Philippians, Colossians, Philemon (Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture)

Hamm, Dennis,SJ, Williamson, Peter S., Healy, Mary

• Editorial: Baker Academic
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781441244864
• Categoría: Teología y religión
• Categoría: Comentario bíblico

Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon, written by Paul from prison in the middle of the first century, were addressed to specific Christian communities facing concrete challenges. What did these letters mean at the time, and what do they mean for us today? In this addition to the Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture, seasoned New Testament scholar Dennis Hamm explores the significance of these letters and their enduring relevance to the life and mission of the church. Based on solid scholarship yet readily accessible, the book is enriched with pastoral reflections and applications and includes sidebars on the living tradition and biblical background.

Paul’s Letter to the Christians in Philippi

Saint Paul’s Letter to the Christians at Philippi has been a favorite down through the centuries. As in the Letter to Philemon, Paul writes with great affection and self-revelation. As in the case of other famous prisoners—think of Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King Jr.—confinement led Paul to reflect on big questions. For example, What if I die here? What comes after death? Has my life been worthwhile? What can I hope for the people I would leave behind? Jesus has made all the difference in my life—how can I best communicate him to others? What do I make of my enemies? How do I make sense of suffering? How can I encourage my friends in their own suffering? What have I learned here that might help them? The life-giving truths Paul conveys about these things have encouraged millions ever since, far beyond his original addressees.

The general introduction to this volume took up some general issues regarding the Prison Letters. This specific introduction to Philippians will address these more immediate issues:

1. the location of the authors,
2. the location and social context of the recipients,
3. the letter’s structure,
4. the occasion and genre of the letter,
5. its theological themes,
6. the relationship of Philippians to the other Pauline Letters, and
7. the letter’s pastoral relevance today.

From Where Did Paul Write?

Where was Paul confined when he wrote this letter? Ephesus has been a popular candidate in recent commentaries because of its relative proximity to Philippi, compared with the much farther distances of other places where Paul was known to have been imprisoned, Caesarea and Rome. While neither his other letters nor the Acts of the Apostles explicitly mention an imprisonment in Ephesus, it is possible given Paul’s general references to “far more imprisonments” (2 Cor 11:23) and to trouble in Ephesus (1 Cor 15:32; 16:8–9). However, a closer scrutiny of Paul’s travel references in Philippians and his mention of imperial institutions—“the whole praetorium” (1:13) and “Caesar’s household” (4:22)—have made the traditional location, Rome, quite plausible again. I find Rome the most convincing venue, as the commentary on these passages will show. Philippi’s location on the Via Egnatia (or Egnatian Way), Rome’s main highway to the East, would allow for the comings and goings mentioned in the letter, making calculations about hypothetical sea travel irrelevant. At the end of the day, however, the location of the church to which Paul writes is far more important than the place from which he writes.

The Historical and Social Context of the Recipients

Philippi was a major city in the Roman province of †Macedonia, in the northeastern arm of today’s Greece. It sat on the Via Egnatia, the major east-west road across the southern part of the Balkan Peninsula, joining Byzantium in the east (today’s Istanbul) to the Adriatic Sea in the west. Across the water, the road continued up the boot of Italy to Rome. Philippi lay some eighty miles to the east of Thessalonica, Macedonia’s capital. Adjoined to a fertile plain and near the gold deposits of the Pangaion Hills, Philippi gets its name from Alexander the Great’s father, Philip of Macedon, who took it over around 360 BC, especially to mine the gold. Some three centuries later, Octavian, later called Caesar Augustus, made it a Roman colony and a settlement for retired Roman veterans. Colonizing the place with former Roman soldiers meant the takeover of Greek farmland and, eventually, the concentration of more and more land into the ownership of Roman colonizers. This resulted in an increasingly powerful urban elite and a growing number of wealthy colonist farmers.

Since we are reading a letter addressed to a small Christian minority in a mainly non-Christian, Gentile population, it is helpful to try to form a concrete picture of the social situation of Paul’s addressees. Using the data of archaeology, ancient history, profiles of other first-century Roman and Greek towns, and clues from the letter itself, Peter Oakes, in a recent study, has attempted to reconstruct the demographics of Philippi in the mid-first century AD.1 Granting that such a reconstruction is hypothetical, the effort to create the picture helps the contemporary reader listen to the text from the point of view of the original recipients.

The following picture emerges from Oakes’s study. At the time Paul wrote, the population of Philippi was around fifteen thousand, judging from such things as the size of its theater (seating eight thousand).

• The wealthy Roman elite constituted around 3 percent.
• Roman farmers living in the city and working land outside the walls, some 20 percent.
• Service groups (shopkeepers, bakers, hunters, entertainers, and so on—a third of them Roman citizens, two-thirds Greek), around 37 percent.
• The poor (people living below subsistence level, selling marginal goods or begging), 20 percent.
• Slaves, about 20 percent of the population.

Since slaves were embedded in households (familiae), their situation varied according to the household of their master. Roughly a third of the slave population was in the households of the Roman elite; a quarter was in the households of the commuting colonist farmers; and the rest were in families of the service groups. The families of the poor could not afford to own slaves. Thus, while slaves had the lowest social status, they were not among the poor. And although Roman citizens constituted only around a third of the population, their power and social status in this special colony made them the dominant cultural influence. The Roman atmosphere, focused on empire and emperor, prevailed.

Even though the Greeks were in the majority, the Roman citizens—especially the elite and the colonist farmers—held the wealth and power and so dominated the culture. Roman society has been characterized as the most status-symbol-conscious culture of the ancient world. It was a highly stratified society in which the elite especially thought of their lives as an “honors race” (cursus honorum), which is abundantly reflected in the inscriptions on public monuments detailing the various offices each civic benefactor held in his or her lifetime. Honor meant both esteem and public office. Thus to seek honor and to seek office were one and the same thing; one held office in order to gain honor.

Roman municipalities in the provinces replicated this social stratification, where wealth was mainly important for the civic honor one could accrue by underwriting public works.2 The many honorific inscriptions unearthed in Philippi demonstrate that, after the city of Rome itself, this colony was perhaps the most status-conscious place in the empire. The general population of Philippi would have been confronted with this cursus honorum culture at every turn—in the Roman forum at the center of the city, in the honorific inscriptions in public places, in emperor worship, in the images on Roman coins, in the lineup of civic processions, and in the lifestyle of Roman veterans and their descendants. This background illuminates much of the language and imagery Paul uses when he writes to the church in this city.

Jewish presence in Philippi was apparently minute. There is no first-century archaeological evidence for a Jewish synagogue there. The account of Paul and Silas’s first visit to the area (with Timothy and Luke?) in Acts 16:12–16 simply mentions a “place of prayer” with a small gathering of women, whereas Paul finds flourishing synagogue communities in Thessalonica and Beroea (Acts 17:1–10) farther down the road to the west.

So much for the general population of Philippi. The little Christian community within Philippi would, of course, have reflected the complex composition of the population as a whole, but in different proportions. The research I am summarizing proposes the following composition for the local church:

• Christians from households of Roman elite: around 1 percent (+ 3 percent slaves) = 4 percent
• Christians from colonist farmers: around 15 percent (+ 4 percent slaves) = 19 percent
• Christians from service groups: around 43 percent (+ 9 percent slaves) = 52 percent
• Christian poor: 25 percent3

Thus over three-fourths of the Christian community was from the service groups and the poor, and sixteen percent were slaves. The economic picture of the Philippian church, then, is of a small group made up mainly of landless noncitizens who were somewhat financially insecure. Certain passages in Paul’s Letters give evidence that the Macedonian churches, of which the Philippians and the Thessalonians were chief, did indeed experience poverty. He reminds the Thessalonians, “You recall, brothers, our toil and drudgery. Working night and day in order not to burden any of you, we proclaimed to you the gospel of God” (1 Thess 2:9). In the present letter, he refers to aid that came to him from the Philippians during that same period of ministry:

You Philippians indeed know that at the beginning of the gospel, when I left Macedonia, not a single church shared with me in an account of giving and receiving, except you alone. For even when I was at Thessalonica you sent me something for my needs, not only once but more than once.

Phil 4:15–16; and see 2 Cor 9:1–4

How big is the community to which Paul writes? We can only guess, but the reference to local harassment (1:28) suggests they are a distinct minority. If the community was, say, between 150 and 300, the Philippian Christians would constitute 1–2 percent of the population of the town of Philippi.4

The courts favored the Roman colonists over the Greeks, and those colonists owned most of the land and wielded the power, even though they only made up around a third of the population. Public inscriptions, including those on coins, were in Latin, and Latin books would have dominated the texts in the public library. We saw how the primarily agricultural economy of Philippi put the wealth and power in the hands of the elite landowners and the colonist farmers. This was bound to magnify the difference in status between rich and poor. Yet citizenship versus noncitizenship was also an issue. Even the brief account in Acts of Paul and Silas’s time in Philippi highlights this fact. The masters of the slave girl with the oppressive spirit complain that Paul and company are “advocati...