Introduction

A Letter Written in Chains

Philippi was a city of Macedonia, founded by and named for Philip of Macedon, and by the apostolic age it stood under the metropolitan authority of Thessalonica. Theophylact opens his commentary by recalling how the church there began: Paul, scourged alongside Silas and shut up in prison, saw the jailer come to faith with his whole household after a single earthquake and a single sign—a beginning, Theophylact notes, that was “splendid” from the first, as the Acts of the Apostles record. The Philippians never forgot the debt. Years later, learning that their founder was again a prisoner, they sent him support through one of their own, Epaphroditus, both to relieve his needs and to learn how it stood with him.

Paul answers in a letter written, Theophylact says, from a second imprisonment—after the first defense Paul mentions in writing to Timothy—and it is one of several Epistles composed in bonds, a company that also includes Ephesians, Philemon, and Colossians. Theophylact finds nothing incidental in this. Writing to Philemon, Paul had called himself one “begotten in my chains”, and Theophylact takes the phrase as a lesson meant for every reader: hardship borne for Christ is not a thing to be merely endured but, rightly understood, an honor. The whole letter to the Philippians turns on exactly this point. Fearing that the news of his imprisonment would trouble a church that loved him, Paul writes to explain that chains borne for Christ’s sake are matter for joy, not grief, and the theme of joy sounds through the letter almost as a refrain.

The Hymn to the Self-Emptying Christ

At the center of the letter stands the passage for which it is best remembered, the description of Christ “who, being in the form of God, counted it not a thing to be grasped to be equal with God”, but “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant”, humbling himself to death, “even the death of the cross” (Phil. 2:6–8). No passage in the commentary draws a longer or more combative response from Theophylact, and none is more consequential for how the letter has been read ever since. He takes the verses as a roll call of the heresies they refute in turn—Marcion, who denied that God took real flesh; Paul of Samosata, who made Christ begin at Mary; Sabellius, who dissolved Father, Son, and Spirit into a single person; Apollinaris, who denied Christ a human mind—and above all the teaching of Arius, that the Son is a creature.

Against Arius in particular, Theophylact presses the wording itself. “The form of God” is not an appearance but an essence, exactly as “the form of a servant” that Christ took is a true human nature and not a costume; and the one who “emptied himself” did so as Lord, with authority over what was properly his own, not as a creature obeying a command from outside. The verse that a careless reading might take as diminishing Christ—that he was found obedient—Theophylact turns the other way: obedience given willingly, as a son honors a father he loves, is no mark of inferiority but of a genuine Sonship. And the self-emptying itself he reads as proof of divinity rather than its loss: only one who possesses a dignity by nature, and not by seizure, can lay it aside without fear of losing it and take it up again. The Son had no need to grasp at equality with the Father, Theophylact insists, because that equality was never something apart from him to begin with. Read this way, the hymn becomes not a description of the Word’s descent from divinity into something less, but of God’s own free condescension into the form of a servant—the standing Orthodox answer to any reading of the passage that would make the Incarnation a diminishment of Christ rather than his self-giving love.

Joy, Concord, and a Wary Eye on False Teachers

Paul offers the hymn to Christ, Theophylact observes, not as a detached point of doctrine but as the ground of a moral appeal: if this is what the Son of God did, who among the proud can still make an excuse for himself? The letter’s practical concerns follow directly from its Christology. Theophylact traces Paul’s counsel toward unity and humility among the Philippians, his warm and grateful acknowledgment of what they had sent him by Epaphroditus, and his sharp warning against a set of teachers—Judaizers pressing circumcision under the guise of the Gospel—whom Paul brands “dogs” and “evil workers”. Theophylact reads Paul’s tenderness toward the Philippians throughout as more than customary politeness: this was a church that had shown, from its first days in the book of Acts to its gift now sent to a prisoner, an unusual constancy in faith and in giving, and Paul writes to a congregation he plainly loves and honors.

How to Read This Commentary

Philippians is short, and Theophylact’s exposition moves briskly through most of it, phrase by phrase in his customary manner. But the reader should slow down at the hymn in the second chapter, where Theophylact’s terse, almost combative style—naming heresiarchs one after another and answering each from the wording of the text—rewards patient attention. It helps to know, on first approach, that when Theophylact says a heretic “falls” on a given phrase, he means that the plain sense of Paul’s Greek, taken seriously, leaves that reading nowhere to stand. Read in that spirit, the letter that begins as a prisoner’s thanks to a generous church becomes, at its center, one of the clearest expositions in the whole New Testament of who Christ is and what it cost him to become what we are.

Note on This Edition

This commentary is translated directly from the Greek text of Migne’s Patrologia Graeca, volume 124, where Theophylact’s exposition of Philippians is preserved among his commentaries on the Pauline Epistles. Scripture quoted within the commentary follows Theophylact’s own wording, which reflects the Byzantine text he knew, rather than any modern translation. The Greek terms he plays on in the original—most notably the verb rendered “emptied”, from which the theological term kenosis derives—are noted where the argument of the text depends on them.