97. The Epistle to the Philippians

CHAPTER XII

They must stand or fall together. But they will stand. They represent, indeed, an advanced state of christological and ecclesiological knowledge in the apostolic age, but they have their roots in the older Epistles of Paul, and are brimful of his spirit. They were called forth by a new phase of error, and brought out new statements of truth with new words and phrases adapted to the case. They contain nothing that Paul could not have written consistently with his older Epistles, and there is no known pupil of Paul who could have forged such highly intellectual and spiritual letters in his name and equalled, if not out-Pauled Paul.1128 The external testimonies are unanimous in favor of the Pauline authorship, and go as far back as Justin Martyr, Polycarp, Ignatius, and the heretical Marcion (about 140), who included both Epistles in his mutilated canon.1129

The difficulties which have been urged against their Pauline origin, especially of Ephesians, are as follows: 1. The striking resemblance of the two Epistles, and the apparent repetitiousness and dependence of Ephesians on Colossians, which seem to be unworthy of such an original thinker as Paul.1130 But this resemblance, the Corinthians who tolerated an incestuous person in their midst and disgraced the love feasts by intemperance? What of the Epistle to the Romans which contains a similar warning against drunkenness (Rom. 13:13)? And what could induce a pseudo-Paul to slander the church at Ephesus, if it was exceptionally pure? 1128 Farrar (II. 602): “We might well be amazed if the first hundred years after the death of Christ produced a totally unknown writer who, assuming the name of Paul, treats the mystery which it was given him to reveal with a masterly power which the apostle himself rarely equalled, and most certainly never surpassed. Let any one study the remains of the Apostolic Fathers, and he may well be surprised at the facility with which writers of the Tübingen school, and their successors, assume the existence of Pauls who lived unheard of and died unknown, though they were intellectually and spiritually the equals, if not the superiors, of St. Paul himself!” 1129 See the quotations in Charteris’s Canonicity, pp. 237 sqq and 247 sqq. 1130 This is DeWette’s chief argument. See his table of parallel passages in Einleitung, § 146a (pp. 313-318 of the sixth ed.). Such as αίσχρολογία (Col. 3:8), ἀνταναπληρόω (1:24), εἰπήοποιέω (1:20), ἐθελοθρησκεία (2:23), πιθανολογία (2:4); τὰ ἐπουράνια (Eph. 1:3, 20; 2:6; 3:10; 6:12),τὰ πευματικά (6:12), κοσμοκράτορες (6:12), πολυποίκιλος σοφία (3:10). Even the word ἄφεσις (Col. 1:14 and Eph. 1:7) for πάρεσις (Rom. 3:25) has been counted among the strange terms, as if Paul had not known before of the remission of sins. Holtzmann has most carefully elaborated the philological arguTHE NEW TESTAMENT

361 which is more striking in the practical than in the doctrinal part, is not the resemblance between an author and an imitator, but of two compositions of the same author, written about the same time on two closely connected topics; and it is accompanied by an equally marked variety in thought and language. 2. The absence of personal and local references in Ephesians. This is, as already remarked, sufficiently explained by the encyclical character of that Epistle. 3. A number of peculiar words not found elsewhere in the Pauline Epistles.1131 But they are admirably adapted to the new ideas, and must be expected from a mind so rich as Paul’s. Every Epistle contains some hapaxlegomena. The only thing which is somewhat startling is that an apostle should speak of “holy apostles and prophets” (Eph. 3:5), but the term “holy” (άγιοι) is applied in the New Testament to all Christians, as being consecrated to God (ἁγιασμένοι, John 17:17), and not in the later ecclesiastical sense of a spiritual nobility. It implies no contradiction to Eph. 3:8, where the author calls himself “the least of all saints” (comp. 1 Cor. 15:9, “I am the least of the apostles”). 4. The only argument of any weight is the alleged post-Pauline rise of the Gnostic heresy, which is undoubtedly opposed in Colossians (not in Ephesians, at least not directly). But why should this heresy not have arisen in the apostolic age as well as the Judaizing heresy which sprung up before a.d. 50, and followed Paul everywhere? The tares spring up almost simultaneously with the wheat. Error is the shadow of truth. Simon Magus, the contemporary of Peter, and the Gnostic Cerinthus, the contemporary, of John, are certainly historic persons. Paul speaks (1 Cor. 8:1) of a “gnosis which puffeth up,” and warned the Ephesian elders, as early as 58, of ment. But the veteran Reuss (I. 112) treats it as futile, and even Davidson must admit (II 219) that “the sentiments (of Ephesians) are generally Pauline, as well as the diction,” though he adds that “both betray marks of another writer.” 1131 Such as αίσχρολογία (Col. 3:8), ἀνταναπληρόω (1:24), εἰπήοποιέω (1:20), ἐθελοθρησκεία (2:23), πιθανολογία (2:4); τὰ ἐπουράνια (Eph. 1:3, 20; 2:6; 3:10; 6:12),τὰ πευματικά (6:12), κοσμοκράτορες (6:12), πολυποίκιλος σοφία (3:10). Even the word ἄφεσις (Col. 1:14 and Eph. 1:7) for πάρεσις (Rom. 3:25) has been counted among the strange terms, as if Paul had not known before of the remission of sins. Holtzmann has most carefully elaborated the philological argument. But the veteran Reuss (I. 112) treats it as futile, and even Davidson must admit (II 219) that “the sentiments (of Ephesians) are generally Pauline, as well as the diction,” though he adds that “both betray marks of another writer.”

the rising of disturbing errorists from their own midst; and the Apocalypse, which the Tübingen critics assign to the year 68, certainly opposes the antinomian type of Gnosticism, the error of the Nicolaitans (Rev. 2:6, 15, 20), which the early Fathers derived from one of the first seven deacons of Jerusalem. All the elements of Gnosticism—Ebionism, Platonism, Philoism, syncretism, asceticism, antinomianism—were extant before Christ, and it needed only a spark of Christian truth to set the inflammable material on fire. The universal sentiment of the Fathers, as far as we can trace it up to Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, and Polycarp found the origin of Gnosticism in the apostolic age, and called Simon Magus its father or grandfather.

Against their testimony, the isolated passage of Hegesippus, so often quoted by the negative critics,1132 has not the weight of a feather. This credulous, inaccurate, and narrow-minded Jewish Christian writer said, according to Eusebius, that the church enjoyed profound peace, and was “a pure and uncorrupted virgin,” governed by brothers and relations of Jesus, until the age of Trajan, when,after the death of the apostles,” the knowledge falsely so called”(ψευδων υμοςγνωσ ις,comp. 1 Tim. 6:20), openly raised its head.1133 But he speaks of the church in Palestine, not in Asia Minor; and he was certainly mistaken in this dream of an age of absolute purity and peace. The Tübingen school itself maintains the very opposite view. Every Epistle, as well as the Acts, bears testimony to the profound agitations, parties, and evils of the church, including Jerusalem, where the first great theological controversy was fought out by the apostles themselves. But Hegesippus corrects himself,

1132 Baur, Schwegler, and Hilgenfeld (Einleit., 652 sq.). 1133 Eus., H. E., III. 32: “The same author [Hegesippus], relating the events of the times, also says that ’the church continued until then as a pure and uncorrupt virgin (παρθένος καθαρὰ καὶ ἀδιάφθορος έμενεν ἡ ἐκκλησία); whilst if there were any at all that attempted to pervert the sound doctrine of the saving gospel, they were yet skulking in darkness (ἐν ἀδήλῳ που σκότει); but when the sacred choir of the apostles became extinct, and the generation of those that had been privileged to hear their inspired wisdom had passed away, then also arose the combination of godless error through the fraud of false teachers. These also, as there was none of the apostles left, henceforth attempted, without shame (γυμνῃ λοιπὸν ἤδη τῃ κεφαλη)ι , to preach their falsely so-called gnosis against the gospel of truth.’ Such is the statement of Hegesippus.” Comp. the notes on the passage by Heinichen in his ed. of Euseb., Tome III., pp. 100-103. and makes a distinction between the secret working and the open and shameless manifestation of heresy. The former began, he intimates, in the apostolic age; the latter showed itself afterward.1134 Gnosticism, like modern Rationalism,1135 had a growth of a hundred years before it came to full maturity. A post-apostolic writer would have dealt very differently with the fully developed systems of Basilides, Valentinus, and Marcion. And yet the two short Epistles to the Colossians and Ephesians strike at the roots of this error, and teach the positive truth with an originality, vigor, and depth that makes them more valuable, even as a refutation, than the five books of Irenaeus against Gnosticism, and the ten books of the Philosophumena of Hippolytus; and this patent fact is the best proof of their apostolic origin.

§ 97. The Epistle to the Philippians. The Church at Philippi.

Philippi was a city of Macedonia, founded by and called after Philip, the father of Alexander the Great, in a fertile region, with contiguous gold and silver mines, on the banks of a small river and the highway between Asia and Europe, ten miles from the seacoast. It acquired immortal fame by the battle between Brutus and Mark Antony (b.c. 42), in which the Roman republic died and the empire was born. After that event it had the rank of a Roman military colony, with the high-sounding title, “Colonia Augusta Julia Philippensis.”1136 Hence its mixed population, the Greeks, of course, prevailing, next the Roman colonists and magistrates, and last a limited number of Jews, who had a place of prayer on the riverside. It was visited by Paul, in company with Silas, Timothy, and Luke, on his second missionary tour, in the year 52, and became the seat of the first Christian congregation 1134 The same Hegesippus, in Eus., IV. 22, places the rise of the heresies in the Palestinian church immediately after the death of James, and traces some of them back to Simon Magus. He was evidently familiar with the Pastoral Epistles, and borrowed from them the terms ψευδώνυμος γνωσις , ἑτεροδιδάσκαλοι., ὑγιὴς κανών. 1135 The critical school of Rationalism began in Germany with Semler of Halle (1725-1791), in the middle of the eighteenth century, and culminated in the Tübingen School of our own age. 1136 Augustus conferred upon Philippi the special privilege of the “jus Italicum,” which made it a miniature likeness of the Roman people, with “praetors” and “lictors,” and the other titles of the Roman magistrates. Under this character the city appears in the narrative of the Acts (16:12 sqq.), where “the pride and privilege of Roman citizenship confront us at every turn.” See Lightfoot, pp. 50 sqq., Braune, and Lumby.