First Conclusion: Call to Rejoice
“With this communication about Epaphroditus now the epistle seems to be at an end” (Ewald, ad loc.). If so, nothing remains but a final word of greeting. The reader is therefore prepared for Finally.
3:1 Finally: the natural inference from this phrase (drawn by most commentators) is that Paul is on the point of finishing his letter. If the letter be regarded as a unity, it must be assumed that something suddenly occurred to him which prompted the warning of verse 2 with its sequel.
The exhortation to rejoice is expressed in a word (Gk. chairete) which is also a common form of greeting: “hail” or (less often) “farewell.” The language here, Finally, my brothers, rejoice … (Gk. to loipon, adelphoi mou, chairete …), is very similar to that in 2 Corinthians 13:11 (Gk. loipon, adelphoi, chairete), where the sense is certainly “Finally, brothers, good-bye.” The main reason for not taking the present words in the same sense lies in the added phrase in the Lord (Gk. en kyriō; cf. 4:4). Rejoice in the Lord echoes an exhortation repeated in the Psalms (cf. Pss. 32:11; 33:1). The people of God rejoice in him because he is their “exceeding joy” (Ps. 43:4); cf. Rom. 5:11, “we … rejoice in God.” It is not necessary to give “in the Lord” its incorporative sense here.
The question now arises: what are the same things that Paul has written before and does not mind writing to you again? The reference might be to the exhortation to rejoice given already in 2:18 (cf. also 1:25; 2:28, 29), but it is difficult to see how a repeated exhortation to rejoice would be a safeguard for the Philippians. G. B. Caird explains that joy “is a safeguard against the utilitarian attitude which judges people and things wholly by the use that can be made of them” (ad loc.). On the other hand, F. W. Beare (ad loc.), regarding 3:2–4:1 as part of another Pauline letter that has been editorially interpolated between 3:1 and 4:2, takes the reference here to be Paul’s call for unity, already voiced in general terms in 2:1–4 and now about to be repeated with respect to two named individuals in 4:2. Yet another possibility is that the second half of 3:1 goes closely with the warning of 3:2 and refers to a similar warning given in an earlier letter, now lost (cf. J. H. Michael, ad loc.). On the whole, in spite of some difficulty, it seems best to understand the same things as the call for joy in 2:18 and elsewhere.
Additional Notes
3:1 In The New Testament: An American Translation the first clause is rendered: “Now, my brothers, good-bye, and the Lord be with you”; cf. E. J. Goodspeed, Problems of New Testament Translation, pp. 174, 175. “The Lord be with you” is an excessively free rendering of en kyriō “in the Lord.”
On the significance of Finally and the relevance of the same things, see (in addition to the commentaries and NT introductions) W. Schmithals, Paul and the Gnostics, pp. 71–74; he treats 3:2–4:3 and 4:8, 9 as part of a separate Pauline letter and argues against the division of v. 1 so as to relate its second sentence to what immediately follows, as suggested by R. A. Lipsius, F. Haupt, and P. Ewald (ad loc.).
It is a safeguard for you: lit., “for you it is safe” (Gk. asphales). V. P. Furnish (“The Place and Purpose of Philippians iii,” NTS 10 [1963–64], pp. 80–88) argues that the adjective asphalēs (not found elsewhere in Paul) means here “specific” or “dependable” (as in Acts 25:26) and (unconvincingly) that “to write the same things” (ta auta graphein) means “to give the same admonitions in writing as Timothy and Epaphroditus have been instructed to give you orally” (not, as in NIV, to write the same things to you again).
The words emoi men ouk oknēron, hymin de asphales (“not irksome for me, and safe for you”) may well form an iambic trimeter (quoted by Paul from some source or other), even if a purist would object to the caesura in the penultimate spondaic foot, as violating the “law of the final cretic.”
Warning Against “Workers of Iniquity”
After “Finally” in verse 1, it comes as a surprise to find this warning which, together with the later warning of verses 18 and 19, forms a substantial part of the letter in its present form. It is by way of contrast with those against whom the warnings are given that Paul sets forth his own procedure and purpose in life (vv. 7–14).
3:2 Who now are those men who do evil, the dogs against whom Paul puts his readers on their guard? They are certainly identical with the mutilators of the flesh (all three expressions denote the same people), and these last words provide the surest clue to their identity. In the original they represent a single noun, devised by Paul as a derogatory wordplay on “circumcision” (Gk. peritomē) and rendered in older English versions as “concision” (Gk. katatomē). Paul sometimes uses the word “circumcision” as a collective noun, as when Peter is called an apostle “to the circumcision,” meaning, as NIV puts it, “to the Jews” (Gal. 2:7–9). Here the word “concision” is similarly used, of those mutilators of the flesh—“the mutilation party,” we might say.
For Paul, circumcision is a sacral term, applied not only in its literal sense but also to the purification and dedication of the heart. There is OT precedent for this in Deuteronomy 10:16 (“Circumcise your hearts”) and Jeremiah 4:4 (“circumcise your hearts”), where emphasis is laid on the circumcision of the heart as what God really desires. Paul’s older contemporary, Philo of Alexandria, agrees that circumcision signifies “the cutting away of pleasure and all passions and the destruction of impious glory,” but disagrees with those who maintain that the external rite may be discontinued if the spiritual lesson is practiced (Migration of Abraham. 92). Here, therefore, Paul applies to those who insist on the external rite a disparaging parody of the sacral word—a parody that links literal circumcision with those pagan cuttings of the body that were forbidden by the law of Israel (Lev. 19:28; 21:5; Deut. 14:1; cf. 1 Kings 18:28).
But it is not to Jews in general that he refers here so scathingly, nor yet to those Jewish Christians who may have continued to circumcise their sons in accordance with ancestral custom. The people against whom Gentile Christians needed to be put on their guard, and whom Paul elsewhere denounces in the same kind of unsparing terms as he uses here, are those who visited Gentile churches and insisted that circumcision was an indispensable condition of their being justified in God’s sight. This insistence was conceivably part of a campaign to bring Paul’s Gentile converts under the control of the mother church in Jerusalem. Paul was certainly at pains to emphasize his converts’ independence of Jerusalem; but his basic objection was that the insistence on circumcision undermined the gospel that proclaimed that God in his grace justified Jews and Gentiles alike on the ground of faith in Christ, quite apart from circumcision or any other legal requirement. The Judaizers, then, are the mutilators of the flesh—“the Snippers,” as H. W. Montefiore aptly translates the dismissive term.
In calling them those men who do evil, Paul may be echoing the phrase “workers of iniquity” (NIV: “all who do wrong,” “all you who do evil”) which some of the OT psalmists used to describe their enemies (cf. Pss. 5:5; 6:8; etc.); he refers to the same class of interlopers in 2 Corinthians 11:13 as “deceitful workmen.” To his mind, they were doing the devil’s work by subverting the faith of Gentile believers. In calling them dogs, he was perhaps throwing back at them a term of invective by which they described uncircumcised Gentiles; it was all the more apt if he pictured them as prowling round the Gentile churches trying to win members to their own outlook and way of life.
It is not implied that such people had already made their way into the fellowship of the Philippian Christians, but it was quite likely that they would attempt the same tactics in Philippi as they had used in Corinth (cf. 2 Cor. 11:4–6, 12–15, 20), and the Philippian Christians are forewarned against them.
3:3 For it is we, says Paul, who are the circumcision: (another instance of “circumcision” as a collective noun). True circumcision, “the circumcision done by Christ” (Col. 2:11), is a matter of inward purification and consecration. Those who are the circumcision render to God true heart devotion: they worship him by the Spirit of God. This is the teaching conveyed by Jesus to the Samaritan woman: “God is Spirit, and his worshippers must worship in spirit and in truth” (John 4:24). Such people glory in Christ Jesus—more literally, they “boast in Christ Jesus”; he is the object of their exultation (there is no need to give the phrase “in Christ Jesus” its incorporative force here). More than once Paul quotes Jeremiah 9:24 in the form “Let him who boasts, boast in the Lord” (1 Cor. 1:31; 2 Cor. 10:17). He probably alludes to the same text here: for Paul, “the Lord” is Christ Jesus.
The flesh is henceforth irrelevant. Physical circumcision has been replaced by the circumcision of the heart which is “by the Spirit, not by the written code” (Rom. 2:29). The word rendered flesh (Gk. sarx) is used by Paul not only in its ordinary sense but also to denote unregenerate human nature and sometimes to include practically everything, apart from God, in which people mistakenly put their trust.
Additional Notes
3:2 “It will always appear extraordinary,” wrote H. J. Holtzmann, “that the letter actually first finds its center at the very point where it seems to be moving towards the end” (Einleitung in das Neue Testament, p. 301). The abrupt transition to a note of warning has been variously explained—by changing impressions affecting Paul’s attitude as he dictated the letter (R. A. Lipsius, ad loc.), by a belated stimulus from Timothy (P. Ewald, ad loc.), by a fresh report that had just reached Paul (J. B. Lightfoot, Philippians, p. 69).
Watch out is the rendering of Gk. blepete, which is similarly used in warning in several NT passages; cf. Mark 4:24; 8:15; 12:38; 13:5, 9; 1 Cor. 8:9; Gal. 5:15; Col. 2:8; etc. It can, of course, mean simply “look at,” “pay attention to” (cf G. D. Kilpatrick, “Blepete Philippians 3:2,” in M. Black and G. Fohrer, eds., In Memoriam Paul Kahle, pp. 146–48), but in the present context a more urgent sense is indicated.
Dogs were regarded as unclean animals (cf. Rev. 22:15) because they were not particular about what they ate. J. B. Lightfoot (ad loc.) quotes Clem. Hom. 2.19, where (with reference to Matt. 15:26) Gentiles are said to be called dogs because their habits in the matter of food and conduct are so different from those of the Israelites.
The idea that the mutilators of the flesh are Jews who have no commitment to the Christian faith (cf. E. Lohmeyer, ad loc.) may be ruled out because Paul does not use such opprobrious language in speaking of his own natural kinsfolk; moreover, there does not seem to have been any substantial Jewish community in Philippi (see pp. 4–5). As for the view of W. Schmithals (Paul and the Gnostics, pp. 65–91) that they were Jewish-Christian Gnostics, hē katatomē would have been a most imprecise and misleading way of designating such people. As with so many other features of Schmithals’s interpretation, Gnosticism has to be read into Phil. 3:2 in order to be read out of it.
3:3 We who worship by the Spirit of God: Gk. hoi pneumati theou latreuontes, for which there is a rather less well attested variant hoi pneumati theō latreuontes (so KJV: “which worship God in the spirit”).
Paul’s Former Code of Values
When Paul claims that he could put up a better record “in the flesh” than most people, if he still attached any importance to this sort of thing (which he does not), he means not only external ceremonies but a wide range of heritage, endowment, and achievement. The contemplation of this wide range once filled him with deep satisfaction, but this is no longer so.
3:4 If an orthodox pedigree and upbringing, followed by high personal attainment in the religious and moral realm, ensured a good standing in the presence of God (as was implied by the people against whom Paul’s warning is directed), Paul need fear no competition. There is a close affinity between his words here and 2 Corinthians 11:21ff., where (“speaking as a fool”) he lists things in which he might boast, if boasting were appropriate, and then dismisses the idea of boasting in such things as utter madness. This suggests that the opponents whom he now has in view are of the same order as those whom he castigates in 2 Corinthians 11:12–15, and it would be easy to believe that the present warning was written about the same time as 2 Corinthians 10–13. Even if such people had not yet infiltrated the church of Philippi, they might well try to do so. It is not so certain as W. Schmithals thinks (Paul and the Gnostics, p. 73) that Paul’s language reflects an attempt already made to undermine his authority in the eyes of the Philippians.
3:5 Paul now lists seven things which at one time would have given him confidence before God.
Circumcised on the eighth day, as every male Israelite child had to be, according to the terms of God’s covenant with Abraham (Gen. 17:12). He was a Jew by birth, not a proselyte from paganism who would have been circumcised at the time of his conversion.
Of the people of Israel. Having been born into the chosen race and admitted into the covenant community by circumcision, he inherited all the privileges that belonged to that community—privileges he enumerates in Romans 9:4, 5.
Of the tribe of Benjamin. Paul evidently attached some importance to his membership of this tribe; he mentions it also in Romans 11:1. Benjamin was the only son of Jacob born in the holy land (Gen. 35:16–18). When the Davidic monarchy was disrupted after Solomon’s death, the tribe of Benjamin, situated on the northern frontier of Judah, was retained as part of the southern kingdom. After the return from the Babylonian exile there were resettlements in Jerusalem and the surrounding territory of members of the tribe of Benjamin (Neh. 11:7–9, 31–36). From some of these Paul’s family may have traced its descent. His parents may have given him the name Saul (cf. Acts 7:58; 13:9; etc.) after Israel’s first king, the most illustrious member of the tribe of Benjamin in Hebrew history.
A Hebrew of Hebrews (Hebrew son of Hebrew parents). This implies something more than his being “an Israelite by birth,” as in 2 Corinthians 11:22, where he says of his opponents, “Are they Hebrews? So am I. Are they Israelites? So am I.” “Hebrews” in the special sense (as probably in Acts 6:1) were Jews who normally spoke Aramaic with one another and attended synagogues where the service was said in Hebrew (as distinct from Hellenists, who spoke only Greek). According to Luke, Paul heard the heavenly voice on the Damascus road address him in Hebrew (Acts 26:14) and could address a hostile Jerusalem crowd impromptu in Hebrew (Acts 21:40; 22:2); in both these places “Hebrew” may be used in a wider sense to include Aramaic. Unlike many Jews of the dispersion, Paul’s family apparently avoided as far as possible assimilation to the culture of their Tarsian environment.
In regard to the law, a Pharisee. The party of the Pharisees made special conscience of keeping the Jewish law in minute detail, although all members of the covenant community were under an obligation to keep it. The Pharisees, who first appear in history late in the second century B.C., seem to have been the spiritual heirs of the Hasidaeans or pious groups who played a noble part in defense of their ancestral religion when Antiochus Epiphanes (175–164 B.C.) set himself to abolish it (cf. 1 Macc. 2:42; 7:14; 2 Macc. 14:6). At an earlier date those pious groups receive honorable mention in Malachi 3:16–4:3; their devotion to the divine law is illustrated by Psalm 119.
The term Pharisees means “separated ones”; it has been variously explained, but among those so designated it probably emphasized their separation from everything that might convey ethical or ceremonial impurity. They built up a body of oral tradition which was designed to adapt the ancient precepts of the written law to the changing situations of later days and thus safeguard their principles against being dismissed as obsolete or impracticable. In this they were distinguished from their chief rivals, the Sadducees, who maintained the authority of the written law alone and who also rejected the Pharisees’ belief in the resurrection of the dead and in the existence of orders of angels and demons (cf. Acts 23:8). They banded themselves together in local fellowships. Josephus, who claims to have regulated his own life by Pharisaic rule from the age of nineteen, reckons that there were some six thousand Pharisees in his day (Ant. 17.42).
Paul’s membership in the party of the Pharisees is attested by Luke, who reports him as saying that “under Gamaliel (the leading Pharisee of his day [cf. Acts 5:34]), I was thoroughly trained” (Acts 22:3), as telling the younger Agrippa that “according to the strictest sect of our religion, I lived as a Pharisee” (Acts 26:5), and as claiming before the Sanhedrin to be “a Pharisee, the son of Pharisees” (Acts 23:6), implying that he was not the first member of his family to be associated with the party or (less probably) that he was the pupil of Pharisees.
As for zeal, …: zeal for God was an honorable tradition in Israel, and at this period was not confined to the party of militant nationalists who came to be known as the Zealots. The precedent for godly zeal had been set by Phinehas (Num. 25:7–13; Ps. 106:30, 31), Elijah (1 Kings 19:10, 14) and Mattathias, father of Judas Maccabaeus (1 Macc. 2:24–28). Paul describes himself in Galatians 1:13, 14, as having been “extremely zealous for the traditions of my fathers,” more so than most of his youthful contemporaries, and provides supreme evidence of that devotion or zeal by the ruthlessness with which he “persecuted the church of God and tried to destroy it.” If in 1 Corinthians 15:9 (cf. 1 Tim. 1:13, 14) his persecution of the church, viewed from a later Christian perspective, was the sin of all sins, rendering him quite unworthy of the grace that yet called him to be an apostle; nevertheless when he was actively engaged in the work of persecution he regarded it as his most acceptable service to God. When in Romans 10:2 he describes his fellow Israelites as “zealous for God,” adding that “their zeal is not based on knowledge,” he is drawing a pen portrait of the man he himself once was, endeavoring by his persecuting zeal to set up his own way of getting right with God.
In fact, as for legalistic righteousness, he says, I was faultless. This is Paul’s Christian assessment of his pre-Christian attainment, made from the perspective of nearly thirty years of apostolic ministry. No Jew could have achieved more in devotion to his ancestral heritage. The parents of John the Baptist are commended because of their “observing all the Lord’s commandments and regulations blamelessly” (Luke 1:6). High commendation indeed, and Paul also had earned it. To gain such commendation was once his ambition, but now the great reversal of accepted values had altered everything.
With Paul’s attainment may be compared that of the rich man who assured Jesus that he had kept all the commandments of God since his boyhood (Mark 10:20) or, more relevantly, Paul’s own claim before the Sanhedrin to have maintained a good conscience before God his whole life long (Acts 23:1; cf. 24:16). To conform with the righteousness required by the law called for infinite painstaking, but (as Paul had proved) it was not impossible. He made the grade, only to discover that it did him no good.
Additional Notes
3:4 The twofold I (I myself have reasons … I have more [reasons] …) is emphatic (Gk. egō). Cf. the repeated “So am I” (Gk. kagō=kai egō) of 2 Corinthians 11:22. W. Schmithals thinks Paul is defending himself against Gnostics who represent him as a mere man of flesh, lacking the Christ spirit, and therefore no apostle of Christ but at best an apostle of men (Paul and the Gnostics, pp. 90, 91). There is nothing in the text to support this. He is rather defending himself against Judaizers who try to diminish his status in order to exalt their own superior authority.
3:5 Of the tribe of Benjamin. It is one of the “undesigned coincidences” between Acts and the Pauline letters that only in the latter do we read that Paul belonged to the tribe of Benjamin and only in the former do we read that his Jewish name was Saul. Early Christian writers traced a connection between Paul’s persecuting zeal and the words about Benjamin in Jacob’s blessing of his sons (Gen. 49:27): “Benjamin is a ravenous wolf; in the morning he devours the prey, in the evening he divides the plunder” (cf. Hippolytus, On the Blessing of Jacob, ad loc.; cf. ANF 5, p. 168).
A Hebrew of Hebrews: on Hebrews and Hellenists see C. F. D. Moule, “Once More, Who Were the Hellenists?” ExpT 70 (1958–59), pp. 100–102; F. F. Bruce, Paul: Apostle of the Free Spirit, pp. 42, 43.
In regard to the law. lit., “according to law” (Gk. kata nomon). The omission of the definite article before “law” is common in Paul; it may reflect the Jewish tendency to treat the corresponding Hebrew word tōrāh almost as a proper noun, and therefore not requiring the article, when the law of Moses is meant.
A Pharisee: on the Pharisees see Josephus, War 2.162–66; Ant. 18.12–15. “Pharisees” most probably represents Aram. perîshayyâ, Heb. perûshîm, “separated ones” (especially in a moral sense). For the Hebrew word cf. a later rabbinical commentary, Leviticus Rabba, where the injunction, “Be holy because I, the LORD your God, am holy” (Lev. 19:2) is amplified: “As I am holy, so you also must be holy; as I am separate, so you also must be separate [perûshîm].” The Pharisees were particularly scrupulous is observing the Jewish food laws and the rules about tithing. They tithed garden herbs as well as grain, wine, and olives (cf. Matt. 23:23; Luke 11:42), and avoided eating food that was subject to tithing unless they were sure that the tithe had been paid on it. See W. D. Davies, Paul and Rabbinic Judaism; E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism; and E. Rivkin, A Hidden Revolution.
3:6 In Gal. 1:14 Paul calls himself a zealot (Gk. zēlōtēs) for the ancestral traditions; in Acts 22:3 he tells a Jewish audience in Jerusalem that, before his conversion, he “was just as zealous for God as any of you are today”; in Acts 21:20 the elders of the Jerusalem church tell Paul that all its members are zealots for the law. In none of these places is the noun used in its party sense (as it is, perhaps, in Luke 6:15; Acts 1:13). The party of the Zealots shared the principles of the Pharisees, but insisted in addition that it was impermissible for Jews living in the holy land to pay taxes to a pagan ruler (like the Roman emperor).
Paul’s Present Code of Values
What Paul formerly regarded as achievement he now acknowledges to have been failure. What he would formerly have regarded as worthless and indeed pernicious he now recognizes to be the only achievement worth pursuing—the personal knowledge of Jesus as Lord, sharing the experience of his death and resurrection.
3:7 It was but reasonable to take pride, as Paul once did, in such a catalogue of merit. If a reader suspects that Paul still feels some pride in being able to present such a record of past achievement, all such suspicion is swept away by what Paul now says: whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ—that is, for the sake of gaining Christ. From the credit side of the ledger they have been transferred to the debit side; they are not merely seen to be valueless and irrelevant, but he would be better off without them. Perhaps the very recollection of such attainments could now be harmful if it carried with it the temptation to put some confidence in them again. Christ alone must be the object of Paul’s confidence, and for the sake of Christ all these former objects of confidence have lost the value they once had. Paul had learned that, in spite of them all, his only ground of acceptance before God was ground that he shared with the rawest convert from paganism: faith in Christ. He does not deny that it was a great privilege to have been born a Jew and have access to the oracles of God (Rom. 3:1, 2); he does deny that one can rely on such a privilege as a basis of divine approval.
3:8 In truth, not only Paul’s personal heritage and achievement but everything in the world has been transvalued by Christ. So surpassing was the greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord that, by comparison with it, everything else was not merely valueless but had negative value. Whatever existed outside of Christ and the gospel that he had commissioned Paul to make known throughout the world was a dead loss, the sort of thing to be lost or thrown away, like so much rubbish, the merest street-sweepings. When he entered the service of Christ on the Damascus road, that meant the renunciation of all that he had chiefly prized up to that moment; it was a renunciation well worth making.
The knowledge of God was of paramount value in the eyes of the great prophets of Israel (cf. Hos. 6:6); for Paul the knowledge of God was supremely mediated through Christ, and in being so mediated it was immensely enriched. “Knowledge” (Gk. gnōsis) was a current term in the religious and philosophical vocabulary of Paul’s day; the “knowledge” that was widely sought and esteemed was partly intellectual, partly mystical. Some forms of the current cultivation of “knowledge” developed into the systems of thought that appear in the second century under the general designation of “Gnosticism.” Such “knowledge” was pursued in the Corinthian church, and Paul was not impressed by it: “Knowledge,” he said, “puffs up, but love builds up” (1 Cor. 8:1). A community was helped to grow to maturity much more by love of God and love of one’s fellows than by the pursuit of knowledge. Knowing Christ Jesus my Lord is personal knowledge: it includes the experience of being loved by him and loving him in return—and loving, for his sake, all those for whom he died. It is not certain that here, as in his Corinthian correspondence, Paul is contrasting this personal knowing of Christ with inferior forms of knowledge: he is assuredly emphasizing that it is the only form of knowledge worth having, a knowledge so transcendent in value that it compensates for the loss of everything else.
To know Christ and to gain Christ are two ways of expressing the same ambition. If Christ is the one “in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col. 2:3), to know him means to have access to those treasures; but to know him for his own sake is what matters to Paul most of all.
Paul had never known the earthly Jesus. If, during Jesus’ ministry, Paul had learned anything about his teaching and activities, he would have disapproved. After Jesus’ arrest and execution, Paul thought of him with repulsion as one on whom, by the very nature of his death, the curse of God rested: “Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree” (Gal. 3:13). Those who proclaimed such a person to be the Lord’s anointed, as the disciples of Jesus did, were blasphemers; the well-being of Israel demanded their extinction. And, quite apart from Paul’s antipathy to all that Jesus stood for, how can one enjoy a personal relationship with someone who has died and whom one never knew?
When God chose, on the Damascus road, to reveal his Son to Paul, the Son of God at the same time introduced himself to Paul: “I am Jesus,” he said. Immediately Paul was captivated by him and became his bondslave for life. “What shall I do, Lord?” he asked him, and his whole subsequent career was one of obedience to the answer that his question drew forth (Acts 22:7–10). In that moment Paul knew himself to be loved by the Son of God who, as he was to say, “loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20). For him henceforth the “first and great commandment,” to love the LORD his God, was honored in his love for Christ, the image of God: “the man who loves God is known by God” (1 Cor. 8:3). A relationship of mutual knowledge and love was established there and then between the apostle on earth and his exalted Lord, and to explore the fullness of this relationship was from now on Paul’s inexhaustible joy. For him, in short, life was Christ—to love Christ, to know Christ, to gain Christ: “Christ is the way, and Christ the prize.”
3:9 To gain Christ means to be found in him, to enjoy faith-union with him (and therefore also with the rest of his people); compare NEB: “for the sake of … finding myself incorporate in him.” Paul was intensely aware and appreciative of his one-to-one relationship with the risen Christ, but it was not an exclusive relationship: “I knew that Christ had given me birth / To brother all the souls on earth” (John Masefield, “The Everlasting Mercy”). He was already “in Christ” but here he speaks of his ambition to be found in him. The aorist tense of the verbs “gain” and “be found” suggests that he is again looking forward to the day of Christ. But his ambition to be found in him on that great day can be realized only if he is continuously and progressively living in union with him during this mortal existence, and to this end Paul gladly jettisons everything else, including his formerly prized righteousness … that comes from the law.
The man who had attained full marks in competing for legal righteousness now threw that righteousness overboard, for he had found a better kind. What good had legal righteousness done him after all? It had not saved him from the sin of persecuting the followers of Christ. Anyone who sought legal righteousness could no doubt claim it as his own, but it was fatal to imagine that such a righteousness, which was inevitably self-righteousness, could establish a claim on God.
But with the better righteousness—that which is through faith in Christ—there is no question of establishing a claim on God; it is God himself who gives this righteousness. It comes from God and is by faith. Faith in Christ is the means by which sinners appropriate it; they are “justified by faith in Christ, and not by observing the law” (Gal. 2:16). It is good to do what the law requires, but that is not the way to receive the righteousness that God bestows. Paul’s trusted foundation of legal righteousness collapsed beneath his feet on the Damascus road, when he suddenly saw himself to be the chief of sinners; but in that same instant he received through faith in the Son of God the new and durable foundation of righteousness freely bestowed by God’s grace. Now, and forever after, he knew himself to be accepted by God for Christ’s sake.
3:10 I want to know Christ: once more Paul states his ambition. He had lived with the knowledge of Christ for many years, but he found in Christ an inexhaustible fullness; there was always more of him to know. So much was this knowledge a matter of interpersonal union that to know Christ meant to experience the power of his resurrection. If the love of God is supremely demonstrated in the death of Christ (Rom. 5:8), his power is supremely demonstrated in the resurrection of Christ, and those who are united by faith with the risen Christ have this power imparted to them. “That power is like the working of his mighty strength, which he exerted in Christ when he raised him from the dead” (Eph. 1:19, 20); it is the power which, among other things, enables the believer to ignore the dictates or enticements of sin and to lead a life of holiness which pleases God.
If, on one plane, Paul shared the power of Christ’s risen life, on another plane he shared his sufferings. To suffer for Christ, he has said already (1:29), is a privilege; moreover, to suffer for him is to suffer with him. “The sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives” (2 Cor. 1:5), he says in the letter that perhaps more than any other discloses this aspect of Paul’s apostleship. In Paul’s eyes, the sufferings he endured for Christ’s sake in the course of his apostolic service represented his share in the sufferings of Christ, and to accept them as such transfigured and glorified them. It was also his hope that, by absorbing as many of these afflictions as possible in his own person, he would “fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions” (Col. 1:24) and leave less for his fellow Christians to endure. Thus he might make some personal recompense for the zeal with which he had once made the people of Christ suffer and so persecuted Christ himself (cf. Acts 9:4, 5). Nor does he show any spirit of self-pity in speaking thus: it was an honor to share in the sufferings of Christ and so to enter into closer personal fellowship with him.
Becoming like Christ in his death was for Paul partly self-identification with Christ crucified, partly a matter of daily experience, partly an anticipation of bodily death, which would more probably than not take the form of martyrdom for Christ’s sake (as in the event it did).
So far as self-identification with Christ is concerned, the dying with Christ enacted in baptism at the outset of Paul’s Christian career (Rom. 6:2–11) was no make-believe; it exercised a decisive influence on him from then on: “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me” (Gal. 2:19, 20).
So far as daily experience was concerned, Paul could say, “I die every day!” (1 Cor. 15:31). He could speak of “carry[ing] around in our body the death [or rather the ‘dying’] of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body” (2 Cor. 4:10). And if he should one day face the executioner for Jesus’ sake, that would crown his likeness to Christ in his death. Death, and especially such a death as that, would (as he has said in 1:21) be sheer gain for one to whom life meant Christ.
There were no doubt some people in the Gentile churches (not necessarily in the church of Philippi) who viewed Paul’s hardships, including his present imprisonment, as a sign that he had not yet reached that stage of spiritual perfection that they themselves claimed to have attained (cf. 1 Cor. 4:8). Paul views them quite differently: they are for him the indispensable conditions of identification with Christ in glory: “If indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory” (Rom. 8:17).
3:11 Experiencing the power of Christ’s resurrection here and now was not a substitute for looking forward to the resurrection of the body, as some of Paul’s Corinthian converts appear to have thought (1 Cor. 15:12). Christ’s resurrection, the power of which was imparted to his people even in their present mortal life, involved the hope for those who died believing in him “that the one who raised the Lord Jesus from the dead will also raise us with Jesus” (2 Cor. 4:14). Paul will return to this later (vv. 20, 21). Here he speaks personally: if one who faced death daily for Christ’s sake was liable to end mortal life as a martyr for him, so one who experienced the power of his resurrection day by day could look forward with certainty to sharing his resurrection after death. The hope which Paul implies (and so, somehow, to attain …) is no uncertain hope for him, but one that is sure and well-founded. If his language implies any uncertainty—“if only I may finally arrive at the resurrection from the dead” (NEB)—it may lie in Paul’s belief that, even at this late stage in his career, he might not pass through death after all but still be alive at the coming of Christ. But all the signs pointed to his having to undergo death, and a violent death in all probability. His assurance, however, was that if “Christ has indeed been raised from the dead,” he is “the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep” (1 Cor. 15:20). “We know,” he says in 2 Corinthians 5:1, “that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands.”
The NIV rendering, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead, brings out the clear implication of Paul’s wording: that the resurrection of believers is a resurrection that brings them out of the realm where the rest of the dead are.
Additional Notes
3:7 I now consider: Gk. hēgēmai (perfect); the reference is not particularly to his conversion experience, as it would be if the aorist hēgēsamēn had been used. (In v. 8 I consider represents the present hēgoumai.)
Paul’s language here is different from the adaptation of the book-keeping terminology of profit and loss occasionally found elsewhere. Cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 5.4.13, where justice is said to be the mean between profit and loss (no one gets more or less than is due); also Pirqe Abot 2.1, where Rabbi Judah the Prince (ca. A.D. 200) is credited with the precept: “Reckon the loss incurred by the fulfillment of a commandment against the reward secured by its observance, and the gain acquired by a transgression against the loss it involves.”
3:8 What is more: Gk. alla menounge kai (“Yes indeed; I even …”). Gk. alla kai is reinforced by the compound particle (men, oun, and ge), which emphasizes its progressive sense (cf. M. E. Thrall, Greek Particles in the New Testament, pp. 15, 16).
F. W. Beare (ad loc.) has a helpful discussion of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. Paul’s language here cannot be accounted for in terms either of the Hebraic or of the Hellenic background of gnōsis: rather, he makes “a new, creative fusion of the Hellenic with the Hebraic, which issues in a distinctively Christian synthesis far richer than either, though it is the heir of both.” In this synthesis, it should be added, the most important element was the personal knowledge of Christ that Paul had already gained; he expands its significance in v. 10. See R. Bultmann, TDNT, vol. 1, pp. 689–714, s.v. “ginōskō,” “gnōsis” etc.; J. Dupont, Gnosis; La connaissance religieuse dans les épîtres de saint Paul; B. E. Gartner, “The Pauline and Johannine Idea of ‘to know God’ against the Hellenistic Background,” NTS 14 (1967–68), pp. 209–31.
I have lost all things: Gk. ta panta ezēmiōthēn (passive), lit., “I have been fined everything”; “I have been deprived of all that I have,” which may imply such penalization or disinheritance as he had suffered because of his commitment to Christ as well as his willing renunciation of all for Christ’s sake.
3:9 To be found in him: Gk. hina … heurethō. For the use of the passive of heuriskein as a surrogate for the verb “to be” or “to become” cf. 2:7. See also E. D. Burton, The Epistle to the Galatians, p. 125 (in a note on Gal. 2:17). If it be asked at what time Paul hopes to be found in Christ, the answer may be “on the day of Christ”; but he knows that he will be found in Christ then only if he lives in Christ now.
The righteousness that comes from God is “God’s way of putting people right with himself” (Rom. 3:21)—a right relationship with God received by divine grace and not achieved from the law. It is through faith in Christ: Gk. dia pisteōs Christou, where NIV is certainly right in treating Christou as objective genitive, although some wish to treat it as subjective genitive and render the phrase, “through Christ’s faithfulness” (cf. Rom. 3:22, 26; Gal. 2:16). See J. A. Ziesler, The Meaning of Righteousness in Paul; F. F. Bruce, The Epistle to the Galatians, pp. 138–40 (in a note on Gal. 2:16).
3:10 I want to know Christ: Gk. tou gnōnai auton, “in order to know him,” where the aorist infinitive follows the precedent of the aorists kerdēsō (I may gain) and heurethō (“I may be found”) in vv. 8, 9. It is with the knowledge of Christ to be experienced in this life that Paul is here concerned (as in v. 8, knowing Christ Jesus my Lord). It is pointless to say that “Paul undoubtedly borrows from the Gnostics in describing the gnōsis Christou lēsou as a distinctive mark of the Christian” when it is conceded, almost in the same breath, that the content of vv. 8–11 “is very different from Gnosticism” since “Paul is not describing individual experiences but the character of Christian existence in general” (R. Bultmann, TDNT, vol. 1, pp. 710, 711, s.v. “ginōskō, “gnōsis,” etc.). It might be, as W. Schmithals says, that Paul here “sets the true knowledge of Jesus Christ in opposition to the ‘contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge’ ” (Paul and the Gnostics, p. 92), if it were clear that Paul had in mind proponents of such a rival gnōsis (see notes on vv. 18, 19 below).
On Paul’s desire for sharing in Christ’s sufferings see B. M. Ahern. “The Fellowship of His Sufferings (Phil 3:10),” CBQ 22 (1960), pp. 1–32; also H. Seesemann, Der Begriff KOINŌNIA im Neuen Testament.
3:11 And so, somehow: Gk. ei pōs, “if perhaps,” “if by any means,” introducing a clause of purpose where the attainment of the purpose is not altogether within the subject’s power; cf. Acts 27:12, of the sailors’ hope of making Phoenix and spending the winter there; Rom. 1:10, of Paul’s prayer that it may be possible for him at last to visit Rome; 11:14, of his hope to promote the salvation of his fellow Jews by moving them to covet a share in the gospel blessings so much enjoyed by Gentile believers. See BDF, §375.
The noun exanastasis, “resurrection,” is unparalleled in NT; the addition of the prefix ex- before the regular form anastasis (used, e.g., in v. 10) reinforces the significance of the preposition ek in the following phrase ek nekrōn, “out from among dead ones,” and emphasizes that the end-time bodily resurrection of the just is in view, not simply a present spiritual resurrection. It “is intended unmistakably to convey the realism of the resurrection from among the physically dead, but it makes sense only if it is distinguished from another interpretation” (J. Gnilka, ad loc.)—the other interpretation being presumably that against which Paul makes a full statement of the doctrine of resurrection in 1 Cor. 15. Again, this may be so; we cannot be sure.
