Bibliotheca
Sacra 141 (April-June. 1984) 99-111.
Copyright © 1984 by
Colossian
Problems
Part 2:
The "Christ
Hymn"
of
Colossians 1:15-20
F. F. Bruce
Perhaps in Paul's mind there was not the same
measure of
urgency in the theological situation of the
Colossian church as
there had been some years before in that of the Galatian
churches. At any rate, in Colossians he does not
launch an attack
on the false teaching immediately after the
prescript, as he does
in Galatians. The fact that the
directly planted by him, as the churches of
that he was personally unacquainted with most of its
members
may also have something to do with his procedure.
However that
may be, before he undertakes a refutation of the
false teaching
which was being urged on the Colossian Christians, he
presents
them with a positive statement of the truth which
was being
challenged by the false teaching.
Hengel has recently drawn
attention to the important part
that hymns or Spirit-inspired songs played in
formulating the
doctrine of Christ in the primitive church, even
before the start of
the Pauline mission.1 The doctrine of
Christ was the principal
truth threatened by the false teaching at
doctrine Paul presents to his readers before
dealing specifically
with the false teaching. His presentation of the
doctrine of Christ
takes the form of the "Christ hymn" in
Colossians 1:15-20.
Do these six verses really contain a hymn?
Certainly one
cannot recognize here the established forms of either
Hebrew or
Greek poetry. What is here is
rhythmical prose, but it is rhyth-
mical prose with a strophic
arrangement such as is found in
99
100 Bibliotheca Sacra — April-June 1984
much early Christian hymnody. As with the
"Christ hymn" in
Philippians
2:6-11, it is not of the first importance to decide
whether Paul is composing the words de novo or reproducing an
inspired composition already known to him (and
possibly to his
readers) and stamping it with his apostolic
authority.
The strophic arrangement is indicated by the
repetition of
key words or phrases. There appear to be two
strophes — verses
15-16
and verses 18b-20 — with verses 17-18a supplying a tran-
sitional link between them. Each
strophe begins with o!j
e]stin
("He
who is") and exhibits the key words prwto<tokoj
("first-
born"),
o!ti
e]n au]t&?
("because in Him"), di ] au]tou?
("through Him"),
ta>
pa<nta ("all things"). The first and last
clauses of the transition-
al
link begin with kai>
au]to<j e]stin ("He indeed
is"), the first sum-
ming up the preceding
strophe and the last introducing the
following strophe.2
The First
Strophe (1:15-16)
He who is the image of the invisible God,
Firstborn before all creation,
because in Him all things were
created —
things in heaven and things on
earth,
things visible and invisible,
whether thrones or dominions,
whether principalities or
powers —
they have all been created
through Him and for Him (author's
translation).
This first strophe celebrates the role of Christ
in creation,
most probably in His character as the Wisdom of God.
This early
Christian
theme, which exercised a major influence on the
church's Christological thought, was not confined
to the Pauline
circle and probably did not originate in it. It finds
expression in
the prelude of Hebrews (Heb. 1:2b-3a), in the
prologue of the
Fourth Gospel (John 1:1-5), and in the
Apocalypse (Rev. 3:14).
Christ, then, is introduced as "the image
of the invisible
God." That He is "the image of God"
has been affirmed already by
Paul
(2 Cor. 4:4), in a context which appears to reflect
Paul's
conversion experience. Paul recognized the One
revealed to him
on the
in that same moment, recognize Him also as the
image of God?3
When
Ezekiel received his vision of God, he saw enthroned at the
heart of the rainbow-like brightness "a likeness
as it were of a
human form" (Ezek. 1:26). Paul had a similar
experience when
The "Christ Hymn" of
Colossians 1:15-20 101
he recognized "the glory of God in the face
of Christ" (2 Cor. 4:6).
He
is not merely echoing someone else's form of words here; he is
expressing what his own experience confirmed as
true.
To call Christ the image of God is to say that
in Him the being
and nature of God have been perfectly manifested —
that in Him
the invisible has become visible. In another letter
Paul had de-
clared that since the creation
of the world the "everlasting power
and divinity"4 of the unseen
Creator may be "clearly perceived in
the things that have been made" (Rom. 1:20).
But now an all-
surpassing disclosure of His "everlasting
power and divinity'' has
been granted. "The light of the gospel of the
glory of Christ" has
shone into His people's hearts through the same
creative Word
that first called light to shine forth out of
darkness (2 Cor. 4:4-6).
In addition to being the image of God, Christ is
said to be the
"Firstborn before all creation." This rendering is
designed to
clarify the force of the genitive phrase
"of all creation." To con-
strue the wording as though
He Himself were the first of all
created beings is to run counter to the context,
which insists that
He
is the One by whom the whole creation came into existence.
The
construction prwto<tokoj pa<shj kti<sewj is similar to that in
John
1:15, 30, where John the Baptist says of Jesus prw?to<j
mou
h#n, He was first in respect to me."5 In
Colossians 1:15
prwto<tokoj with the genitive has
the same force that prw?toj with
the genitive has in John 1:15, 30; it denotes not
only priority but
primacy.
The title "Firstborn" perhaps echoes
the language of Psalm
89:27,
where God says of the Davidic king, "I will make him the
firstborn, the highest of the kings of the
earth." But it belongs to
Christ
not only as the Son of David but also as the Wisdom of
God. In the wisdom literature of the Old Testament
wisdom is at
best the personification of a divine attribute or of
the holy law,
but when the New Testament writers speak of Wisdom
in person-
al terms, they consciously refer to One who is
alive, one whose
ministry on earth was still remembered by many.
To all those
writers, as to Paul, Christ was the personal
(not personified) and
incarnate Wisdom of God. They were not so much
arguing that
the personified wisdom of the Old Testament is
actually Christ as
they were testifying that Christ (who lived on earth
as Man, who
died and rose again, "whom God made our
wisdom" [1 Cor. 1:30])
is the One who was before all creation, the
preexistent Christ.
The idea of preexistence is not unknown in
Jewish thought.
It
is seen, for example, in later discussions about the Messiah6
102
Bibliotheca Sacra — April-June 1984
and in the preexistent Son of Man in the Parables
of Enoch.7 But
such preexistent beings were, to the minds of those
who dis-
cussed them, largely ideal. Here preexistence is
predicated of
Jesus
who had lived and died in
half-century. This is not the only
place in the Pauline letters
where the preexistence of Christ is stated or
implied, and Paul is
not the only New Testament writer to teach such a
truth.
Paul speaks of Christ not only as preexistent,
but also as
cosmic, that is, he finds in Christ "the key to
creation, declaring
that it is all there with Christ in view."8
Whatever other figures in
Jewish
literature may have preexistence ascribed to them, none
of them is credited with such cosmic activity and
significance as
are here predicated of the preexistent Christ. Paul
had already
used language of this kind; in 1 Corinthians 8:6 he
said that
Christians
acknowledge "one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom
are all things, and we through him." And in
Romans 8:19-21 he
showed how the redemption secured by Christ works not
only to
the advantage of its immediate beneficiaries,
"the sons of God,"
but through them to the whole creation.
Not only is Christ's primacy with regard to
creation asserted;
it is "in Him" that all things were
created. When the Revised
Version
appeared in 1881 with this rendering in place of the King
James
Version's "by Him," some critics, like B. W. Newton,
charged the revisers with encouraging the
"deadly" error of the
immanence of the Word in the world by thus
"reversing the
translation of their Protestant predecessors."9
But if
others had studied the matter a little further, they
might have
discovered
why Paul wrote e]n au]t&? here,
and why the revisers
translated the phrase "in Him." The
reason is that Christ is
identified with the beginning "in" which,
according to Genesis
1:1,
"God created the heavens and the earth."10 This is not mere
surmise; He is expressly called "the
beginning" in Colossians
1:18.
Perhaps one could say that here He is viewed as the sphere
within which the work of creation takes place, as in
Ephesians
1:4
the people of God are said to have been chosen "in Him" even
earlier, before the world's foundation. God's
creation, like His
election, is accomplished "in Christ"
and not apart from Him.
When the preposition is changed, and creation is
said to
have taken place "through him" (di ] au]tou?), as it is at the end
of
verse 16, He is denoted as the Agent by whom God
brought the
universe into being. This is in line with the
testimony of the
Epistle
to the Hebrews, which affirms that through the Son (di
]
The "Christ Hymn" of
Colossians 1:15-20 103
ou$) God made the worlds
(Heb. 1:2), and of the Fourth Gospel
which states that "all things came into being
through him
[through
the Logos, who is identified with the
Son), and apart
from him none of the things that exist came into
being" (John
1:3).
This is to be distinguished from
Philo's doctrine of the func-
tion of the logos in
creation. It is easy to see affinities between
Pauline
language and Stoic terminology, but Paul's thought is
derived not from Stoicism but from Genesis and
the Old Testa-
ment wisdom literature,
where wisdom is personified as the
Creator's assessor and master-workman. However, for Paul,
"master-workman"
is no longer a figure of speech but a descrip-
tion of the actual role of
the personal, preexistent Christ.
Thus Christ through whom the divine
work of redemption
has been accomplished (Col. 1:14) is the One
through whom the
divine act of creation 'was effected in the beginning.
His media-
torial relation to the created
universe provides a setting to the
plan of salvation which helps his people appreciate
the gospel all
the more. For those who have been redeemed by
Christ the uni-
verse has no ultimate terrors; they know that their
Redeemer is
also Creator — the Origin and Goal of all.
Probably with special reference to
the "Colossian heresy"
Paul
then emphasized that if all things were created by Christ,
then those powers for which such high claims were
made in that
heresy must have been created by Him. "Thrones,
principalities,
authorities, powers, and dominions" probably
represent the
highest orders of the spirit world, but the
variety of ways in which
the terms are combined in the New Testament warns
against
attempting to construct a fixed hierarchy from
them. The point
is that the most powerful angel princes, like the
rest of creation,
are subject to Christ as the One in whom, through
whom, and for
whom they were created.
The concept of Christ as the Goal of
creation plays an
tial part in Pauline
Christology and soteriology. To this concept
Jewish
parallels have been adduced; for example, the third-
century Rabbi Yohanan
offered the opinion that the world was
created with a view to Messiah.11 But
for Paul, Messiah had come;
He
is identical with Jesus who, not more than 30 years earlier,
had been crucified in
himself on the
standing of Paul's Christology which fails to
reckon with his
personal commitment to Jesus, crucified and
exalted, would be
104
Bibliotheca Sacra — April-June 1984
the kind of understanding that is dismissed in this
letter as
being "according to the elemental forces of the
world, and not
according to Christ" (Col. 2:8).
The
Transitional Link (1:17-18a)
He indeed is before all things,
and
they all cohere in Him;
He is also the head of the body, the
church (author's translation).
The teaching of the first strophe is
recapitulated in a twofold
reaffirmation of the preexistence and
cosmic significance of
Christ:
"He indeed is before all things, and they all cohere in
Him." The phrase "before all things"
sums up the essence of His
designation as "Firstborn before all
creation" and excludes any
possibility of interpreting that designation to mean
that He Him-
self is part of the created order (albeit the first
and chief part).
Since
the phrase pro> pa<ntwn occurs elsewhere in the
New Testa-
ment to denote priority in
importance, this denotation, as well as
the idea of priority in time, may well be present
here.
The statement "all things
cohere in Him" adds something to
what has been said about His agency in creation.
What has been
brought into being by Christ is maintained by
being in Him. The
best known parallel to this comes, as stated
earlier, in the prelude
of the Epistle to the Hebrews, where the Son is
not only the One
through whom the worlds were made but also the
One who
upholds all things by His almighty and enabling
Word (Heb.
1:2b-3a).
The Greek verb suni<sthmi
is found as a Platonic and
Stoic term. According to Philo, the material of the
human body
"coheres (sune<sthken) and is quickened as into flame by the provi-
dence of God."12
The Greek translator of Ben Sira, using a
synonymous verb, says that by the Word of God
"all things hold
together (su<gkeitai)" (Sir. 43:26). But to Paul the living Christ,
who died to redeem His people, is the Sustainer of
the universe
and the unifying Principle of its life.
Thus far the doctrine of Christ has
been set forth in terms
that Paul shares with other New Testament writers --
terms
which indeed may have belonged to a widely used
Christian
catechesis or confession, even if Paul stamped them
here with
the imprint of his own experience and thought. But
now he went
on to make a contribution to apostolic Christology
which is
distinctively his own. Christ, he
wrote, is also "the Head of the
body, the church."
The "Christ Hymn" of
Colossians 1:15-20 105
Those who believe that verses 15-20
constitute an already
existing hymn incorporated into the argument of
this letter con-
clude that "the
church" is a gloss added by Paul to make plain the
sense in which "the body" is to be
understood. This may be so.
But
it is also widely supposed that in the original form of the
hymn the body was the ko<smoj.13 Christ is certainly presented in
this letter as Ruler of the ko<smoj— as Head, in
particular, "of
every principality and power" (2:10). But when
"Head" and
"body" are used as correlative terms, as they are here
in 1:18a,
the physiological analogy is to the fore, and it is
not established
that the physiological analogy ever figured in
Christ's headship
over the ko<smoj.
Where the ko<smoj was viewed as a body, as in Stoicism, it is
animated by the divine world-soul and not by a
power function-
ing as head of the body.
And if it be maintained that the original
hymn was not only pre-Pauline but pre-Christian, and
that it was
the kosmokra<twr,
or the Gnostic redeemer, and not Christ, who
was originally presented as head of the body (the ko<smoj),14 one
would still ask for evidence that the head-body
relationship was
current in that realm of thought.
But if the identity of the church
with the body of which
Christ
is the Head is implied or expressed in the original hymn, is
Paul
then dependent on an existing composition (viz., this sup-
posedly pre-Pauline hymn) for
this insight? Whereas the por-
trayal of the church as the
body of Christ appears in his earlier
letters (cf. 1 Cor.
12:12-27;
as Head of the body is found first in Colossians
and Ephesians. It
seems unlikely to this author that this development
of Paul's
earlier thought first took shape in someone
else's mind. More
probably the hymn was composed within the circle
of the Pauline
churches, under the influence of Paul's own
teaching.
Another possibility has been
ventilated, however. Benoit
suggests that it was only the first strophe
celebrating Christ's
role as the creative Wisdom, that circulated
independently before
it was incorporated in this letter, and that the
second strophe
was constructed (by Paul himself?) on the model of
the first.15
Since
the transitional link, which leads from the first strophe
into the second, would have no point apart from
second strophe
it would have been constructed at the same time as
the second
strophe. This writer does not know if this
consideration has any
bearing on the presentation of these verses in
the 26th edition of
the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament, where verses 15-18a
106
Bibliotheca Sacra -- April-June 1984
(the first strophe plus the transitional link) are set as
poetry, but
verses 18b-20 (the second strophe) as prose.
This, however, is not the occasion
for entering further into
Paul's
doctrine of the church as the body of which Christ is the
Head,
apart from repeating what has been suggested from Patris-
tic times, that the seed may have been sown in his
mind when the
risen Lord addressed him on the
from heaven about the injuries being inflicted on
His body on
earth.16
The Second Strophe
(1:18b-20)
He is the beginning,
Firstborn from the dead,
that
He might be preeminent in all things,
because in
Him it was decreed that all the fullness should
take
up residence
and that
through Him, [God] should reconcile all things
to Himself,
having
made peace through the blood of His cross — [through
Him], whether those on
earth or those in heaven (author's
translation).
As the first strophe celebrates
Christ's role in the old crea-
tion, the second strophe
celebrates His role in the new creation,
especially with regard to His work of
reconciliation. In relation to
the old creation and the new He holds the rank of
"Firstborn."
The
new creation is the resurrection order; over it, as over the old
order, He is "the Beginning." He is not
only "the Beginning" in
whom heaven and earth were first created, but also
by His rising
from the dead He is proclaimed the One in whom men
and women
who died in the first Adam are "made
alive" (1 Cor. 15:22).
The risen Christ is Head of the body, which is the church.
His
resurrection marked His victory over all the forces that held
men and women in bondage. On that first Easter
morning He
brought new hope for humanity. Now Christ is
"the Firstborn
among many brethren" (Rom. 8:29); He is
"the Firstfruits of
those who have fallen asleep" (1 Cor. 15:20); His own resurrec-
tion is the harbinger of the
great forthcoming resurrection-
harvest of His people. He who has been
"designated Son of God in
power . . . by the resurrection of the dead"
(Rom.1:4) exercises
universal primacy; the divine purpose is thus
fulfilled "that He
should be preeminent in all things" (Col. 1:18).
The fact that the designation
"Firstborn from the dead"
appears independently in Revelation 1:5
(expanding the title
The "Christ Hymn" of
Colossians 1:15-20 107
"Firstborn" in a quotation from F's. 89:27)17
suggests that it may
have had a wider currency in first-century
Christianity. The
same consideration applies to the title "the
Beginning," which is
given to Christ at the beginning; of the letter to
the Laodicean
church in Revelation 3:14, in the fuller form
"the Beginning of
God's
creation" (probably by way of an allusion to wisdom's self-
introduction as "the beginning
of His way" in Prov. 8:22). Is there
further significance in the fact that the church
to which these
words were addressed was situated, like the Colossian
church, in
the
least it may be asked.
In the following words of the hymn
the statement that God
has decreed the preeminence of Christ over every
order of being,
both in this age and in the coming age, is repeated
in different
terms. These terms may have been calculated to appeal
with
peculiar force to the Colossian Christians in
their present situa-
tion. "In Him it was
decreed that all the fullness should take up
residence." The impersonal rendering "it
was decreed" has been
adopted provisionally. But the verb is not
impersonal: eu]do<khsen
means "decreed," "decided,"
"was well pleased," and implies a
subject. Who or what was well pleased? When the
good pleasure
is God's, there are analogies for the omission of
His name. For
example, "He was well pleased" could
mean "God was well
pleased" (as in the KJV: "It pleased
the Father that in Him should
all fullness dwell"). On the other hand, an
explicit subject for the
verb is offered in the clause itself; "the
fullness was well pleased to
take up residence in Him" (as in the RSV:
"in him all the fullness
of God was pleased to dwell"). It cannot be
decided with certainty
whether o[ qeo>j (understood) or pa?n
to> plh<rwma (expressed) is the
more probable subject. Benoit, for example, prefers o[ qeo>j;18 on
the other hand Kasemann
declares this construction to be "not
permissible19
(but on exegetical and theological, not on
grammatical, grounds).
Before which of the two
constructions can be considered the
more probable, the meaning of plh<rwma in this sentence must
be
examined and determined. So far as Paul's
intention is con-
cerned, its sense is scarcely
in doubt; it is repeated more fully in
Colossians
2:9: "It is in Him [i.e., Christ] that all the fullness of
deity dwells in bodily form." If, then,
Colossians 1:19 is con-
strued to mean that "in Him
all fullness of deity was well pleased
to take up residence" (the double aorist, eu]do<khsen and
katoikh?sai perhaps pointing to the
time of His resurrection or
108 Bibliotheca Sacra -- April-June 1984
exaltation),20 this is tantamount to saying
that God Himself, in all
His
fullness, was pleased to dwell in Him. No substantial
differ-
ence exists, then, in
meaning between the two constructions.
This is so, as has been stated
earlier, "so far as Paul's inten-
tion is concerned."
This leaves open the possibility that in the
original hymn, if it were an independently
existing composition,
the sentence had a different meaning from what has
been placed
on it by its being incorporated into the argument
of this letter.
But
one should ask for evidence that the original meaning was
different, before accepting that it was so; and
such evidence is
hard to obtain.
No doubt the word plh<rwma had a special sense (or
senses) in
Gnostic
terminology, but it does not follow that the present
occurrence originally bore that special sense (or
senses). The
word is used by Paul and other New Testament writers
in a
variety of senses. Conceivably it may have been
used in a techni-
cal sense by the false teachers at
allusion to that technical sense here; but
nothing can be estab-
lished as a matter of fact on
the bare ground of its being conceiv-
able. In the mid-second century the Valentinians used plh<rwma
to denote the totality of aeons
(divine entities or emanations),
and the word may have borne some such meaning in
incipient
forms of Gnosticism in the mid-first century. But it
is necessary
to insist no information on the Colossian heresy
is known apart
from inferences drawn as cautiously as possible from
the argu-
ment and wording of this
letter. It would make sense — one can
say no more than that — if the Colossian heresy
thought of a
hierarchy of powers among which the divine
fullness was distrib-
uted and which occupied the
intermediate realm between the
supreme God and the world of humanity. In that
situation, any
communication between God and the
world, in either direction,
would have had to pass through the spheres in which
those
powers exercised control. Those who thought in this
way would
see the point of treating such powers with due
respect. The
nature of the Colossian heresy is the subject of the
next article in
this series, but if it was anything like this, then
it is undermined
in one simple affirmation: the totality of the
divine essence and
power is resident in Christ. Christ is the One and
all-sufficient
Intermediary
between God and the world of humanity, and all the
attributes of God are disclosed in Him. There is no
good reason to
suppose that the hymn at any stage bore a
different meaning
from what it bears in the context of the Letter to
the Colossians.
The "Christ Hymn" of
Colossians 1:15-20 109
It was God's good pleasure,
moreover, to "reconcile all things
to Himself" through Christ. The fullness of
divine energy is man-
ifested in Him in the work of
reconciliation as well as in that of
creation. In the words that follow in Colossians
1 this reconciling
activity is applied particularly to redeemed
humanity, but first its
universal aspect comes into view. In
reconciliation as in creation
the work of Christ has a cosmic significance; it is
God's eternal
purpose (as stated in Eph. 1:10) that all things
should be sum-
med up in Him.
If "all things" (both in
heaven and on earth) were created
through Him, and yet "all things"
(whether on earth or in heaven)
are to be reconciled to God through Him, it follows
that "all
things" have been estranged from their Creator.
Paul had spoken
of the creation as involuntarily "subjected
to futility" but also as
destined to "be set free from its bondage to
decay and [to) obtain
the glorious liberty of the children of God"
(Rom. 8:20-21). Since
the liberty of the children of God is procured by
the redemptive
work of Christ, the release of creation from its
bondage to decay is
assured by that same redemptive work. That
earlier argument of
Paul's
is akin to his present one, but here not simply subjection
to futility but positive hostility is implied on
the part of the
created universe. The universe has been involved
in conflict with
its Creator, and needs to be reconciled to Him; the
conflict must
be replaced by peace. This peace has been effected by Christ,
through the shedding of His blood on the cross.
Even if Paul was not the first
author of these words about the
reconciliation of all things, his use
of them as part of his argu-
ment implies that he
understood them in accord with his general
teaching about reconciliation. It is difficult to
interpret his
teaching along the lines of anything like
universal reconciliation
as that phrase is commonly understood today. He
did not antici-
pate Origen in the view
that fallen angels benefit by the saving
work of Christ. Instead, Paul thought of the saving
work of Christ
as denuding hostile spiritual powers of all vitality
and potency.21
The peace effected
by the death of Christ may be freely
accepted, or it may be imposed. The
reconciliation of the uni-
verse spoken of here includes what would now be
distinguished
as pacification. The principalities and powers
whose downfall is
described in Colossians 2:15 are certainly not
depicted as gladly
surrendering to divine grace but as
being compelled to submit to
a power greater than their own. Everything in the
universe has
been made subject to Christ even as everything was
created for
110
Bibliotheca Sacra — April-June
1984
Him. By His reconciling work "the host of the
high ones on high"
and sinful human beings on earth have been
decisively subdued
to the will of God and must subserve
His purpose. As the parallel
Christ-hymn
of Philippians 2:6-11 indicates, the Father's good
pleasure is that all "in heaven and on earth
and under the earth"
shall unite to bow the knee at Jesus' name and
confess that He is
Lord.
As Hengel has pointed out, the hymn to Christ
"served as a
living medium for the progressive development of christological
thinking" in the earliest church, and it
also "created community
in the union of a]galli<asij in praise and spirit-filled didaskali<a;
indeed, the unity of the earthly and the heavenly
communities
became evident in the singing."22 Few
exercises can so effectively
promote the spirit of unity as joint celebration
of the person and
work of Christ.
Editor's Note
This is the second in a series of
four articles delivered by the author as the
W.
H.
ber 1-4, 1983.
Notes
1
Martin Hengel, Between
Jesus and Paul, trans. J. Bowden (
Press,
1983), pp. 78-96.
2
The strophic arrangement followed here is that suggested by Pierre Benoit,
"L'hymne christologique de Col 1,
15-20," in Christianity, Judaism and
Other Greco-Roman Cults, ed. Jacob Neusner, 4 vols. (Leiden: E. J.
Brill, 1975),
1:226-63.
3
See Seyoon Kim,
The Origin of Paul's Gospel (
mans Publishing Co., 1982), pp. 137-62.
4
With the qeio<thj
("divinity") revealed in creation maybe contrasted the ethnic
("deity") embodied in Christ (Col. 2:9).
5
A. W. Argyle compares the construction of the Septuagint in 2 Kingdoms 19:43
(not
found in the Hebrew of 2 Sam. 19:43): prwto<tokoj e]gw>
h} su>, "I was born
before you" ("prwto<tokoj pa<shj kti<sewj [Colossians
1:151," Expository Times
66
[1954-55], pp. 61-62).
6
An example is the messianic interpretation of Psalm 72:17 as "Before the
sun
his name was Yinnon"
(Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 98b).
7
See Maurice Casey, The Son of Man (London:
S.P.C.K., 1979), pp. 99-112.
8
Archibald M. Hunter, Interpreting Paul's
Gospel (London: SCM Press, 1954),
p. 60.
9
B. W.
Testament (London: Houlston, 1881), p. 65.
10
See C. F. Burney, "Christ as the APXH of Creation," Journal of Theological
Studies 27 (1925-26):160-77.
11
Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 98b.
12
Philo Who Is Heir of Divine Things?
58.
The "Christ
Hymn" of Colossians
111
13
See E. Schweizer, "Die Kirche
als Leib Christi in den paulnischen Anti-
legomena," Neotestamentica
(Zurich: Zwingli Verlag, 1963), pp. 293-316
14
See Ernst Kasemann, "A Primitive Christian
Baptismal Liturgy'' in Essays
on New Testament Themes (London: SCM Press, 1964), pp. 149-58.
15 Benoit, "L'hymne
christologique de Col 1, 15-20," pp. 248-50.
16
See Augustine Sermon 279.1.
17
The phrase in Revelation 1:5 is o[
prwto<tokoj tw?n nekrw?n as compared with
prwto<tokoj
e]k tw?n nekrw?n here, but the meaning
is the same.
18 Benoit, "L'hymne
christologique de Col 1, 15-20," p. 256.
19
Kasemann, "A Primitive Christian Baptismal
Liturgy," P. 158.
20
Probably katoikh<sai
should be construed as an ingressive aorist. It is not
questioned that God was in Christ before His
resurrection, but the risen Christ is
the subject of this second strophe.
21
Because of His saving work they have been rendered "weak and
beggarly"
(Gal.
4:9).
22
Hengel, Between
Jesus and Paul, pp. 95-96.
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