Smoodock's Blog

Worldviews are very important. Our sense of right and wrong comes from our worldview, as do our understanding of God and ourselves. Who is God? Who are we, and why are we here? Do we fulfill a purpose? What is good, and what is evil, and how do we know, and just as importantly, who gets to say? How one responds to these questions make up some of the building blocks of his or her worldview. Worldviews aren’t always true, but they are what we think or believe is true about ourselves, our world and about God.

Colossae was a small city in Phrygia in Asia Minor, whose importance, such as it might have been, lay in the fact that it was situated on a major trade route to and from the East. As a result, its original residents were joined by Greeks and Romans from the west and Jews and perhaps other ethnicities from the east. So, Colossae became a very diverse city with multiple religious and political traditions, both of which tend to color how one understands everything and everyone around him, including how he understands God.

According to Paul’s epistle, Epaphras, a citizen of Colossae (Colossians 4:12), was the person responsible for bringing the Christian faith to that city (Colossians 1:7). We aren’t told how Epaphras came to the Christian faith, but it is supposed by some scholars that he came by it through Paul during an assumed visit to Ephesus, while Paul taught there during his third missionary journey. If this is so, or a reasonable facsimile, it may be that Epaphras shared his newfound faith with a few friends and family at Colossae, and this began to spread, more or less, on its own, showing the power of Christ in the original mention of Jesus’ name by Epaphras.

Most scholars understand the reason for Paul’s epistle was to counteract the effect of false teachers who had come into the local church in Colossae. Nevertheless, I get the impression that the Colossian Christians were never really grounded in the faith before Paul’s epistle, in much the same way that folks today make a decision for Christ, without ever being discipled by a church leader, which would have helped them understand the important place Jesus is supposed to take in one’s life. Nevertheless, whatever might have been the true purpose of Paul’s epistle, this epistle does not take on anything near the tone of Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, where he accused the brethren there of going after another Gospel (Galatians 1:6-8).

In the matter of the Galatian epistle false teachers were responsible for the condition the church at Galatia had taken. Considering Paul’s milder tone in the Epistle to the Colossians, I have to wonder, if we could say in truth that the errors the Colossian believers embraced were actually due to false teachers, as is normally assumed. If we are not to look for ‘false teachers’ to account for the Colossian believers’ false understanding of Christ, how should we understand the reason for their coming to err to such a degree in the Gospel?

First of all, we don’t know what Epaphras understood as the pure, unadulterated Gospel of Christ. Folks only assume he learned it from Paul, but the text isn’t explicit. Considering what Paul claims later in chapter 2 of this epistle, Epaphras may have heard the Gospel during a pilgrimage to Jerusalem or a visit to a church during a business trip. It may be that Epaphras’ understanding of the Gospel was more legalistic than we believe, or this legalism may have come innocently through one of the brethren at Colossae, who adopted the idea that keeping the Law was necessary, while he was on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and brought that idea home. There may be another reason, but the point is, the problems pertaining to the church in Colossae don’t have to be due to visiting false teachers. In fact, considering the tone of Paul’s letter to the Galatians over the trouble false teachers caused there, I take the tone of his Epistle to the Colossians to mean the errors the believers there embraced came to them some other way.