Colossae. Ancient city in Asia Minor, located in the southwestern part of present-day Turkey, and remembered primarily for the apostle Paul’s letter to the church there (Col 1:2). Colossae was near the Lycus River, a tributary of the Meander. The city flourished during the 6th century bc. According to Herodotus, an ancient Greek historian, when the Persian king Xerxes came to Colossae, it was a city of great size. Another Greek historian, Xenophon, related that Cyrus the Great, founder of the Persian empire, had passed Colossae still earlier on his way to Greece.
Colossae, the city to which tradition says Paul wrote Colossians.
Colossae was situated in the region known as Phrygia and was a trading center at a crossroads on the main highway from Ephesus to the east. In Roman times relocation of the road leading north to Pergamum brought about both the growth of Laodicea, a city 10 miles away, and Colossae’s gradual decline. Colossae and Laodicea shared in the wool trade. Thus the name Colossae was derived from a Latin name collossinus, meaning “purple wool.”
In the apostle Paul’s time Colossae was a small city with a mixed population of Phrygians, Greeks, and Jews. During his extended stay in Ephesus, Paul may have taught Jews and Greeks who lived in Colossae (Acts 19:10). Epaphras, a Colossian, visited Paul in Rome and informed him about the condition of the church at Colossae (Col 1:7; 4:12), then was later imprisoned with Paul (Phlm 23). Others from the Colossian church included Philemon, Apphia, Archippus, and Onesimus, a slave who became a Christian (Phlm 16). Subsequent history is silent on the church at Colossae. The city was weakened under Islamic rule and was eventually destroyed in the 12th century.
In 1835 archaeologists discovered the acropolis, theater, and other structures together with inscriptions from ancient Colossae at a site near Chonas. Recent archaeological investigations have been conducted near Tell Hüyük.
Walter A. Elwell and Barry J. Beitzel, “Colossae,” Baker Encyclopedia of the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1988), 496.
Picture of Colossae
Introduction
Until recently, there had been no book, monograph, or even article dedicated explicitly to a study of the OT in Colossians. An essay on the subject by Fee (2006) was published recently, and not long before that, C. Beetham (2005) completed a doctoral dissertation on the same subject, of which I was the supervisor (Beetham and I did our work independently). The final form of both Fee’s and Beetham’s studies appeared too late for sufficient interaction with them in the present chapter, although prepublication exposure of their work reveals that their approach is quite similar to mine, and the OT allusions that they have identified overlap with many of those that I discern.
One reason for such little attention to this subject is that there are no formal quotations or citations from the OT in the letter. Many commentators even find difficulty in detecting many allusions in the letter. Nevertheless, there are allusions, and a number of them. Some of the allusions are discussed in the various commentaries, which sometimes agree about the particular OT texts to which the author is alluding. (I am indebted to Beetham for cataloguing the various allusions and echoes recorded by various commentators; of course, I have subsequently consulted the commentary literature myself. For a large-scale discussion and analysis of allusions in Colossians, see Beetham 2005. In some cases I have detected new allusions.) But even when commentators have observed allusions, there has been little attempt to demonstrate their validity or to reflect on how Paul is using them (for debate over Pauline authorship of Colossians, which I am assuming for purposes of the present chapter, see the commentaries). As far as possible, within the limits of this overall project, the procedure in this chapter on Colossians is generally twofold: to demonstrate the validity of various OT allusions and to discuss their significance. Neither of these tasks has been consistently carried out in past study of Colossians (an expansion of the discussions throughout the following commentary, as well as other OT references that could not be discussed at all due to space limitations, are given in Beale, forthcoming).
Commentators offer various definitions of “allusion” and “echo” and posit various criteria for discernment of both, sometimes defining an echo as unconscious and unintentional and sometimes as conscious and intentional. Whether OT references are referred to as “allusions” or “echoes,” the purpose here is to argue the likelihood that Paul, to one degree or another, intended to make the reference. The goal here is to point out, on a case-by-case basis, the clearest cumulative evidence for the presence of an intentional OT reference, regardless of how one wants to categorize it formally.
Nevertheless, readers will make different judgments on the basis of the same evidence, some categorizing a reference to be “probable,” and others viewing the same reference to be only “possible” or even so faint as not to merit analysis. I have tried to include for study those OT allusions whose validity are attested by the best evidence and that I consider to be probable. However, some may still wonder whether Paul has intended to make a particular allusion, and they may question that if Paul really intended to convey all the meaning from an OT text for which I am contending, why he did not make the links with that text more explicit. In such cases I would allow for the possibility that Paul merely may have presupposed the OT association in his mind, since he was such a deep and long-experienced reader of the OT Scriptures. This would not mean that there is no semantic link with the OT text under discussion, but rather that Paul perhaps was either unconscious of making the reference or was not necessarily intending his audience to pick up on the allusion or echo. In either case, identification of the reference and the enhancement of meaning that comes from the context of the source text may well disclose the author’s underlying or implicit presuppositions, which form the basis for his explicit statements in the text (e.g., texts in the following discussion that may be susceptible to this kind of conclusion are 1:9, 12b–14; 2:11; 3:1).
G. K. Beale, “Colossians,” in Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, MI; Nottingham, UK: Baker Academic; Apollos, 2007), 841–842.