An Atheist Explores the Bible Part 225: Beware of the Dog, and Don’t Edit Stuff (Philippians 1-4)

Philippians 1-4
Beware of the Dog, and Don’t Edit Stuff.

Welcome to another instalment of An Atheist Explores Sacred Texts (Bible version).

In this series I work my way chapter-by-chapter through the King James Bible, commenting on it from the point of view of the text as literature and mythology.

For more detail, see the introductory post http://bit.ly/2F8f9JT

For the online KJV I use, see here http://bit.ly/2m0zVUP

And now:

Philippians 1

“For God is my record, how greatly I long after you all in the bowels of Jesus Christ.”

Another epistle, with roughly half of the chapter being formulaic greetings from Paul and Timotheus to the Philippians, quite warm and friendly for Paul’s standards, with no immediate chiding about listening to false teachers or falling into heathen ways.

The latter half, Paul delves deeply into some confusing metaphorical use of “Christ” as something akin to the Holy Spirit – “so now also Christ shall be magnified in my body, whether it be by life, or by death”. Paul also goes into a bit of a Hamlet-esque soliloquy about wanting to be with Christ, or to stay and help the Philippians and other Christians – “For I am in a strait betwixt two, having a desire to depart, and to be with Christ; which is far better”. This highlights a bit of a paradox for Christianity; if believers think that the afterlife is going to better than this one, where they will be “with God” for eternity, why bother living? Hence the addition of a strong proscription against taking one’s own life to prevent anyone committing suicide in order to meet God. Paul decides that “to abide in the flesh is more needful for you.”

Philippians 2

“If there be therefore any consolation in Christ, if any comfort of love, if any fellowship of the Spirit, if any bowels and mercies”

What’s with the obsession with bowels? Was Paul suffering from a stomach disorder when he wrote this one?

Anyway, Paul starts by reminding the Philippians to look after each other – “Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves” and then there’s some discussion concerning the nature of Jesus Christ.

This reminds me of something that I meant to mention earlier – that throughout the epistles so far Paul has referred to “Christ” moreso than he does Jesus; here he kind of expands on what I was suspecting from previous epistles, that the man “Jesus” became the man-god “Christ” (which is, after all, an honorific, the Anointed One) only when He goes through the crucifixion.

Which is consistent with other year-king style myths; the god is sacrificed in the form of a man in order to release it as a god; the transfiguration of a man to man-god, or man-god to pure god, needs to happen under some kind of ritual, usually involving sacrifice.

So, it seems to me, that to Paul the “Christ”, seen as the route or pathfinder to some form of afterlife, or rebirth, is the spiritual entity whereas Jesus is the physical entity – “And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name.” Recall that Jesus himself, in the gospels, only ever proclaims to be the “Son of God”, and that only a few times, and recall that at the time I mused that perhaps He only meant as a kind of obedient servant, or creation (or both), and not as a literal spiritual being (except, perhaps, towards the Palm Sunday end of things when He seems to have bought fully into the idea of being the Messiah and that His death and resurrection were a certainty).

Which is a lot to say for a chapter that is mainly about mechanics, about how Timotheus will be visiting the Philippians and how Epaphroditus was going to but he was ill, but might come later.

Philippians 3

“Beware of dogs, beware of evil workers, beware of the concision”

I had to look up concision – it means shortening a statement by cutting out unnecessary words, which doesn’t seem like much of a crime to me. I know I could do with it frequently. The rest of the chapter is mainly Paul saying how much he has sacrificed in the name of his religion (“for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ”) and how it’s all worth it, but also I detect a hint of sanctimony. Paul speaks of equality amongst the Christians – it doesn’t matter, he says, if he has suffered, nor does it matter if some are more righteous than others – “Let us therefore, as many as be perfect, be thus minded: and if in any thing ye be otherwise minded, God shall reveal even this unto you”. As long as you are a Christian you are better than all those non-Christians – “Whose end is destruction, whose God is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame, who mind earthly things”. Take that, non-believers/believers in the wrong thing. Again with the stomach metaphors though.

Philippians 4

“I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound: every where and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need”

Paul states how his faith sustains him, and we learn at the end that the letter is being sent from Rome, including greetings from the “saints” of “Caesar’s Household”, suggesting that Paul is a “guest” of the Emperor in some form, and not necessarily a voluntary one. I haven’t commented yet on how Paul uses the term “saints” for his fellow believers and not “Christians” – this latter was only used, so far, in Acts, as I recall.

Anyway, Paul likes the Philippians because they asked after him. Not like those stanky Thessalonikans –“no church communicated with me as concerning giving and receiving, but ye only”. Oh, and lastly, Paul gives brief testimonials for fellow believers, including “And I intreat thee also, true yokefellow, help those women which laboured with me in the gospel”. Wait – women helping with the gospel? So this again seems to fly in the face of the rather sudden and incongruent recommendations that women should remain silent and not teach the gospels.

And that’s it for Philippians. It feels equivalent to some of the lesser prophets in the old testament. There, the minor prophets like Micah and Zachariah just repeated the same old fire and brimstone stuff of Jeremiah and Isaiah. I can recall nothing unique to either of those two, only Jonah and Daniel have any interesting events of note. This is similar in that there is nothing concerning early Christian belief that isn’t already discussed in previous epistles. Which is what happens when you think concision is an evil thing, I guess.