This weekend I start a 14 week Sunday school class on the book of Colossians. This is a class I’ve been looking forward to for a while. Somehow in my preparation, I missed the fact that Colossae was damaged and maybe destroyed by an earthquake in about 61AD. One person in the class asked about that and I said I didn’t think that was correct but I’d have to look into it. Doh. Forehead slapping moment. I’ll correct that on Sunday.

Anyway, as part of the introduction to the book I asked about the ‘Colossian Heresy’. That is, why was Paul writing to the church? Some have hypothesized that there was a growing heresy at Colossae and Paul was writing to correct it. They look to chapter 2 to find the nature of the error and see in it a Greek element and a Jewish element. The Greek part of the error involved philosophy and visions and angel worship and asceticism. The Jewish element involved circumcision and observing days and the law.

When the Nag Hammadi Library was discovered in the 1940s we suddenly had Gnostic documents and thereby access to an ancient Christian heresy in a way that we hadn’t for over a thousand years. Some scholars suddenly found Gnosticism everywhere from popular Christian culture to Colossians. The idea that the Colossian heresy was Gnosticism soon got challenged since Gnosticism didn’t bloom till about 150 and obviously Colossians is much earlier. Okay, so it isn’t Gnosticism, it is proto-Gnosticism. Well, that doesn’t really help that much because the Jewish elements of the Colossian heresy don’t fit in Gnosticism. So then the heresy became a “syncretic proto-Gnosticism with Judizing tendencies.”

What a mess. In first year Greek I did some work on Colossians and came across some scholarship that suggested that maybe there wasn’t a Colossian heresy. That got me thinking. First, Galatia embraced a heresy and Paul’s tone with them was sharp and to the point. “Paul, an apostle to the church at Galatia. Grace, etc. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?! Why have you so quickly abandoned the gospel?!” There is a section in Second Corinthians where the Greek is almost untranslatable. Paul is so angry it is just a string of words and you have to figure out what he’s saying. But you don’t get that with Colossians. If the Colossian church was on the verge of heresy, I would expect more spit and fire from Paul. Now, it could be argued that since he didn’t know this church he adopted a softer tone. I suppose, but that just doesn’t sound like Paul.

So what was going on? What would prompt the kind of firm but loving response from the Apostle? My theory is that Paul has only a cursory, second-hand understanding of the struggles of the Colossian church. But he knows what kind of problems other churches have faced when attempting to integrate Jews and Greeks. There had been a tendency toward legalism and Judiasm amongst the Jews so Paul talks about real, New Covenant circumcision and how the law related to Christ. Amongst the gentiles there was the draw of Greek philosophy with its own peculiarities and catchwords (like pleroma which he uses a few times in the letter.) So as this congregation of Jew and Gentile forms into the body of Christ, whatever their background, it all has to be understood in light of Jesus. Whatever the issue is, Jesus trumps it. Paul didn’t have to know exactly how the church was wrestling through her different issues to know what the answer was. ¹Since later Gnosticism was rooted in Greek philosophy it isn’t surprising that some of the issues at Colossea could appear Gnostic to us later on. The same basic philosophies are present but that doesn’t mean that Gnosticism was present at Colossea. It also excuses those who thought they’d found it there in my opinion.

See, the problem with fixing the Colossian error is that we can then strand it in the past. I mean how many evangelical churches are facing Judizing tendencies or are about to embrace Greek philosophy? Not many, some but not many. For most of us we can largely not see the message as applying to us. We’ll hip pocket it so that we can straighten out other folks. But what if there isn’t a specific error that’s being addressed? That might make the principle of Jesus’ supremacy that much more applicable to us. We don’t have to see it against Gnosticism to see how it might apply in our lives. If our tendency is toward legalism, Colossians has an answer. If your tendency is toward visions and mystic experience, Colossians applies.

Sure, even if there is a specific error we can still get the same principles, but I know for me tying it to a specific error rather than a tendency makes it that much harder for me to apply it to myself and my situation and my church. It makes it much easier to put it on the bookshelf and forget it.