PHILIPPIANS, EPISTLE TO THE, a book of the New Testament. Though Philippi was the first place in Europe where St. Paul preached the gospel, the letter to the local church was one of the last he wrote. Ever since he founded the church, he kept in touch with it (iv. 15f) ; indeed he had accepted a gift of money from it. But the present letter is an answer to one written by the Philippian Christians, who had enquired anxiously about his health and prospects, assuring him of their prayers, and wonder ing when he would be able to revisit them (i. 25f). Epaphroditus, who had brought the money, had fallen ill, and the apostle appar ently sends him back reluctantly, perhaps with the present letter.
It is a friendly missive, which falls into two parts. The first begins by relieving their anxiety about himself, assures them that he hopes to return before very long, and warns them, in the mean time, to preserve their unity (i.—ii.). At this point there is a sudden change in tone. The letter swerves into a passionate denunciation of some errorists or agitators (iii. if), after which the writer resumes (iv. 1-7) his counsels to the community. The closing appeal (iv. 8f) is for harmony.
Modern criticism of the epistle is no longer concerned with supposed traces of gnosticism in ii. 6f. The two engrossing ques tions are (a) the place from which the letter was written, and (b) whether or not it is a literary unity.
The former problem is raised by those who point out that the Greek term "praetorium" ("palace" in the English version of i.
13) does not necessarily mean the Roman barracks of the prae torian guard at Rome, but might conceivably, for example, refer to the palace of Herod at Caesarea (Acts xxiii. 35) or to judicial authorities at a centre like Ephesus, where we know Timotheus was living (Acts xix. 22), and where the apostle was once im prisoned. The data indicating Rome as the place of composition cannot be hastily set aside, i.e., the considerations which involve the latter part of the two years confinement at Rome (Acts xxviii. 3o) as the period when the letter was written.
The second problem starts from the abrupt change in iii. 2. It is thought by some (e.g., by B. W. Bacon, The Story of St. Paul, pp. 367f) that iii. 2f represents an earlier letter, written in reply to the gift of money, and subsequently added to the later i. i. iii. I, as 2 Corinthians x.—xiii. has been added to an epistle which chronologically it preceded. The partition theories, of which this is the simplest form, imply that two letters have been muti lated and transposed; otherwise, the hiatus at iii. 2 is inexplicable.
But the writer may have been interrupted at iii. 1, or something may have occurred which moved him to turn aside sharply. In iv. 4 he echoes the note sounded in iii. 1, and the intervening outburst may be psychologically explained without recourse to any theory of transposition.
He associates Timotheus with him in the address (i.i), owing to his local ties with Philippi (ii. 22 and Acts xvi. 3f), but the apostle writes in the first person throughout, even in iv. 21; indeed he speaks of his companions as distinct from himself, and iii. 17 is no real exception to this. The letter is an affectionate personal message from St. Paul in the evening of his life to a church with which his relations had been exceptionally friendly. Their troubles were not connected with doctrine; the great passage in ii. 5f is introduced as a motive to humility, not as specific instruction on the person of Christ. These Macedonian Christians had a naturally affectionate temperament, which affected their religion; the apostle's chief prayer for them is that their emotional warmth may ripen into insight and understanding (i. 9f), and his concern for them is solely for their Christian principles of conduct.
The earliest definite traces of the letter in second century litera ture occur in Polycarp, who had some close interest in the church of Philippi. It passed at once into the early canons of Scripture, and soon was quoted by church fathers like Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian.
English the older commentaries by Ellicott (5th edition, i888) and Lightfoot (6th edition, 1891) may be supplemented by H. A. A. Kennedy's in the Expositor's Greek Testament (1903) , M. R. Vincent's in The International Critical Commentary (1897), and a commentary on the English text by M. Jones (Westminster Commen taries, 1918). The latest German editions are by Lohmeyer (Gottingen, 1928), P. Ewald in Zahn's Commentar (1923), and M. Dibelius (in Lietzmann's Handbuch, 1913), but A. Klopper's (1893), Von Soden's (1903), and R. A. Lipsius's (Handcommentar, 1892) are by no means superseded. General studies of the epistle will be found in R. R. Smith's The Epistle of St. Paul's First Trial (1899), in Sir W. M. Ramsay's St. Paul the Traveller (chapters x. and xv.), and in Weiz sacker's Apostolic Age (vol. i. pp. 218f, 279f). Weizsacker dealt the deathblow to the older view that the epistle was non-Pauline, the last traces of which are to be found in van Manen's article in the Encyclo paedia Biblica (37031). (J. MoF.)