Philippians 2:3–11 (Part 1 of 2)

Philippians 2:6–11 has long fascinated me. Its content is mind-and-heart-shaking, and Paul uses a form that focuses our attention sharply on what he says. It would have done so even more sharply for some of his contemporaries.

I’m not alone in my fascination. Commentaries say that more has been written about this passage than about any other in Paul’s letters. Philippians 2:6–11 feels for all the world like a poem, and in English translations is often set out like a poem. Is it a poem? Gordon Fee (1992; 1995:191–197) remarks that numerous attempts have been made to find poetic form in the Greek original, and thinks that the very lack of agreement among these attempts suggests that it is not a poem at all. Fee goes further, and shows that in several ways this is fairly typical Pauline prose. I don’t have the expertise to evaluate his claim, but Fee’s argument seems well founded and I trust his scholarship.

I don’t think this is the end of the story. The passage is unquestionably poetic. If it is prose, it is poetic prose. It is also an amazingly compact piece of theology. Reading around Philippians 2:6–11 (and I have read only a tiny percentage of what has been written about it) I came across a (to my mind) erudite paper by Martin & Nash (2015). They had studied the rhetoric textbooks of Paul’s time that instructed the reader in how to write each genre of Greek prose or poetry. They found a genre of which this passage is an example, namely the hymnos. Now, Greek hymnos is the word from which English hymn is derived, but a hymnos was not a hymn. It didn’t have the rhyme or rhythm of a hymn, because it was not written to be sung but to be spoken,  declaimed. A hymnos was a prose composition praising the person to whom it would be presented. It was composed of a number of topoi (loosely ‘topics’), and Martin & Nash match  Philippians 2:6–11 to the topoi of a Hellenic hymnos, as follows:¹

Martin & Nash call this a ’subversive hymnos’, a hymnos that startled the reader by upending their expectations. Conventionally the origin section should show either the subject’s high birth or his success in escaping the effects of humble birth. The highest-born was the Emperor, who was descended from a god. Paul shocks his readers both ways: Jesus wasn’t just a descendant of a god—he was God—and instead of rising from lowly birth, Jesus gave up his divinity to become a slave—the lowest of the low in Roman society. What an extraordinary thing for God to do . . .

All this was aimed at members of the Philippian church who came from a distinctly Roman background. Unlike other cities Paul visited, Philippi was a Roman colony established for ex-officers of the Roman army, and the emperor cult must have been strong there. When we reach the virtues section, Paul confronts us with an utterly un-Roman virtue: ‘he humbled himself’. Some of Paul’s readers in Philippi must have wondered what was God thinking of. The hymnos was also politically subversive.

As for Jesus’ glorious deeds on the battlefield, he became ‘obedient to the point of death, even death on the cross’, the cruelest, most humiliating manner of death that Rome had devised, and maybe some of his earliest readers had supervised a crucifixion or two.

Only when it comes to posthumous events does Paul let up, but only to go for broke in the opposite direction. Roman emperors, it was claimed, became gods, but they came nowhere near the names and titles that Paul attributes to Jesus. The final statement is shocking to Romans and Jews alike (recall that Paul was both). Every knee will bow to Jesus and confess him as Lord—this places him above the Emperor! For a Jew, though, the sticking point was that God bestowed upon Jesus ‘the name that is above every name’, that is, Yahweh, God’s own Hebrew name, translated in the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament used by many diaspora Jews) as kurios ‘Lord’—and there it is in verse 1: ‘Jesus Christ is Lord 
to the glory of God the father’. In the Greek, kurios ‘Lord’ is placed emphatically at the beginning of the clause. A little clumsily, one might translate it as ‘Lord/God is what Jesus Christ is …’.²  And as if there were any doubt, when Paul says that every knee will bow to Jesus and confess him as Lord, he is using the language that God uses of himself in Isaiah 45:23 when he insists that only he is God, not the idols some of the Judahites have fashioned. So Jesus was and is the perfect expression of God.

This post is titled Philippians 2:3–11 (not 6–11). Why? Because, mindblowingly, Paul uses the whole hymnos as a model for our behaviour: ‘[v3]… in humility value others above yourselves, [v4] …not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of others. [v5] …In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus, [v6] …who … [v7] …made himself nothing….’ and then ‘[v8] …humbled himself by becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross.’ What a challenge!

The challenge here is so absolute that some scholars have suggested that Paul didn’t mean it to apply to Jesus’ followers , but verses 3–11 of chapter 3 make it very clear that he did.

(The second part of this post is here.)

References

Fee, Gordon D., 1992. Philippians 2:5–11: Hymn or exalted Pauline prose?’. Bulletin for Biblical Research 2:29–46.

—-, 1995. Paul’s Letter to the Philippians. Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans. (The New International Commentary on the New Testament)

Martin, Michael Wade & Bryan A. Nash, 2015. Philippians 2:6–11 as subversive hymnos: A study in the light of ancient rhetorical theory. The Journal of Theological Studies, NS 66:90–138