INTRODUCTION

THE Epistle to the Colossians is comparatively brief; but it is unique among the writings of the New Testament, and its importance and value are out of all proportion to its brevity. In consequence of the difficulty of its main subject and the obscurity of the form of false teaching which it was intended to guard against, it has not received the attention and appreciation to which it is entitled. In short, it has been comparatively neglected.

I. THE COLOSSIAN CHURCH

The church at the city of Colossæ on the banks of the Lycus in Asia Minor was not founded by Paul; for several passages of the epistle imply that he had never seen them, that he was personally unknown to them (1 : 4 and 2 : 1). Moreover, there is no mention of a visit of Paul to Colossæ in the accounts of his missionary journeys in the book of Acts. It is probable that the founder of the church was Epaphras (an abbreviated form of Epaphroditus). This is implied in 1 : 7, where it is said, "since ye heard of the true grace of God, even as ye learned it of Epaphras." It is likely that Epaphras had learned it from Paul. It is certain that he preached Paul's gospel. In several passages of the epistle Paul strongly expresses his approval of the way that Epaphras had taught the Colossians. He refers to him in the opening paragraph as "our beloved fellowservant, who is a faithful minister of Christ on our behalf." The pronoun here used practically implies that Epaphras was a representative, possibly an actual appointee of Paul. As to the complexion of the church at Colossæ, it was

evidently composed of Gentiles. This is indicated by the general tone and tenor of the epistle, and it is specifically implied in such passages as 1 : 21, 27, and 2 : 13. This is not disproved by the fact that the doctrines of the false teachers which are so vigorously opposed in the epistle were of a Jewish character. The same is true of the epistle to the Galatians, though it is certain that the churches in Galatia were composed entirely of Gentiles.

II. THE OCCASION OF THE EPISTLE

We learn from the epistle itself that Epaphras had gone to Rome and was with Paul when he wrote it, for in 4: 12 he is mentioned as one of those who send greetings to the Colossians, "Epaphras, who is one of you, saluteth you." Doubtless he had gone to Rome for the very purpose of laying before Paul "the state of the church" and especially to tell him of the danger to which the believers there were exposed on account of the false teachings of certain propagandists of some new-fangled system which they were trying to persuade them to accept instead of the gospel as they had learned it from Epaphras. Paul refers to them in 2 : 4, where he says, "Let no one delude you with persuasiveness of speech." Still more clear and specific is his reference to them in 2: 8, "Take heed lest there shall be any one that maketh spoil of you through his philosophy and vain deceit,” and in 2: 18, "Let no man rob you of your prize by a voluntary humility and worshipping of the angels . . . vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind and not holding fast the Head."

The appearance of these false teachers and their energetic efforts to seduce the Colossian Christians from the gospel they had heard and received were the occasion of the epistle; and the character of their teachings gives the key-note to the letter and furnishes the key to its interpretation. It becomes important, then, to ascertain, if possible, what this new teaching was.

Bishop Lightfoot holds that it was a form of Gnosticism

with Jewish modifications; and he makes a very ingenious and able argument in support of this view. But it is claimed by later writers that it is not necessary to assume the presence of Gnosticism in order to explain the contents of the epistle. All the passages and references which, according to Lightfoot, require the assumption of Gnostic teaching can be explained, it is claimed, by what we know of the views that were prevalent among the Jews of that day concerning angels. The New Testament is itself, in large part, the source of this knowledge. What is there said will be a matter of surprise to one who has never had occasion to look up the various references and put them together; but it is not necessary to cite them here.

As Lightfoot and those who follow him, as Moule and others, have doubtless made too much of Gnosticism in their setting and interpretation of the epistle, those who reject that view have erred, and very naturally, in going too far in the other direction and have made too much of their angelology and angelolatry. They even go so far as to hold that "the elements of the world," referred to by Paul in Col. 28, are "the elemental spirits which animate all material things and are so called from the elements which they animate"; and they are called "dominions, principalities, powers," etc., from their sphere of authority. (See Peake's Commentary on Colossians in the Expositor's Greek Testament and the article by Massie on "Elements" in Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible.)

If Lightfoot and his followers are too specific and explicit on the one hand, the angelologists are too explicit and specific on the other. They all know too much. Chrysostom somewhere says that it is often wiser not to know than to know, the aptness and force of which one can appreciate when reading Peake and Massie. The following statement is about as definite as can be safely risked, and it probably gives the correct view: The false system which was promulgated at Colossæ and which Paul so vigorously and so vehemently opposed was on its doctrinal side a

mixture of Jewish Kabbalistic views with current oriental speculation and theosophy, of which Asia Minor was and had been a hotbed from the time whereof the memory of man ran not to the contrary. It appears to have taught the mediation of angels and other mysterious powers of the unseen world in the creation of the world, the giving of the law, the work of redemption, and the processes of salvation; and so it obscured, if it did not exclude, Christ altogether.

On its practical side, it combined a merciless asceticism (Col. 2: 23) and a strict observance of Jewish rites (2 : 11, 16) with the worship of angels (2 18) and an arrogant claim to special and superior enlightenment (2 : 8, 18). Its one special danger lay in the fact that it obscured or even denied the unique glory of Christ, the ground and agent and goal of creation, and the sole mediator through faith in whom the Christian was delivered from under the power of darkness (113), raised into newness of life (3 : 1), and made partaker of his glory (34).

Any attempt to go further than this, to fix definitely the false teaching, to identify it with any one definite system, or to give it a single specific name is attended with difficulties and sure to be misleading.

At any rate the character of the heresy and the serious danger which it threatened were such as to make it necessary for Paul, the tireless watchman of the infant Church, to make an explicit, strong, full, formal statement of the supremacy of Christ,- of his relation to God, to creation, to the universe, and to the Church. That is the theme of the epistle. It bears the same relation to the other epistles that the Fourth Gospel bears to the other Gospels. It is the Christological epistle as that is the Christological gospel. A heresy doctrinally and substantially similar to that which made it necessary to write the Colossian epistle and to make the statement and exposition there found of the supremacy of Christ, made it necessary to write the Fourth Gospel in order to set forth the God-consciousness and supremacy of Jesus as there found.

This does not mean that Paul had developed a new view and doctrine of Christ, different from that which he previously held and taught. By no means. We know from his previous epistles that he held all along substantially the view of Christ which he states and expounds in Colossians. If any one doubts this, let him read carefully Gal. 1: 16; 2:20; Rom. 1 : 3, 4; I Cor. 8:6; 2 Cor. 4:4; 8:9; Phil. 26, 9-11. In all these passages he assumes the supremacy of Christ as a matter of course.

The last passage is here cited with the others because, though it was not written as long before Colossians as the other epistles quoted, it was written without any polemical purpose and in such a way as to make it manifest that it expressed the view of Christ which was taken for granted, not only by Paul himself, but by the churches which he had founded or taught. There is not in the passage a word or a suggestion which would betray that this view of Christ was new or strange to Paul or his readers. The self-evident reason why he did not make in the previous epistles an express and formal statement of the deity and supremacy of Christ is precisely this, that it was universally accepted and so no occasion had then arisen for it, as had now arisen in the Colossian church by reason of the presence and teachings there of those who sought to ignore, obscure, or deny the deity of Paul's Lord and Christ. This consideration, let it be said incidentally, is sufficient to refute the notion of some few (as Holtzmann, Von Soden, etc.) that the Christological passages of our epistle were not written by Paul.

III. AUTHORSHIP AND DATE

Indeed, the epistle is so characteristically and evidently Pauline that it is now accepted as Paul's with practical unanimity among the best scholars. To undertake to show exhaustively that it is Pauline, in its point of view, its fundamental conceptions, its spirit, its style, its grammatical peculiarities, its figures, and, in view of its