I said I would return to Biblical Studies, so I decided to take a random passage of the Bible and explain how the field has changed over the last 40 years. RandomBible.com gave me an excellent example: Col 2:15.   /K. waits for those who wish to look up the passage.

My job isn’t to explain what this verse means, I can’t direct anyone in prayer, give moral guidance, or advise how this should fit into anyone’s theology. I can say a great deal about Paul, I can say many things about ancient letters, and I can talk about what a splendid example this verse is as a place to start.

Paul did not write this verse, nor this letter. We tell this by asking the same questions we’d ask in a TV courtroom drama: and this is not the way Paul wrote, the way he thought, nor the vocabulary he used. It is a pastiche of Paul-like sentiments (Colossai is only mentioned here. Epraphas is only mentioned here and in Philemon – where it seems to have been added by a later hand. Laodicea is only mentioned here, in another letter Paul certainly didn’t write, and in Rev.)

Col. is an exhortation to continued faithfulness, a faithfulness that is established and settled – the work Paul was still in the midst of with his known congregations. So the topic of the letter is an issue from after Paul’s time, making this is a Deutero-Pauline letter. (i.e. someone else writing his name, a very common practice in Antiquity.)* This letter is also interested in enforcing the "household code", the hierarchy within Roman society and individual homes that put the paterfamilias at the top. (A code Paul dismantled in favor of the unifying and liberating body of Christ.)

* Imagine, for example, you wanted to give relationship advice. People will listen to advice attributed to Dr. Phil; people will not listen to John Nobody. Nowadays you would get a prompt letter from Mr. McGraw’s publishers and lawyers if you tried this, but in Antiquity there were no such mechanisms and no way to verify who’d written what. (There was an effort to get at the best copy of Homer's Iliad (Part I Part II) by comparing existing ones, but that was extraordinary for the ancient world.)

The phrase "principalities and powers" also appears in Eph 1:21, which he did write. There the term talks about the position of Christ – beside God and superior to intermediaries or semi-divine figures.

Our passage in Col. is a bit different: it talks about Christ triumphing over the principalities and powers by the fact of the crucifixion. (Some Gnostic texts take up similar themes: that either the evil Archons wanted to kill Christ and could not, or that they thought they had killed Christ and failed, or that the crucifixion fooled them by allowing Christ to complete his mission of (in these texts Gnostic) salvation.)

The past century, and especially the past 40 years, has added a great deal to our knowledge of these intermediate figures in Judaism and Jewish-Christianity (forms of Christianity that did not break with their parent religion.) It’s a bit puzzling to find Archons in the New Testament, but there they are: the Greek term originally meant ‘ruler’ or ‘government official’, but it came to mean a series of hostile heavenly figures, one for each planet or sphere of the heavens, which challenged the soul on its way to God. Along with Fate, they were sometimes blamed for humanity’s bad lot – and both Christian and non-Christian religions sought to diffuse the hostile power of Fate during life and teach the keys to getting past each Archon after death (via a series of password or by offering certain proofs that one came from God. (The Gospel of Thomas has some of this, by the way.)) Eph. and Col. share the idea that these hostile celestial figures existed, but it’s difficult to tell from either letter whether they shared with any particular other ancient religion ideas about how the Archons had been created, what they were, what their names were, or how to slip past them. In Gnosticism the idea of the Archons is part of an overall theology that mortal life is a prison and a trick (yes, like the Matrix ... I can’t shake the sense that the film makers had read a bit about Gnosticism: the Architect in the second film reminded me of the Demiurge ... you decide if this definition sounds like "architect" to you.)

I am not saying Col. is Gnostic, some of its warnings about faithfulness sound like warnings against certain form of Gnosticism. But this is one place in the Bible where a powerful but enigmatic phase has become filled in with a mountain of specifics in the last 40 years: one could write a disquisition on all the mentions of the Archons in Antiquity, lists of the names attributed to them, lists of the passwords or proofs believers were given against them, and what all this meant for how Christian and non-Christian religions talked to and borrowed from each other – and Col. and Eph. are examples of this.

(I am not upset at the idea that Christianity approached people using spiritual terms they had heard of:  there are some charms to a completely new religious vocabulary, but comprehensibility isn’t one of them. Also, as I’ve said before, every religion borrows from its fellows and predecessors.)

-Kushana