A Journey through Philippi

By David Gwartney

Explore the vibrant Greco-Roman backdrop of the Apostle Paul's letter of Philippians. The Roman colony of Philippi was the first city Paul encountered as his missionary journeys expanded into Greece. Paul’s stop in Philippi proved eventful, including casting out a spirit from a servant girl and spending the night in the local jail. Lydia’s acceptance of the gospel message laid the foundation for the beginnings of the Philippian church.

The church in Philippi quickly became known for their generous support of Paul and his message. It was while under house arrest in Rome that Paul would pen his letter of Philippians. His primary message was that, while their earthly citizenship would draw them to the ascending path of honor and glory, their heavenly citizenship would call them to the descending path of servanthood. His encouragement was to follow the example of Christ and take the downward path.

When understood through the worldview of the original hearers – the Philippian church – many Greco-Roman threads can be traced through the letter of Philippians. These include the rights and responsibilities of Roman citizenship, the Roman cursus honorum, or path of honors, and the ancient Olympic games. Embark on a journey through Philippi in this comprehensive exploration of the biblical and historical landscape of the New Testament book of Philippians.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Gwartney
• Release date: Feb 1, 2024
• ISBN: 9798215614617

David Gwartney

David Gwartney has traveled to biblical sites in Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Greece, and Turkey, gaining an understanding of places that bring scripture to life. He grew up in Tallahassee, Florida and met his wife, Tiffany, in Orlando, Florida, while earning his first master’s degree in Business Administration. He spent the next thirteen years living in Chicago, Illinois. While in Chicago, he earned his Master of Divinity from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, studying both Greek and Hebrew languages. He then planted a church in the Wrigleyville neighborhood of the city, where he pastored for seven years. His travels and studies have led to three books exploring the Greco-Roman context of Paul’s letters to Philippi, (A Journey Through Philippi), Ephesus (A Journey Through Ephesus), and Colossae (A Journey Through Colossae). He currently resides in St. Petersburg, Florida and works as a Business Analyst, but is always planning his next adventure to ancient sites.

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A JOURNEY THROUGH PHILIPPI

By David Gwartney

Published by David Gwartney at Smashwords

Copyright 2023 David Gwartney

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com. The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

Discover other titles by David Gwartney:

A Journey Through Ephesus

A Journey Through Colossae

Ten Essential Words

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Part I: The Background of Philippi

Chapter 1: A Brief History of Philippi

Chapter 2: The Apostle Paul’s Visit to Philippi

Chapter 3: Four Vital Questions

Part II: Paul’s Letter to the Philippians

Chapter 4: Choose the Better Way

Chapter 5: Defending Your Life

Chapter 6: Dual Citizenship

Chapter 7: The Heroic Journey

Chapter 8: Eyes On The Prize

Chapter 9: Guard Your Mind

Part III: Philippi In Church History

Chapter 10: The Role of Philippi in Church History

About The Author

Notes

Bibliography

Introduction

As the world emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic, it would have been easy to imagine a universal feeling of renewed optimism, excitement to return to the norms of life, and a new solidarity about what it meant to be a global citizen. Unfortunately, this is not the reality that is unfolding before us. Instead, the post-pandemic world that is materializing is one of war, inflation, supply-chain disruptions, ongoing racial tensions, fearmongering over the next potential pandemic, and a deeply divided political landscape. Welcome to the post-pandemic world!

Closer to home, perhaps it has never been more muddled as to what it means to be a citizen of the United States, or at least not since the Civil War. The political right seems determined to find a savior who will return us to the idealistic past, while the political left increasingly can find nothing redeeming in the nation’s past. Events that previously brought both sides together, such as a foreign threat, a national crisis, or even the Olympic Games, nowadays only pushes each side further apart. As one commentator recently noted, everything is now politicized.

Adding to the complexity of what it means to be a good citizen, people of the Christian faith must also consider how closely their faith aligns with their citizenship. Do the two complement each other or do they stand on opposite sides of the room, calling the believer to pick a side? Historically in the United States, one’s faith and one’s citizenship were often seen as complementary parts, working together for the betterment of both God and country. This was due, in part, to the conception that America was founded as a Christian nation, though it is more accurate to say that it was founded on Judeo-Christian values. And while Christianity enjoyed a respected place in American society through the middle of the 20th century, more recently that position has been steadily losing ground. It remains to be seen whether this will ultimately be a positive development for people of faith or a negative one.

But this is not a book about politics. Nor do I even wish it to resound with a negative tone. This book does, however, endeavor to offer some ancient wisdom around this topic of what we might refer to as dual citizenship. Specifically, what does it mean for a Christian to be a citizen of his or her country of residence, in addition to being a citizen of heaven - as the Apostle Paul will put it. Does one citizenship mean renouncing the other? If not, where might the two align toward the same goals and where might they come into conflict? And if competing values do arise, which one will command ultimate loyalty?

Nearly 2,000 years ago, the Apostle Paul wrote a letter to a group of Christ-followers living in the city of Philippi in northern Greece. And among the number of topics he addresses in his brief letter of Philippians is this tension between their citizenship in the Roman Empire and their newly-pledged loyalty to the good news of Jesus Christ. While certainly not everyone in the fledgling church could claim Roman citizenship, the city of Philippi was established as a Roman colony - to be a miniature Rome and to reflect the glory of what Rome embodied (at least if you were on the right side of the empire). So, this question of dual citizenship was a particularly relevant question to the church at Philippi. And while Paul’s letter is not an especially political essay, there are several implied references to this very issue that may not be apparent in our English renderings.

As it turns out, this present-day tension between faith and country – the tension of dual citizenship - has been around since the advent of Christianity.

The New Testament book of Philippians is one of several letters that the Apostle Paul wrote to newly-established churches located in cities throughout the Roman Empire. Because these letters fall into the genre of personal correspondence – epistles, as they are sometimes referred to - they offer a unique opportunity to dig into the context of scripture. To put it another way, Paul was writing to churches in specific cities and regions that were part of the Roman Empire of the first century. Places like Corinth, Ephesus, Philippi, and Thessalonica were cities where Paul had preached this new gospel and established church communities. He walked the city streets, met the residents, and got a taste of the unique culture of each place. He would have done business with local merchants, eaten some of the favorite cuisine of the region, and listened to the stories that shaped each community. These simple activities can sometimes get lost when we read a book of the Bible, like Philippians, and forget that Paul visited and spent time in a city called Philippi. And in certain cases, we can walk down some of those very streets today.

In October of 2022, my brother J.R. and I had an opportunity to do just that – to walk through the archaeological site of Philippi. We visited several other sites, such as Corinth, Delphi, and Thessaloniki, to name a few. But having already started on this current book project, I was especially excited about visiting Philippi. My experience has been that certain insights gained by walking the streets, talking to the locals, and getting a general lay of the surrounding land cannot be extracted from the pages of a book. Thus, I have found it tremendously insightful and fulfilling to visit these places in person. And while I recognize that some insights transcend the written word, I will attempt to convey as many of those insights as possible. My brother and I had a unique opportunity to explore the area and hear some fascinating stories from the locals – including the owner of the Philippeio Hotel, who acted as our impromptu guest lecturer each morning at breakfast. His passion for the history of the region was infectious and set the tone for each day. Philippi did not disappoint!

In the first book of this Journey series, A Journey Through Ephesus, I refer to my approach, for lack of a better description, as a narrative commentary – the balancing act between the story and the context behind Paul’s letters. It has been my experience that most biblical commentaries or study guides take one of two approaches. The first approach skims the surface of the story, quickly moving to the question, what does this mean for me? The original context of text is only cursorily considered, taking the English (or some other modern translation) at face value. As a result, the application of a passage of scripture may have little resemblance to the original intent. With this approach, the Bible is little more than a collection of maxims, platitudes, and self-help advice, and the reader ultimately determines the interpretation.

The second approach plunges deeper below the surface, exploring the depths of word tenses, sentence structures, and the text of the original language. While this level of analysis can be helpful (I am indebted to these types of commentaries in my own study), if the exploratory dive does not come back up for air, connecting back to the narrative, then the primary storyline can be disjointed or completely lost. Oftentimes, these types of commentaries are inaccessible to everyone but the theologian or academic.

With the narrative approach taken on these pages, my hope is to call out those words, concepts, and allusions that may not be obvious to the modern reader in order to better tell the story in the way it was originally intended to be told. Being equipped with a greater understanding of the story in its original context, we are better prepared to apply its wisdom to our modern world. This will help us guard against the practice of cherry-picking a verse out of the Bible and bending it to fit our own agenda - a practice that is not just limited to religious circles but can also be found in political rhetoric and in media narratives.

I humbly acknowledge that this is far from the only approach to understanding this incredibly complex accumulation of wisdom and spiritual insight we possess in the Bible. It is an approach, however, that I am particularly passionate about. And because there can be any number of ways to approach the Bible, it is to the specifics of this approach that we turn to next.

Any attempt to interpret a passage or a book of the Bible begins with some effort to understand the original context of those words. While translators have done much of the work for us, even a word correctly translated can take on different connotations over time. A word such as castle, used several times in the King James Version, evokes images of the large palace-like structures throughout medieval Europe and has little to do with a military fortress of King David’s Israel, or later, of the Roman Empire. Similarly, a concept like slavery carries much different inferences today than it did in the Apostle Paul’s letters. In some cases, what seems innocuous in our modern translations can actually be a scathing reference to a pagan god. To better understand any text of the Bible, it is helpful to consider three spheres that shed light on the intent of the Biblical narrative.

The first of these contextual spheres is the worldview of the people who recorded the Biblical narrative, as well as the worldview of those who were the intended audience. A worldview is a collection of beliefs that shapes an individual's or a community's perspective and guides their interactions with the world around them. It is a general philosophy of life; it is a way of interpreting everything going on around us. Often, peoples’ worldview is so intrinsic that they would have a difficult time even articulating the set of beliefs that shape the way they view the world. This can also make it difficult to view a set of events or a story from the perspective of another culture. We must take off our own cultural lenses and put on a new pair of glasses, taking a second look at the world from a different perspective.

From a broad perspective, the ancient worldview held that everything earthly or visible has its heavenly or unseen counterpart, and every spiritual reality has material consequences. Accordingly, biblical stories often attribute events and outcomes to spirits, demons, or to God directly. Under the umbrella of this ancient worldview, we can also consider several distinctive worldviews: the Jewish worldview, the surrounding pagan worldview, and, in the New Testament, the Greco-Roman worldview. For the latter, this can often be summarized by the writings of early Greek philosophers, who set out to define and refine the proper way to view the world.

The writers of the New Testament did not write in a vacuum. They were often having conversations reflective of larger philosophical or religious debates of their day. From Jesus to the Apostles John and Paul, New Testament writers were often engaged in the types of conversations that could be heard at the Jerusalem Temple, in remote Judean villages, or in the local Greek agora. They obviously brought to these conversations the unique perspective of God’s revelation through the person of Jesus. Yet often we can gain new insights when framing some of these scriptural debates through the lens of the ancient worldview. Before we ask what a passage might mean for us today, we need to ask what it originally meant for the ancients in their day.

The second contextual sphere is the stories that were told and repeated. These stories would come to define many an ancient culture. Stories that are passed down and preserved convey a wealth of information about the cultures that told them. They are enduring precisely because they convey so much more than just a nice tale that may or may not have actually occurred. If they did not grip the imagination of generation after generation, they would not have endured, left to be forgotten to history. So when we talk about cultural stories, particularly Greek Mythology as it relates to the New Testament, we are given glimpses into the values and beliefs that the gospel would encounter as it spread from Jerusalem to Judaea to Samaria, and throughout the Roman Empire.

From our own rational-scientific worldview, we may not value the power of story as much as it was valued in ancient times. We tend to evaluate things by whether they are scientifically verifiable or what can be rationally provable. We even divide books into two categories: fiction and non-fiction. And the underlying assumption is that anything that falls into the fiction category is made up – it’s just a story that never really happened. And if it did not really happen, then it is not as important as events that actually took place, even if the story might be enjoyable to read. This mindset has led many to dismiss the historical value of enduring cultural stories, specifically the Greek Myths and other stories that fall under the category of mythology.

When we take stories and enduring myths into account, we can begin to see that much of what was written in the Bible - the Apostle Paul’s letters in particular - often contained an implicit critique of pagan religion and culture. Biblical stories allude to these pagan stories more than the average modern person may realize. And if we fail to understand these allusions, we will not grasp the full polemic against the pagan culture or how that critique might apply to our own modern culture.

Speaking of culture, this is the third area of emphasis when it comes to understanding the original context of the Bible. A culture is an aggregation of a set of norms, behaviors, beliefs, and customs that come to define a society – ancient or modern. We can think of a culture as a specific worldview put into practice within a particular place and time. Beyond what a society believed, what did they spend their time doing? How did they support their families? What did they eat when they gathered for a meal? What did they create for art and entertainment? How often did they interact with other cultures? The answers to these questions, and many more, collectively come to define a particular culture.

Sometimes, ancient writings captured small slices of daily life within a culture. But most of the time, the focus was on larger topics of philosophy, history, or mythology. This is where archaeology can help fill in some of the missing details of daily life in the ancient world. While archaeological digs can focus on reconstructing ancient sites or uncovering the occasional invaluable treasure, these digs can also shed light on the ordinary routines of the people who inhabited a site. In fact, this emphasis on daily life is a growing trend in archaeology. An excavation of an ancient city can reveal some of these details, such as what foods most people ate, what trades they worked at, what deity was worshipped, and the socio-economic level of the average resident.

Being able to walk through a site like Ephesus or Philippi can also bring us in closer proximity to the daily life of the people who inhabited those sites. The size of a city’s theater can help provide estimates of the city’s population. The grandeur of a local temple is suggestive of the status a city possessed. And while the main attractions might be a city’s theater, its temples, or the acropolis, many insights can be garnered from the more pedestrian gymnasium, agora, or even the public toilets (as one can find in Ephesus and Philippi). It can serve as a reminder that Biblical writers were not just writing to churches and cities, but to the people who lived there, who navigated daily life in much the same way we do today.

The second half of this approach entails taking the insights gathered from the original context and rightly applying them to our modern context. Once we better understand the original intent of a passage and how it applied to ancient life, we are better prepared to translate that ancient wisdom into modern life. And we are more likely to avoid the pitfall of pressing the words of scripture into the mold of our own agenda. (In the last week alone, I have heard two politicians on separate occasions quote a single verse of the Bible to garner support for their political position. One wonders if they have bothered to read the rest of it!) If the goal of faith is spiritual transformation, then we must be the ones who are pressed into the mold of God’s image. Again, let us consider three spheres of emphasis.

If the goal of biblical application is no less than spiritual transformation, then the first area of emphasis focuses on bringing healing to a broken world, including to ourselves. In fact, healing appropriately begins with us. It is difficult to offer something to the world that we, ourselves, have not yet experienced.

In the spiritual sense, healing begins to take place when we accept God’s gift of grace – the forgiveness of sin. But that is only the starting point. It is easy to believe that once we accept God’s gift of grace, the gift means that we can just bide our time until we get to heaven. Maybe drop a couple glaring bad habits along the way, but otherwise just live in grace, knowing all has been forgiven. However, this mindset does not put us on the path toward spiritual transformation.

In some traditions, sin is described as a disease that needs healing. And while we may be delivered from the effects of sin – spiritual death – the spiritual life, in part, involves the ongoing elimination of all that does not align with God’s ideal. Religious concepts that speak to minimizing the effects of our sinful nature, such as catharsis or mortification, always involve an ongoing process of healing from sinful thoughts, words, and behaviors.

Consider that Paul’s letters, chronicled in the New Testament, were written primarily to churches – to people who had already accepted the gospel message and regarded themselves as followers of Jesus Christ. Yet scattered throughout his letters are persistent appeals to leave behind behaviors reflective of the surrounding pagan culture. He was never content to just say, Glad you are saved, and we’ll see you in heaven one day. He understood that they were only just beginning their spiritual journey of conformity to the image of Christ. In addition to drawing on religious traditions and practices, modern psychological principles and therapies can also help our understanding of our own journey of healing, moving toward wholeness.

Once we have initiated the process of healing – indeed, it will be a lifelong process – we can begin to focus on bringing meaning to our lives. Again, the good news of salvation does not consist of saying a prayer and then getting on with life. The gospel message is one that calls us to reorder our priorities and align our activities with God’s kingdom. And this reordering brings new meaning to the things we choose to pursue in life.

I recently heard someone comment that, coming out of the COVID pandemic, social unrest, and a looming financial crisis, people more than ever will be on a search for meaning. What does it all mean, if anything at all? People - particularly younger people - are increasingly growing disillusioned with political ideologies, social movements, and utopian promises that the next scientific or technological breakthrough will solve the world’s problems. Suicide rates and depression are on the rise among younger people. It seems that as fast as the next big campaign emerges from the bowels of social media, it is destined for a spectacular crash, leaving an even deeper feeling of emptiness.

If modern-day Christianity can recapture the meaning of what life should be about, there will be no end of people hungry to consume it and give it another try. Part of that meaning involves making the world a better place, where it is within our range of influence. But it also involves acknowledging that God’s kingdom is bigger than this world, that there is a spiritual realm in addition to the material world we interact with. The gospel message in the New Testament was an announcement that Jesus was the world’s true Lord, a pronouncement to the spiritual forces of evil that their time was up, and a call to align with God’s emerging kingdom. This gospel proclamation was a threat to the Roman Empire and any other claim to temporal authority. This is (or it should be) the same good news today, and it has the potential to have the same disruptive impact. Refreshed with new meaning in life, this is where we learn to follow God’s Spirit – to walk by faith and not by sight.

The final sphere of emphasis, and the goal of the spiritual life, is that of transformation. Being resolute in our pursuit of healing, along with refocusing our energies toward a renewed meaning, puts us on the path of spiritual formation, with goal, the telos, being spiritual transformation – to be conformed to the image of the Son, Jesus. This is another theme that emerges in Paul’s letters to the churches. He wants nothing less than for each of them to reach full maturity in Christ, to be transformed through a renewed way of thinking, a new worldview, a higher mindset.

This transformation is more than simply growing up and becoming a little more responsible, maybe picking up some good habits along the way. It is commonplace to mistake life alterations - like cutting down on smoking, drinking, or swearing - for spiritual transformation. No doubt, some alterations to the way we live would be a good starting point. This was the minimal standard to which Paul was calling these new churches: To, at the very least, stop living like the pagans lived.

The