Comparing the letters to the Philippians and to Philemon brings to light important aspects of Paul’s thought and practice – in particular, how certain key theological commitments are practically enacted when they encounter situational differences. Capturing a sense of what Paul is doing in these letters is best done by grasping what the problems were that he was addressing and considering how the letters deploy a set of rhetorical strategies to resolve those problems. The specific contextualized instantiation of Jesus-like relationships in Colossae is clearly different from its instantiation in Philippi; but the underlying strategy of mobilizing a story of Jesus (both conceptually by letter, as well as directly and personally through a disciple or envoy) remains the same. Paul clearly believes that Jesus, rightly understood and rightly followed, makes a difference to the basic issue that tends to concern all communities, namely, how people relate to one another.

Paul’s inland travels in Galatia and Phrygia are hard to trace: the narrative in Acts, long subjected to detailed scrutiny, is incomplete at best. Complex modern arguments based on the text of Colossians have linked tensions in the church at Colossae, in the Lycus valley, to contacts with Cynic or Middle Platonist philosophers; however, Colossae was not high on the philosophical food chain. The quality of philosophical debate there was probably provincial at best. ‘Worship of angels’ was a feature of popular religiosity in Asia Minor, in multiple contexts, and it is probably right to understand the ‘Colossian philosophy’ as a concoction formed from folk belief. The church at Laodicea is addressed in Revelation and a ‘letter from Laodicea’ is mentioned in passing in Colossians: but this text may be the epistle known as Ephesians. The complex of early texts relating to the Lycus valley cities is informative about the interface of the Jewish-Phrygian and Gentile-Phrygian worlds. The Jews in Phrygia were a successful community, but it is difficult to understand the sources relating to how Jewish, Christian, and Graeco-Roman polytheist communities interacted in the Lycus valley.