theologian Adolf Deissmann says of them: ‘They differ from the messages of the homely papyrus leaves of Egypt, not as letters but only as the letters of Paul.’ When we read Paul’s letters, we are reading things which were meant to be not academic exercises and theological treatises, but human documents written by a friend to his friends.
The Immediate Situation
With a very few exceptions, Paul’s letters were written to meet an immediate situation. They were not systematic arguments which he sat down to write in the peace and silence of his study. There was some threatening situation in Corinth, or Galatia, or Philippi, or Thessalonica, and he wrote a letter to meet it. He was not in the least thinking of us when he wrote, but solely of the people to whom he was writing. Deissmann writes: ‘Paul had no thought of adding a few fresh compositions to the already extant Jewish epistles; still less of enriching the sacred literature of his nation . . . He had no presentiment of the place his words would occupy in universal history; not so much that they would be in existence in the next generation, far less that one day people would look at them as Holy Scripture.’ We must always remember that a thing need not be of only passing interest because it was written to meet an immediate situation. Every one of the great love songs of the world was written at a particular time for one person; but they live on for the benefit and enjoyment of all. It is precisely because Paul’s letters were written to meet a threatening danger or a pressing need that they still throb with life. And it is because human need and the human situation do not change that God speaks to us through them today.
The Spoken Word
There is one other thing that we must note about these letters. Paul did what most people did in his day. He did not normally pen his own letters, but dictated them to a secretary and then added his own authenticating signature. (We actually know the name of one of the people who did the writing for him. In Romans 16:22, Tertius, the secretary, slips in his own greeting before the letter draws to an end.) In 1 Corinthians 16:21, Paul says in effect: ‘This is my own signature, my autograph, so that you can be sure this letter comes from me’ (cf. Colossians 4:18; 2 Thessalonians 3:17).
This explains a great deal. Sometimes Paul is hard to understand, because his sentences begin and never finish; his grammar breaks down and the construction becomes complicated. We must not think of him sitting quietly at a desk, carefully polishing each sentence as he writes. We must think of him striding up and down some little room, pouring out a torrent of words, while his secretary races to get them down. When Paul composed his letters, he had in his mind’s eye a vision of the people to whom he was writing, and he was pouring out his heart to them in words that fell over each other in his eagerness to help.
INTRODUCTION TO THE LETTER TO THE PHILIPPIANS
We are fortunate in one thing in our study of Philippians – there are practically no critical problems involved, for no reputable New Testament critic has ever doubted its genuineness. We can accept Philippians as undoubtedly an authentic letter of Paul.
Philippi
When Paul chose a place in which to preach the gospel, he always did so with the eye of a strategist. He always chose one which was not only important in itself but was also the keypoint of a whole area. To this day, many of Paul’s preaching centres are still great road centres and railway junctions. Such was Philippi, which had at least three great claims to distinction.
(1) In the neighbourhood, there were gold and silver mines, which had been worked as far back as the time of the Phoenicians. It is true that, by the time of the Christian era, these mines had been exhausted; but they had made Philippi a great commercial centre of the ancient world.
(2) The city had been founded by Philip, father of Alexander the Great; and it is his name that it bears. It was founded on the site of an ancient city called Krēnidēs, a name which means the Wells or Fountains. Philip had founded Philippi in 368 BC because there was no more strategic site in all Europe. There is a range of hills which divides Europe from Asia, east from west; and at Philippi that chain of hills dips into a pass, so that the city commanded the road from Europe to Asia, since the road had to go through the pass. This was the reason that one of the great battles of history was fought at Philippi; for it was here that Antony defeated Brutus and Cassius, and thereby decided the future of the Roman Empire.
(3) Not very long after this, Philippi was raised to the status of a Roman colony. The Roman colonies were amazing institutions. They were not colonies in the sense of being outposts of civilization in unexplored parts of the world. They had begun by having a military significance. It was the custom of Rome to send out parties of veteran soldiers, who had served their time and been granted citizenship, to settle in strategic road centres. Usually, these parties consisted of 300 veterans with their wives and children. These colonies were the focal points of the great Roman road systems, which were so engineered that reinforcements could speedily be sent from one colony to another. They were founded to keep the peace and to command the strategic centres in Rome’s far-flung empire. At first they had been founded in Italy, but soon they were scattered throughout the whole empire, as the empire grew. In later days, the title of colony was given by the government to any city which it wished to honour for faithful service.
Wherever they were, these colonies were little fragments of Rome, and their pride in their Roman citizenship was their dominating characteristic. The Roman language was spoken; Roman-style clothes were worn; Roman customs were observed; their magistrates had Roman titles, and carried out the same ceremonies as were carried out in Rome itself. They were stubbornly and unalterably Roman and would never have dreamt of becoming assimilated to the people among whom they were set. We can hear the Roman pride breathing through the charge against Paul and Silas in Acts 16:20–1: ‘These men are Jews, and they are trying to teach and to introduce laws and customs which it is not right for us to observe – for we are Romans.’
‘You are a colony of heaven’ (Authorized Version), Paul wrote to the Philippian church (3:20). Just as the Roman colonists never forgot in any environment that they were Romans, so the Philippians must never forget in any society that they were Christians. Nowhere were people prouder of being Roman citizens than in these colonies; and Philippi was one such colony.
Paul and Philippi
It was on the second missionary journey, about the year AD 52, that Paul first came to Philippi. Urged on by the vision of the man of Macedonia with his appeal to come over and help them (cf. Acts 16:6–10), Paul had sailed from Alexandrian Troas in Asia Minor. He had landed at Neapolis in Europe, and made his way from there to Philippi.
The story of Paul’s stay in Philippi is told in Acts 16; and an interesting story it is. It centres round three people – Lydia, the seller of purple; the demented slave girl, used by her masters to tell fortunes; and the Roman jailer. It is an extraordinary cross-section of ancient life. These three people were of different nationalities. Lydia was from Asia, and her name may well be not a proper name at all but simply ‘the Lydian lady’. The slave girl was a native Greek. The jailer was a Roman citizen. The whole empire was being gathered into the Christian Church. But not only were these three individuals of different nationalities; they came from very different levels of society. Lydia was a dealer in purple, one of the most costly substances in the ancient world, and was the equivalent of a merchant prince. The girl was a slave and, therefore, in the eyes of the law not a person at all, but a living tool. The jailer was a Roman citizen, a member of the sturdy Roman middle class, from which the civil service was drawn. In these three, the top, the bottom and the middle of society are all represented. No chapter in the Bible shows so well the all-embracing faith which Jesus Christ brought to men and women.
Persecution
Paul had to leave Philippi after a storm of persecution and an illegal imprisonment. That persecution was inherited by the Philippian church. He tells them that they have shared in his imprisonment and in his defence of the gospel (1:7). He tells them not to fear their adversaries, for they are going through what he himself has gone through