Looking over My Shoulder (IV)

The most basic issue of Introduction a biblical commentary will treat is authorship. For some New Testament books, this is a more difficult subject. For example, each of the Gospels is, technically, anonymous, since none of the four lists the name of the author. Hebrews is even more difficult, given the widely-varying speculation as to its authorship.

Comparatively speaking, the authorship of Philippians is fairly clear-cut. The name of “Paul” is clearly stated–as the first word in the Greek text. There are also a number of personal details stated that fit well with what is known of Paul’s life from elsewhere (e.g., 1:12-26; 3:4-6).

When stacked upside some of the other traditional Pauline letters, such as Colossians and the Pastoral Epistles, there is very little doubting of Paul’s authorship of Philippians, even among the most liberal biblical critics. However, there is another issue that comes up very frequently in the scholarly literature: the “integrity” of the text of the letter as we have it in our Bibles.

What is meant by “integrity” here? Philippians is viewed as having textual “integrity” if it can be proved that it was originally written by Paul in its current biblical form. You see, there are not a few critics who think that what we call Philippians may have actually begun as two or three separate mini-letters.

The two-letter view sees a major change in the tone of the epistle at 3:2, after, oddly, it uses the term “Finally” in 3:1, only about halfway through the letter. So, from 3:2 (and possibly 3:1b) through 4:9 is considered a different letter by Paul to the Philippians that was “stitched together” with the original letter (1:1-3:1, 4:10-23) at some later point.

The three-letter view basically agrees with the two-letter view, except that it also sees 4:10-20 as yet another short letter by Paul. It is usually referred to by scholars as Paul’s “thank you note.”

There are various ways to answer these speculative attacks on the “integrity” of Philippians. The two most commonly used approaches by evangelicals are: 1) the history of the Greek text of Philippians; and 2) a comparison of “change of tone” and the use of certain key terminology in Philippians and elsewhere in Paul’s letters. These will be discussed in my next post.

What has been largely overlooked is an appeal to a unified literary structure of the book. In other words, if it can be shown that Philippians evidences a clearly unified structure for its entire four chapters, then it is virtually impossible that it was originally two or three smaller epistles that were later put together and treated as one letter. As will be seen next time, this can actually be done in two different, and complementary ways.

Coming Thursday: “Looking over My Shoulder (V)”