He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to be preeminent in everything. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross. (Col 1:15-20)

“He is the image of the invisible God.” This could be read in either of two ways. Either this is an Adam christology, in which Jesus is said to be, like Adam, made in the “image of God,” or, this is a Logos or a Wisdom (the two are often synonymous) christology. We recall that for Philo, the Logos was the copy of God, called “the image of God,” and Adam was the copy of the copy, a Xerox of a Xerox, because a corporeal being couldn’t be directly Xeroxed from God. Therefore, God made an intermediary, the Logos, to be his image, so that humanity could be made after God’s image and likeness. That there is overlap even in Philo between the Logos and personified Wisdom is evident in Allegorical Interpretation 1:43, where Philo calls personified Wisdom the “image” of God. Just prior to this, Philo says that the human mind is made in the image of God, and thus that what separates humanity from other creatures is humanity’s capacity to know wisdom, or reason. Wisdom is elsewhere identified as the “image of God.” It is not unique to Philo:

For she is a reflection of eternal light,
a spotless mirror of the working of God,
and an image of his goodness.
Although she is but one, she can do all things,
and while remaining in herself, she renews all things.
(Wisdom of Solomon 7:26-27)

Because Paul goes on to describe Jesus’ agency in creation, it is more probable that “image of God” is here meant in the sense of Wisdom, not of Adam, although some overlap and ambiguity between the two was probably inevitable, and perhaps intentional.

“The firstborn of all creation.” This is a controversial phrase. Arians would later capitalize on it to prove that Christ is not eternal, but created. And they would have been correct to do so, except that they took the metaphor literally (a mistake of which the Binitarians were no less guilty).

The word “firstborn,” as we have noted in an earlier post, had two senses: (1) The obvious, that the person was born first. (2) Indirectly, it could also mean “preeminent” or “highest ranking.” The second meaning derived from the significance of the first meaning in the ancient world. The firstborn son was customarily the primary heir, and the one who would receive the lion’s share of the inheritance from the father. In royalty, the firstborn was normally the immediate successor to the father’s throne. So, in a metaphorical sense, “firstborn” was sometimes used to connote preeminence, without necessarily implying its literal sense.

Christian apologists often argue that here in Col 1:15, it has to refer to sense #2, and cannot refer to sense #1, since Christ is subsequently described as the one in whom all things were created. But as we have shown in post #09 (Wisdom), this is a bad argument. Personified Wisdom was said to have been created first, before all other created things (e.g., Prov 8:22; Sirach 1:1-14; 24:1-9), and this is stated in so many different ways that its meaning is undeniable. And yet, in each and every case, it is also said to be the agent through whom God created all other things. So being the first created thing and being the agent of creation are not at all incompatible. Therefore, it is emphatically not the case that the language of Jesus’ agency in creation rules out sense #1. And, in fact, the parallels in Proverbs, Sirach, Philo and elsewhere make it abundantly clear that sense #1 is in fact the meaning. Now, this does not rule out sense #2, for obvious reasons. Sense #1 always implied sense #2 in the ancient world. Because the firstborn creature was first, it therefore had authority over all the rest of creation.

This idea is paralleled elsewhere. In post #08 (Preexistence), we quoted an apocryphon from the first century CE, the Prayer of Joseph. There, Jacob says of himself:

I am an angel of God and a primeval spirit, the firstborn of all creatures, and like me were Abraham and Isaac created before any other work of God. . . . I am invested with the highest office in the face of God and invoke Him by His ineffable name.¹

Here I’ll quote the entire fragment, from another translator:

I, Jacob, who is speaking to you, am also Israel, an angel of God and a ruling spirit. Abraham and Isaac were created before any work. But, I, Jacob, who men call Jacob but whose name is Israel, am he who God called Israel which means, a man seeing God, because I am the firstborn of every living thing [literally, “all creatures”] to whom God gives life.

And when I was coming up from Syrian Mesopotamia, Uriel, the angel of God, came forth and said that I [Jacob-Israel] had descended to earth and I had tabernacled among men and that I had been called by the name of Jacob. He envied me and fought with me and wrestled with me saying that his name and the name that is before every angel was to be above mine. I told him his name and what rank he held among the sons of God. “Are you not Uriel, the eighth after me? and I, Israel, the archangel of the power of the Lord and the chief captain among the sons of God? Am I not Israel, the first [preeminent] minister before the face of God?” And I called upon my God by the inextinguishable name.²

Here, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are said to have been created before any other work, and Jacob himself is called the “firstborn,” paralleling Col 1:15. It is clear here that the meaning of firstborn is not just preeminence but creatureliness. Note also the strong parallel with John 1:14. Jacob is said to have “descended to earth” and “tabernacled among men,” just as the Logos was said to have “become flesh and tabernacled among us.” The first-created archangel Israel was given the name Jacob, while the first-created archangel Logos³ was given the name Jesus.

Also noteworthy in this passage is the connection between “seeing God” and being “the firstborn of all creatures.” As John 1:18 says, “No one has ever seen God. It is the unique Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.” For the preexistent Jacob, he is “a man seeing God,” precisely because he is “the firstborn of every living thing.” The same idea of proximity to God making God available to the world is found in Col 1:15a: “He is the image of the invisible God.” In other words, he is uniquely able to reveal God because of his status as “firstborn of all creation.” The idea of one who sees God, or who images God, is virtually synonymous with the idea of being the first creature. Note also in the Prayer of Joseph that Jacob is the “preeminent minister before the face of God,” just as Jesus is “preeminent in everything” in Col 1:18.

Also relevant to the meaning of “firstborn” here in v. 15 is its subsequent use in v. 18: “He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to be preeminent in everything.” If we are to take the meaning of firstborn in v. 15 as “highest ranking,” what does that do for our understanding of v. 18? “He is the beginning, the highest ranking of the dead.” This would mean that he’s still dead, but as a concession, he gets to pick on all the other dead people. Or, conversely, if “firstborn of all creation” is not meant to identify Jesus as a member of creation, then “firstborn from⁴ the dead” would have to mean that Jesus wasn’t really a member of the dead either. That would be a form of Docetism, denying that Jesus died. “Firstborn from the dead” only makes sense if it implies that Jesus was really “of the dead,” and was raised. This should be a further indication how to read “firstborn of all creation.” It only makes sense if Jesus is really “of creation.” The subsequent clause beginning with “so that” makes this clear: “so that he might come to be preeminent in everything.” In other words, Jesus was the first to be created, and the first to be re-created. The meaning of this text is so obvious, it would take something like a Roman emperor to convince everybody to read it differently!

That said, and as we have argued at length in earlier posts, this does not mean that Paul is ascribing literal preexistence to Jesus. This may sound confusing. I’ll try to be clear: Christ being the first creature is a metaphor, but the metaphor is precisely that Christ is the first creature. It is not that Paul is saying that Christ is the “firstborn,” and we should interpret “firstborn” metaphorically while interpreting the idea of his preexistence and his agency in creation literally. If we are going to interpret it literally, then, as I have shown, we have to interpret his being the first creature literally too. But the whole wisdom motif is a metaphor. As we’ve seen, everybody understood that personified Wisdom was a metaphor and not really a person. Therefore, when Jesus is identified as personified Wisdom, everybody in that context would have understood that Jesus’ preexistence was metaphorical, precisely because the preexistent being with whom he was identified was a metaphor. Perhaps James Dunn can state it more cogently than I:

That is to say, [Paul] is identifying this divine Wisdom with Christ, just as ben Sira and Baruch identified divine Wisdom with the Torah. The effect is the same: not to predicate the actual (pre)existence of either Torah or Christ prior to and in creation itself, but to affirm that Torah and Christ are to be understood as the climactic manifestations of the preexistent divine wisdom, by which the world was created. It is Christ in his revelatory and redemptive significance who is the subject of praise here; “the description is revelatory, more than ontological.”⁵ And the praise is that his redemptive work (1:14: “in whom we have the redemption”) is entirely continuous and of a piece with God’s work in creation. It is the same God who comes to expression in creation and definitively in Christ. . . . This is christology set within Jewish monotheism and predicated on the Jewish theological axiom that the one God has chosen to reveal himself in and through his creative power.⁶

“For in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. This is again, emphatically, the language of Wisdom. “You made all things by wisdom” (Psa 104:24). “Yahweh by wisdom founded the earth” (Prov 3:19). Wisdom of Solomon 8:5 speaks of the “Wisdom that effects all things.” Philo speaks of the “Wisdom, by whose agency the universe was brought to completion” (The Worse Attacks the Better, 54). Again I’ll quote Dunn, with whom I concur:

What does such language mean when applied to Messiah Jesus? Not, presumably, that the Christ known to his followers during his ministry in Palestine was as such God’s agent in creation; in the first century no less than the twentieth that would be to read imaginative metaphor in a pedantically literal way. It must mean rather that that powerful action of God, expressed by the metaphor of the female Wisdom, in and through whom the universe came into being, is now to be seen as embodied in Christ, its character now made clear by the light of his cross and resurrection (1:18, 20). . . . The redemptive work also accomplished “in Christ” (1:14) is presented as the key that unlocks the mystery of the divine purpose. “In Christ” creation and redemption are one. In the cross and resurrection (1:18, 20) both past and future find the clue to their ultimate significance.⁷

“In him all things hold together.” More personified Wisdom language. The idea that the universe was held together by the Logos is a basic axiom of much of the Greek philosophy of the period, but this idea is even stronger in Jewish literature. “By his Word all things hold together” (Sirach 43:26). In Wisdom of Solomon 1:6-7, Wisdom is “that which holds all things together.” Philo also joins the ranks, identifying the Logos as “that reason [logos] which holds together and regulates the universe” (On the Life of Moses, 2:133). And again:

For all other things are intrinsically and by their own nature loose; and if there is anywhere anything consolidated, that has been bound by the Logos of God, for this Logos is glue and a chain, filling all things with its essence. And the Logos connects together and fastens everything. (Philo, Who is the Heir of Divine Things, 188)

For the Logos of the living God being the bond of everything, as has been said before, holds all things together and binds all the parts, and prevents them from being loosened or separated. (Philo, On Flight and Finding, 112)

Coming back to the language of Colossians, “in him all things hold together,” the parallel is obvious. Once more, we find Dunn’s summation to be cogent:

Here again conceptuality from contemporary cosmology seems to be loaded in an undefined way on Christ. But again it is important to realize that this is not the language of clinical analysis but of poetic imagination. . . . The language is that of Platonic-Stoic cosmology, the belief that there is a rationality (Logos) which pervades the universe and bonds it together. . . . In identifying this function with Christ (“in him”) the intention presumably was not to reduce the person of Christ to a personification, but to shed the further light of Christ on that personification: paradoxical as it may seem, the wisdom which holds the universe together is most clearly to be recognized in its distinctive character by reference to Christ. This will mean, among other things, that the fundamental rationale of the world is “caught” more in the generous outpouring of sacrificial, redemptive love (1:14) than in the greed and grasping more characteristic of “the authority of darkness” (1:12).⁸

In other words, by ascribing wisdom language to Jesus, Paul is not making a literal claim about Jesus’ preexistence, but a literal claim (by use of metaphor) that the logic by which God created and sustains the universe is most fully displayed in the self-sacrificial love of the man Jesus. John Howard Yoder meant precisely this when he said, counter-intuitively, that “people who bear crosses are working with the grain of the universe.”⁹

“He is the head of the body, the church.” Just a brief comment on this idea. Commentators generally believe Colossians 1:15-18a reflected an early hymn, and in fact, many believe that the hymn could possibly have been pre-Christian, for up until the words “the church,” there is nothing in the hymn that would designate Jesus. The entire hymn up until “the church” could easily be a hymn about personified Wisdom or the Logos. In fact, the language of “the head of the body” was very common in Greek philosophy and also in Philo. The “body” was a designation for the whole universe, or heaven and earth, and the “head” of the body was frequently identified as Wisdom or Logos. I point this out because, if this was a pre-Christian hymn, or even if not, the almost parenthetical addition of the words “the church” which function to define “the body” would have been startling. What “the church” does here is to segue, to transition from talk about the original creation to the new creation. In the beginning, the body was the whole universe, but now, new creation has begun on a microcosmic level with the church, of which Christ is the head. It is the perfect transition from talk of Christ as first creature (firstborn of all creation) to Christ as first new creature (firstborn from the dead), “so that he may be preeminent [i.e., first] in everything.”

“For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.” Many take this to be a clear statement of the doctrine of incarnation. But this is highly anachronistic, and misses the fact that an allusion is being made here to one of the psalms. LXX Psalm 67:16¹⁰ speaks of Zion as “the mountain in which God was pleased to dwell.” Here in Colossians, Paul uses the same two Greek words as the LXX (eudokēsen, “pleased”; katoikein, “to dwell”). Does Psalm 67 reflect a doctrine of the incarnation of God in Mt. Zion? Or inmontation, rather? Of course not. It is a metaphor for election within a psalm whose theme is salvation. In Psalm 67, Yahweh is saving Israel from her enemies and declaring his pleasure to dwell among his people. Paul is alluding to this motif. The significance of the fullness of God dwelling in Jesus is thus that Jesus is God’s agent of salvation and redemption, and that Jesus is the representative of God’s people, in whom God is pleased to dwell.

Thus, the entire passage relays a single message: In Christ’s self-sacrificial love, all the fullness of God’s wisdom is displayed, all the hidden facets of God’s plan for humankind are revealed. In sum, the man Jesus Christ, filled with the spirit of wisdom, has made God’s creative intention a reality again.

ADDENDUM: To further clarify the relevance of the phrase “firstborn of all creation,” let me add this. Apologists rightly point out that there is a genitive of participation (partitive genitive) and a genitive of superiority. So something that is “of something” can either be a part of that something or over that something. An example of the former: Robin of Loxley. This is a partitive genitive. Robin is “of Loxley” because he is a member of those who are from Loxley. An example of the latter: the teacher of the class. The teacher is not part of the class, but is over the class. This is a genitive of superiority. So, the apologists say, Paul is using the genitive of superiority here: Jesus is not part of creation, but over creation.

The problem with this is that when you look at every example throughout the Greek OT of the word “firstborn” (prototokos) followed by a genitive, in every single case, it is partitive. There is not one example of prototokos followed by a genitive of superiority. Not one. Paul could have very easily indicated that Jesus is over creation, and not a part of it, by using the preposition hyper, which means “over.” But he does not. Moreover, as we have shown, the idea that God’s agent in creation was God’s first creature is pervasive throughout the wisdom tradition. We also see “firstborn of all creatures” in the Prayer of Joseph, where it is said of Jacob, and there it is clear that Jacob is a part of creation. Therefore, given the parallels, together with the grammatical evidence (prototokos followed by a genitive is always partitive genitive), it is clear how Paul’s language here would have been read. If Paul had wished to say that Jesus was not a part of creation, he certainly would have used different language than this, which was everywhere we’ve seen understood to denote a first created being.

1. This is preserved by Origen in Johannem, 25/4:84. [BACK]
2. This is the translation of J. Z. Smith in Charlesworth, ed., OT Pseudepigrapha 2:713. [BACK]
3. see Philo, On the Confusion of Tongues, 146. [BACK]
4. Some manuscripts actually leave out “from” and just say “of the dead.” [BACK]
5. Here Dunn quotes Martin, Colossians and Philemon, 57. [BACK]
6. James D.G. Dunn, The Epistles to the Colossians and to Philemon, 89. [BACK]
7. Ibid., 91-92. [BACK]
8. Ibid., 93-94. [BACK]
9. If my pacifist friends made it this far into the series, they are now cheering, and very, very relieved. [BACK]
10. MT Psalm 68:16. [BACK]