The Letter to the Colossians: Who, When, and Why?

[00:00:01] The Letter to the Colossians who, When, and why? [00:00:05] By Bart D. Ehrman read by John Paul Middlesworth now that I have summarized the major themes and emphases of Colossians, I can talk about who wrote it, when and why. [00:00:17] The book, as we have seen, claims to be written by Paul, but there are good reasons for doubting it. In a number of ways. This letter does look very much like those that Paul himself wrote. The prescript written in the names of both Paul and Timothy, the basic layout of the letter and the closing all sound like Paul, and a number of important Pauline themes are sounded the importance of suffering in this world, Jesus death as a reconciliation, and the participation of believers in Jesus death through baptism. [00:00:46] On these grounds, one might think that Paul may well have written this letter. There are, however, solid reasons for questioning Paul's authorship of this letter. [00:00:55] One of the most compelling arguments depends on a detailed knowledge of Greek, for the writing style of Colossians differs markedly from that found in Paul's undisputed letters. Whereas Paul tends to write in short, succinct sentences, the author of Colossians has a more complex, involved style. The difference is not easily conveyed in English translation, in part because the long, complicated Greek constructions have to be broken up into smaller sentences to avoid making them appear too convoluted. [00:01:23] Colossians 1, 3, 8, for example, consists of just one sentence in Greek. [00:01:29] The problem is not that this is bad or unacceptable Greek, but that Paul wrote in a different style, just as Charles Dickens and William Faulkner both wrote correct English, but in very different ways. [00:01:40] This kind of evidence has convinced a large number of linguistic specialists that Paul did not write the letter. [00:01:47] Far and away, the most compelling study of the writing style of Colossians was done by a German scholar named WALTER Bouillard nearly 40 years ago. Now, unfortunately, his book has never been translated into English. [00:01:59] For this kind of study, linguists look especially hard at stylistic features that most people don't think about much when they write for example, what kind of conjunctions they use, how often they use them, how often they use infinitives, participles, relative clauses, strings of genitives, and on and on scores of things. When Bouillard analyzed all sorts of stylistic features of the letter, he was particularly interested in comparing Colossians to letters of Paul that were similar in Galatians, Philippians, and First Thessalonians. [00:02:30] The differences between this letter and Paul's writings are striking and compelling. [00:02:35] To give you a how often does the letter use adversative conjunctions? Words like although Galatians 84 times Philippians 52 times First Thessalonians 29 but Colossians only 8. [00:02:52] How often does it use causal conjunctions? Conjunctions like because Galatians 45 times Philippians 21 Thessalonians 31 Colossians only 9 how often does it use a conjunction to introduce a statement that or as etc. Galatians 20 times Philippians 191 Thessalonians 11 but Colossians only 3 Boular's lists go on for many pages, looking at all sorts of information, with innumerable considerations all pointing in the same direction. This is someone with a different writing style from Paul's. [00:03:33] Other arguments can be more readily evaluated just from the English text. The most striking is one that you may have already surmised. [00:03:41] This author believes that Christians have participated with Christ not only in his death but also in his resurrection. [00:03:49] He is in fact quite emphatic on this critical point. Believers have already been raised with Christ in the heavenly places to enjoy the full benefits of salvation. [00:03:59] Colossians 2:12 3:1 Paul himself, however, is equally emphatic. [00:04:06] Even though Christians have died with Christ in their baptism, they have not yet been raised with him, and they will not be raised with him until the very end when Christ returns. [00:04:17] Not only does Paul stress this point in his most explicit discussion of a baptized person's participation with Christ in his death in Romans 6, he also argues precisely this point against his opponents in Corinth, who claimed to have already experienced the resurrection and so to be ruling with Christ. [00:04:35] How is it that Paul, in his undisputed letters, can be so emphatic that believers have not yet experienced the resurrection with Christ, whereas the author of Colossians can be equally emphatic that they have. [00:04:47] It is certainly possible that Paul changed his mind either because he genuinely thought better of it later, although this seems unlikely given his vehemence on the point, or because, when attacking a different heresy, he had to take a different approach, either consciously misrepresenting his views or forgetting what he had earlier said. [00:05:07] It seems more plausible, however, that Paul went to his grave believing and consistently insisting that Christians had not yet been raised with Christ. [00:05:17] If so, it is hard to accept that he wrote the letter to the Colossians. [00:05:21] Who wrote the letter of Colossians? If Paul did not, we will never know, but he must have been a member of one of Paul's churches who saw the apostle as an ultimate authority figure. This person wrote a fictitious letter to deal with a real problem of false teaching, as described in my previous post that he had come to know about, possibly within his own congregation. [00:05:43] It may well be that this unknown author had access to one or more of Paul's other letters, including almost certainly the letter to Philemon, since the same names appear in the greetings of the two letters. [00:05:55] Using these other letters as models, he penned an authoritative denunciation of a false philosophy that had begun to spread, putting this pseudonymous writing into circulation as an authentic letter of the Apostle Paul. [00:06:08] We cannot assign an exact date to the letter, but it appears to have been written after Paul's death, possibly toward the end of the first century.