter.¹⁹ Those who claim he did write it need to justify their claim, a recent example of which comes from Campbell.²⁰ Perhaps most significantly, a life and theology of Paul hangs by both arms from one’s conclusions about authorship.²¹

One of the all-time great lines about authorship comes from Ernst Käsemann in his RGG³ entry on Colossians: Wenn echt, um des Inhalts and Stiles willen so spät wie möglich, wenn unecht, so früh wie denkbar (3:1728, If authentic, on the basis of content and style, as late as possible; if inauthentic, as early as conceivable). These lines need to be correlated with those of Jerry Sumney, who ramped up the implications of denying Pauline authorship: If Paul is not the letter’s author, the churches of Colossae are probably not its actual recipients.²²

Each of the lines in Käsemann’s and Sumney’s formula is rooted in a mode of thinking characteristic of authorship debates, a mode of comparing what is known to what is desired to be known (or not known but presumably knowable). That is, the authorship of Colossians (the unknown and the desired to be known) is compared to, say, the authorship of Galatians or Romans (both knowns, both from Paul) to see whether the several lines of thinking and expressions in Colossians are consistent with, or even the same as, what is known. If Colossians creates too much or perhaps only some tension with Galatians or shows development, then the inference is that Paul did not write the former; for some, Colossae thus becomes a fictional mailbox, little more than a clever avatar. Notice the logic: from the known to the unknown. But lurking in this logic are serious historical problems that infect the entire discussion, for the logic creates manifold conclusions and implications both for Paul’s life and theology and for the chart of early Christian life and theology. This logic, however, is an exegetical and historical boil that deserves to be lanced.

To say Pauline requires a nondemonstrable and, I believe, false assumption, namely, that the authentic Paulines (say, Galatians or Romans) were written by the man, the apostle, the Jew Paul. Thus, because one has something authentically and demonstrably written by the man Paul (Galatians), one can then compare it with the Prison Letters, such as Colossians, to see whether it measures up to the authentic correspondence.²³ The historical error at work here is repeated over and over by most everyone who denies Pauline authorship of Colossians. What might that be? That solely the man, the apostle, the Jew Paul is responsible for Galatians and that therefore in Galatians or Romans or 1 and 2 Corinthians we have a pure sample of Paul, the authentic voice of Paul. One then compares Colossians to, say, Romans, sees the former in tension with the latter, and decides that the former is inauthentic because it is not Pauline. However, this conclusion rests on one key assumption: that Romans is pure Paul. It’s not, for as Rom 16:22 says, the author (or the one who wrote the letter) of Romans was Tertius.

Here’s an example, this one from my own Doktorvater, from whom I have learned so much and whose own commentary on Colossians has been delightful to study. I agree so often with him below that I do not mind bringing up a disagreement here. His summarizing words reflect this logic of comparison: The fact is that at point after point in the letter the commentator is confronted with features characteristic of flow of thought and rhetorical technique that are consistently and markedly different from those of the undisputed Paulines.²⁴

Let me be clear what I am saying. I am not saying there are not tensions between Romans and Colossians, for there are, though they can be exaggerated and overcooked. What I am saying is that the unknown author (of Colossians) is being compared with something assumed to be certain, factual, and clear: that Romans or Galatians or 1–2 Corinthians are pure Paul. I contest not the tension but the assumption that those other letters are pure Paul. Dunn, admirably and not atypically, admits that Paul’s style may have changed over a few years but concludes that it is more probable . . . that the hand is different.²⁵ Indeed, I would contend in fact that both hands are different—the hand many think at work in Romans or Galatians or 1–2 Corinthians and the hand at work, say, in Colossians or Ephesians or Philippians.

I recently found the same logic—from the supposedly known to the unknown—in a footnote in The Politics of Jesus, a famous book by John Howard Yoder, himself not a Pauline specialist.²⁶ Perhaps, he observes, I should write ‘Paul.’ It is not crucial for present purposes whether the same man who wrote Romans also wrote to the Ephesians and Colossians. Notice this very common logic: Since we know who wrote Romans (Paul) and since we can grasp his thought and his syntax, and since we can compare that author (Paul) and syntax with what we see in Colossians, we can determine by comparison whether Paul wrote Colossians. The failure here is the assumption that it was Paul alone or Paul himself who wrote Romans and that, since Romans is supposedly pure Paul, one must test Colossians against this pure sample to see whether Colossians passes the test. Methodologically, however, this assumption is nondemonstrable and demonstrably wrong.²⁷

In fact, authorship questions about Paul’s letters are more complex today than ever before. Given what we know today about how letters were produced and how authorship would have worked for an apostle like Paul, who was not good at writing himself (see Gal 6:11) and who certainly used co-workers and probably professional secretaries who were more skilled at writing and at articulation (in Greek) and who also contributed theologically to the letters,²⁸ we have to say that Galatians itself was not written by Paul the way it is often assumed in this kind of comparison about authorship. The foundation of a pure Pauline sample for this kind of comparison, then, is undermined: what we have in each of the letters attributed to Paul is Paul and his co-workers and a secretary or two, and some discussions and some drafts and contributions by one or more others in varying degrees.²⁹ The most notable point here is that this mode of letter production applies as much to Galatians as it does to Colossians. Galatians is not a pure Pauline letter, with Colossians a less pure product. It is far more likely that we need to see it as follows: Galatians reflects the style and grammar of one or more secretaries and one or more co-workers mediating Paul, while Colossians reflects another set of the same, mediating Paul. Paul is being mediated by each, to one degree or another, but we need to abandon the historically simplistic, assumptive theory that Paul wrote Galatians and, because we know what Paul’s style and theology are, we can know whether he is the one responsible for Colossians. How can anyone compare the author of one letter when it is produced by committee with the author of another letter produced far more likely than not by another committee? At best, all one can do is posit generalizations. Generalizations, however, destroy the game called comparison of