Introduction

A Church Paul Never Saw

Colossae was a town in the Lycus valley of Asia Minor, and, as Theophylact points out at the very start of his commentary, Paul had never set foot in it. The church there had been planted by Paul’s own disciple Epaphras, and Theophylact places the letter among the group Paul wrote from prison—alongside Ephesians, Philemon, and Philippians—sent, like the letters to the Romans and the Hebrews, to believers the Apostle knew only through report. What moved him to write, Theophylact explains, was a teaching that had taken root at Colossae “like a naturalized citizen”: certain Colossians had come to suppose that access to God the Father was mediated not through the Son directly but through angels, on the assumption that a Son appearing so late in the world’s history must be a lesser way to God than the angelic mediators through whom, they thought, the Old Covenant itself had come. Alongside this ran a fondness for Jewish and pagan observances—the watching of days, seasons, and foods—and it was this whole tangle, Theophylact says, that “moved the Apostle to write”.

Answering a Wisdom That Bypasses Christ

Theophylact does not treat the Colossian error as a fully formed system needing point-by-point refutation. Instead he reads Paul as attacking its single root: any claim to reach God apart from Christ. Whatever the false teachers promised through their angelic mediators and their ascetic observances, Paul answers, the Colossians already possess in Christ, and possess more fully and more directly. Theophylact traces the letter’s plan accordingly: an opening greeting, a doctrinal exposition of the surpassing majesty of Christ that runs through the middle chapters, and a closing section of moral counsel on the new life that follows from that doctrine. The theology, in other words, is not decoration—it is the argument. If Christ is who Paul says he is, no other mediator is needed or even conceivable.

The Firstborn of All Creation

The letter’s doctrinal center, and the passage that has occupied commentators most, is Paul’s description of Christ as “the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation” (Col. 1:15). Theophylact reads both halves of the phrase with exacting care. “Image”, he insists, cannot mean a mere likeness that falls short of its original, the way a human portrait falls short of its subject; where the maker is God, the image differs from what it images in nothing at all, and Scripture reserves the title precisely for the Son, never for the angels, however exalted they are. “Firstborn of all creation” draws his sharpest attention, because—as he says outright—it is the verse Arian readers seized on to argue that the Son is simply the first and greatest of God’s creatures. Theophylact answers from the word itself: Paul did not write “first-created,” and a firstborn son is not made from some other substance than the father who begets him. To call the Son “firstborn” rather than “first-created” is to place him, Theophylact argues, on the side of the begetter, not the begotten things—a distinction he presses further by noting that Scripture itself, without hesitation, calls Seth an image of Adam, and no one doubts that father and son share one nature. The conclusion Theophylact draws is direct: the Son is not the first of creatures but is himself, with the Father, uncreated.

The New Life That Follows

From this height, Theophylact shows, Paul turns the doctrine toward daily life. Because the Colossians already have, in Christ, everything the false teachers promised through angels and ascetic rules, they are called to “seek the things that are above, where Christ is sitting at the right hand of God” (Col. 3:1)—not a summons to leave the world physically, Theophylact is careful to note, but to reorder its loves and its conduct around Christ. The moral counsel that fills the letter’s second half—on putting off the old self, on compassion and forbearance, on conduct within the household—follows from the doctrine rather than standing apart from it. A reader who has understood the argument about Christ’s person, Theophylact implies, will find the ethical demands of the closing chapters not as an added burden but as the natural consequence of what has already been established.

How to Read This Commentary

Colossians is brief, but its central chapter has carried weight far beyond its length, shaping how later generations spoke of Christ’s eternal relation to the Father. A reader coming to Theophylact’s exposition of that chapter for the first time will find him naming heresies by name and answering them from the exact wording Paul chose, in a manner more combative than his usual even pace elsewhere in the letter—that shift in register marks the passage as the letter’s hinge. Read Colossians as Theophylact reads it: not as an antiquarian dispute among vanished sects, but as the enduring case that nothing—no philosophy, no angelic hierarchy, no ascetic program—can supplement what is already complete in Christ.