Epistles to the Colossians and to Philemon, The

The Epistles to the Colossians and to Philemon. By James D. G. Dunn. NIGTC. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996, 388 pp., $32.00.

James D. G. Dunn, Lightfoot Professor of Divinity at the University of Durham, has provided the student of the NT with yet another standard commentary on Colossians and Philemon in that like others it includes introductory background materials and detailed verse-by-verse exegesis of the Greek text. What sets this commentary apart from others, however, is Dunn's ability to place these two letters in their cultural contexts by virtue of his thorough knowledge and mastery of that vast body of ancient literature, Jewish and Greek, both antecedent to and contemporary with the NT, his ability to detect parallels between these two bodies of literature, his ability to show how the one may possibly inform the other and his ability to articulate his understanding of important theological/Christological issues that run through the NT.

It is impossible to do justice to such a thorough piece of work in such a short space allotted, so I will confine my remarks primarily to Colossians and to three matters of interest pertaining to this letter: authorship, the "hymn" about Christ and the Colossian "heresy.'

Dunn places himself among those who hold to the "strong likelihood" that Colossians was written by someone other than Paul (p. 35). He does not base this conviction on vocabulary counts, sentence structure, etc., but on what he is confronted with as a commentator in his verse-by-verse study of the letter: its flow of thought, its rhetorical technique, its Christology (1:15-20), its ecclesiology (1:18 with 2:10), its eschatology (2:11-12) and its parenesis making use of "household rules" (3:18-4:1), each of which he considers "markedly" or "significantly" different from those of the undisputed Paulines. Yet it appears that Dunn is not entirely happy with this position, for from time to time he offers caveats such as, "it is possible that Paul's style changed over a few years" or "one could speak of the development of Paul's own thought" (pp. 35-36). Furthermore, the fact that throughout his commentary he uses expressions like, "it may be," "perhaps," "could," "may have been," "might imply," "seems to be," etc. (pp. 46, 47, 49, 55, 81 and passim), when he points to matters in the text that suggest another writer of Colossians than Paul, reveal still more clearly his discomfort at denying Pauline authorship outright. So it is not surprising that in the end Dunn speculates that although Timothy actually wrote Colossians, yet it was "for Paul at Paul's behest, [and] . . . with Paul's approval of what was in the event written (prior to adding 4:18)." In the end, then, he concludes that we must "call the letter 'Pauline' in the full sense of the word" (p. 38). Perhaps Dunn would have moved still closer to the traditional view of Pauline authorship had he made use of Marcus Barth's recent (1994) detailed commentary on Colossians, but I see no reference to such an important work anywhere in this volume.

Dunn's conclusions concerning the "early Christian hymn in which Christ is praised" (1:15-20) are not wholly convincing. Although he himself believes the hymn expresses an extraordinarily exalted Christology, a Christology that claims that nothing less than the highest possible terms of God's self-expression in and through Christ could be used to assess his person and work (p. 101), that claims that in Christ, in his life, "death and resurrection [is to be found] the key to resolving the disharmonies of nature and the inhumanities of humankind," yet Dunn at the same time seems to deny that this hymn makes any claim for the divine preexistence of Christ (p. 119) or for his incarnation (p. 102). Even if Dunn's thesis is acceptable that the "hymn"-writer took over the language of divine "Wisdom" (e.g. Ps 104:24; Prov 3:19) and used it to express the significance of the person of Christ, yet when one reflects on such statements in the hymn as "in/by [Christ] all things in heaven and on earth were created," "he himself is before all things," "he is the beginning," and "he made peace through the blood of his cross," i.e. "through his physical death," it seems incredible that Dunn would conclude that these statements permit no one to infer from them a full-blown doctrine of the preexistence/incarnation of the Christ, the Son of God's love (vv. 13-14).

For Dunn, the Colossian "philosophy," a term he prefers to that of "heresy," is best explained not as a syncretistic religion composed of a non-Jewish core (e.g. Phrygian folk belief) that gathered about it elements of Judaism and Christianity (contra C. E. Arnold, The Colossian Syncretism, 1995, p. 243), but rather as originating in and emanating from one of the Colossian synagogues. He comes to this conclusion as a result of his careful exegesis of the letter in which he shows, for example, that the thought expressed in 1:12, 21-22; 3:11-12 focuses on Jewish convenantal distinctives, and that the elements featured in 2:8-23 also fit easily within Judaism, though one tinged with apocalyptic and mystical features, a Judaism not wholly unlike that promoted in the Galatian churches. Into this context Dunn, drawing upon his wide knowledge of contemporary Jewish sources, is able to place and convincingly explain such enigmatic words and phrases as pleroma ("fullness," 2:9), ta stoicheia tou kosmou ("elemental forces/spirits of the universe," 1:19; 2:9), and the most difficult crux of all, the wellnigh untranslatable 2:18, with its mysterious phrases (literally translated), "willing in humility," "worship of angels," "what he has seen entering." In my judgment, Dunn has made his case: The likely origin of the Colossian church from within the synagogue, the undoubted presence of Israelite sectarianism within the Diaspora, the lack of other evidence of Jewish syncretism in Asia Minor and the eagerness of some Jews to promote their distinctive religious practices all require that one look no further than the Jewish synagogues in Colossae for the source of whatever influences threatened the young church there.