New Testament · Paul's Letters
Christ over everything, firstborn of creation, fullness of God, your life hidden in him.
Written to a church Paul had never visited, facing a teaching that combined Jewish observance, angelic mediation, and ascetic rules in a mixture nobody has fully reconstructed. His answer is not to argue point by point but to make Christ so large that the alternatives shrink: the image of the invisible God, firstborn over creation, in whom all things hold together, and in whom the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily. The practical section that follows contains the letter's sharpest observation, that rules about handling and tasting and touching have an appearance of wisdom but are of no value against indulgence. This is also the letter that tells its readers to let no one judge them about a festival or a new moon or a sabbath.
If you remember one thing
The answer to every add-on gospel is the same: Christ is not a component of the answer, he is the whole of it.
“He is before all things, and in him all things are held together.”
Colossians 1:17
Colossians 1:15
Firstborn of all creation. Cited by Arians in the fourth century and answered then; the word denotes rank and priority rather than being made.
Colossians 2:16-17
Let nobody judge you about a festival or a sabbath. Central to how Christians relate to the appointed times, and read very differently by different traditions.
Named here rather than skipped. Where Christians read a passage differently, we say so instead of choosing for you.
Everyone here has a write-up, drawn from the same records that explain the names while you read the text.
He ran from his owner Philemon, met Paul in prison, became a believer, and was sent back carrying the letter that asked for him to be received no longer as a slave but as a beloved brother. His name means useful, and Paul makes a pun of it.
The names at the beginnings and ends of the letters, which most readers skip. They are the actual shape of the early church: a courier, a runaway slave, a treasurer of a city, a woman who hosted a congregation in her house, two women whose disagreement was serious enough to be named in a public letter.
A Pharisee trained under Gamaliel who persecuted the church until he was stopped on the road to Damascus. He then spent thirty years planting churches across the Roman world and writing the letters that make up roughly a third of the New Testament. He was a Roman citizen by birth, which is why he could appeal to Caesar.
A quiz for Colossians is on the workbench. In the meantime, the games for the judges, the kings, and the prophets are open.
