This name is given to the Epistles to the Philippians, Ephes- ians, Colossians, and Philemon, because they were composed during Paul’s first imprisonment at Rome. By a few critics they have been assigned to the period of the confinement at Caesarea.
Paul arrived in Rome, under guard, after his shipwreck at Malta, in March, a.p. 61, in the seventh year of the reign of Nero. He was placed in charge of the Praetorian Guard, the mem- bers of which relieved each other in his custody, each soldier being chained to his hand. This interruption of his missionary labors was a blessing in disguise. Twenty years of exhausting toil had brought the necessity for rest and meditation. The two years of confinement in Caesarea afforded the apostle the leisure for sinking his thought deeper into the mystery of the Gospel. The effect is apparent in the epistles from his Roman prison. Nothing in these, indeed, contradicts his previous writ- ings; the fundamental themes of the earlier epistles recur, and Philippians in particular exhibits marked parallels with Ro- mans. In all Christ is central. In Romans and in the Corin- thian epistles there are not wanting instances of the exalted feeling which is so marked in Ephesians, Colossians, and Phi-
lippians. The Judaizing insolence, castigated in Galatians, is sharply touched again in Philippians. The relations of Jew and Gentile reappear in Ephesians; and Christ’s headship of the Church, assumed in First Corinthians, is developed and em- phasized in Ephesians and Colossians.
Nevertheless, the Epistles of the Imprisonment carry us into a new atmosphere. The thought takes new directions and a wider range. The apostle’s personality appears in an aspect which it is not easy to analyze, but which carries with it the sense of a broadening and deepening of the whole man. In the discussion of christian truth the points of emphasis are shifted. In the earlier epistles he deals largely with unbeliev- ers, in the latter with Christians. In the one he is aiming to initiate union with Christ; in the other to develop communion. In the one he points Zo the cross, in the other from the cross to the inheritance of grace and glory which it commands. In the one he emphasizes Christ crucified, in the other Christ risen, ascended, and reigning. In all alike the cross is central, but in these latter epistles it is codrdinated with the vast economy of creation, redemption, the Church on earth and in heaven, as it lies entire in the eternal counsels of God. Here the person rather than the work of Christ is in the foreground: here, for the first time in the Pauline writings, the eye is distinctly fixed upon the pre-incarnate Son of God. While in the earlier groups of epistles the moral applications of doctrine are not overlooked, in these, the ethical element is more evenly balanced with the theological. In Philippians the ethical element dominates the theological. The great christological truths are translated into christian experience, and brought to bear as the principles and motives of duty. ‘No duty is too small to illustrate one or other of the principles which inspired the divinest acts of Christ. The commonest acts of humility and beneficence are to be imitations of the condescension which brought Him from the position of equality with God to the obedience of the cross; and the ruling motive of the love and kindness practised by Christians to one another is to be the recollection of their com- mon connection with Him.” *
* Stalker.
xxii INTRODUCTION.
A difference from the earlier epistles also develops through the new phase of error with which the apostle has to deal. Epaphras announced the appearance of a new enemy in the churches of the Lycus. The point of assault had begun to shift from legalism to philosophic mysticism. Legalism itself be- trayed the infusion of Essenic asceticism and Gnostic specula- tiveness. These were the forces which brought to the front the doctrines of Christ’s person and of the Church; the one as the bulwark against the fancy of mediate creation and the affected humility of angel-worship, and the other, in its exhibition of Christ as the head of the body of believers, contesting the claim of philosophy to be the supreme source of wisdom, and the right of legal ordinances to give the law to life.