Paul the Trojan Horse: The Legacy of Triumph in Philippians

A Triumphalist Narrative

By triumphalist narrative I mean a kind of grandeur-styled historiography that insinuates the exultation of the Christian ‘gospel’ and, beyond that, the ‘superiority’ of Christianity. ⁷ This triumphalism – at least as it pertains to ‘Caesar’s household’ (Phil. 4.22) – has ancient roots, ⁸ but the narrative was given its most prestigious modern voice by J.B. Lightfoot, who, in his famous 1868 commentary, first unveiled Philippians in full triumphalist splendor. Lightfoot described Paul’s successful preaching in Rome as the ‘antecedent to Nero’s persecution’ and the ‘long struggle, which raged for several centuries, and ended in establishing the gospel on the ruins of the Roman Empire’ (1868: 2). Others have echoed the sentiment.

In his 1977 book, Paul’s Letters from Prison, J.L. Houlden describes Paul’s ‘evangelistic strategy’ as ‘triumphant’. By getting thrown into prison in Rome, Paul ‘has acted the Trojan horse, entering into the very heart of the Gentile world to which Christ had dispatched him as apostle’ (1977 [1970]: 58). Here the comparison of Paul to wily Greeks during the Trojan War taps into a military metaphor. It turns Paul into a kind of special forces operative, pits him against the enemy, Rome, and presages the eventual Christian victory in the ‘war’. The Romans, in turn, are cast as Trojan dupes who must now suffer the consequences of ignoring Laocoön’s prophetic warning. ⁹

A few decades later, in his widely read commentary on Philippians, Gordon Fee would put it this way: ‘One should not miss Paul’s obvious delight in this mild “triumph” regarding his arrest, the same kind one senses at the end of the letter when he sends greetings from “all the saints, especially those who belong to Caesar’s household” (Phil 4:22)’. ‘To Paul and to the believers in Philippi’, Fee continues, ‘only Jesus is Lord (2:11), and his lordship over Caesar is already making itself felt through the penetration of the gospel into the heart of Roman political life’ (1995: 114). For Fee, Paul already anticipates a ‘victory’. In fact, with his imprisonment he may even have smirked a bit. And the idea of ‘penetrating to the heart’ is a combat metaphor: the gospel is a weapon and Paul scores a mortal wound on his opponent. Then under the gospel banner, Paul leads the triumphant charge of a Christian army into the enemy’s capital.

More recently, Ben Witherington III had this to say in his commentary on Philippians: ‘Among other things, this greeting [Phil. 4.22b] makes evident that the gospel had reached even into the halls of power, even if it had converted some of its lower echelon. This process of course would eventually culminate in the conversion of Constantine himself in about A.D. 300 or so’ (2011: 283). Here too the ‘gospel’ takes on a life of its own. It has a thrust that overtakes people. In this teleological view of the past that reads Philippians, Acts and later Roman history together, what appears to be a conversion of the ‘lower echelon’ in Caesar’s household is really the prelude to the alleged conversion of the emperor himself, three hundred years later. ¹⁰

Overall, then, the triumphalist narrative is apologetic. It hews close to Christian tradition. It reads the sources too uncritically. It is also celebratory and domineering (see Georgia 2013). It keeps score: there are winners (Christianity) and losers (‘paganism’); there are heroes (Paul) and villains (imperial authorities, non-believers). ¹¹ It touts the power of Paul’s ‘successful preaching’ (i.e., the conversion of others to Christianity) or the power of the ‘gospel’ itself as the determining factor in Christianity’s rise. It works backwards, presuming the ultimate ‘victory’ of Christianity and reading earlier events in light of later Christian institutions. The narrative can also condense time, jumping easily from the first to the fourth century, and in so doing can oversimplify the complex historical processes that generated various forms of Christianity (see Buell 2005: 28). To be fair, the excerpts I have quoted above are largely confessional. They primarily target a Christian-academic audience. Yet this kind of triumphalist narrative, I would argue, is more subtle – and far-reaching – than one might think. Once a narrative takes hold it tends to shape ensuing interpretations. Even scholars who are not overtly confessional, who are not writing for a Christian audience, can still (unknowingly) uphold aspects of the triumphalist narrative. For instance, one of the narrative’s unseen effects is the capacity to trick people into thinking that developments in, say, second- or third-century Rome are directly related to what Paul writes in his first-century letter Philippians (e.g., Frend 1984: 110; Kyrtatas 2006). Not necessarily. Even if members of the Praetorian Guard and Caesar’s household in Rome were Christ followers in the first century, there is no necessary connection with later, and separate, historical events – like Constantine’s ‘conversion’.

But why, one might ask, despite critical biblical scholarship, has the triumphalist narrative persisted? It has been sustained in large part by the much too uncritical use of canonical Acts. ¹² Acts’ apologetic vision is that Paul, the leading figure of the ‘The Way’, as it is called (Acts 9.2), reaches Rome – the ideological center of the Roman Empire and, by this time, the most important place in the inhabited world. The ineluctable movement of ‘The Way’ out of Jerusalem and Judea into the wider Mediterranean world to the center of the Empire, with some of the highest, most powerful authorities – including those who preside over Paul’s legal trials (see Brélaz 2021) – either converting or being exposed to the message, is an authoritative archetype of Christian history. Moreover, although Acts ultimately ends on a cliffhanger, the book even anticipates that the emperor himself will eventually hear Paul’s gospel (Acts 25.11-12; 27.24). The tone of triumph in Acts is hard to miss.

It is Acts, then, more than Philippians itself, that has propelled the larger triumphalist narrative, because, unfortunately, the tendency is to read Paul’s letters alongside Acts, with the latter serving as a kind of guide, if not the interpretive bedrock. Even the most recent, long-awaited Hermeneia commentary on Philippians by Paul Holloway (2017) does just this. Holloway mixes and matches Acts and Philippians, sometimes it seems without even realizing it, with circular arguments as the result. ¹³ Consequently, it is too easy to forget that Acts and Philippians do not match up so neatly – that Paul mentions almost none of the figures, including governors, proconsuls or Caesar, that feature so prominently in Acts. Nor does the Paul of the undisputed epistles ever mention Roman citizenship, let alone an ‘appeal’ or a legal ‘trial’. ¹⁴ Acts is a tremendous work. For the sake of historical clarity, however, it must be separated from Philippians.

Once we recognize the history of the triumphalist narrative and its influence on the interpretation of Paul’s letters, especially Philippians with its tantalizing imperial-esque references, and once Acts is decoupled from the letter, the emerging picture is not as grand as one might imagine. But in its own right it is no less significant. Moving from triumphalism to what I would call originalism highlights three historically valuable aspects of Paul’s letter and its context that offer exciting possibilities for new research.

From Triumphalism to Originalism

First, the letter’s two key terms were, in one sense, rather unexceptional. Praetorium buildings (Phil. 1.13) were common. As I have shown elsewhere (Flexsenhar 2019b), they were scattered throughout the provinces – in capital cities, along major highways (e.g., the Via Egnatia) and in nearby colonies such as at Dium. They could be large, official buildings of an agora or smaller ones with shops and baths attached. The people who frequented these buildings were not simply bigwig Roman administrators or bureaucrats, but locals – public slaves and imperial slaves, for example. This is significant because in Paul’s day the phrase Καίσαρος οἰκία (Phil. 4.22) did not refer to the emperor’s palace or his (free) family members, but to slaves. As I have argued in detail in a recent monograph (Flexsenhar 2019a: 27-44), the key to understanding Paul’s phrase in Phil. 4.22 is ancient slavery terminology. The late first-century curator of Rome’s aqueducts, Julius Sextus Frontinus (c. 40–104 ce), explains that crews of public slaves, whom Frontinus calls familiae publicae, worked on the city’s water ducts alongside crews of imperial slaves, whom Frontinus calls familiae Caesaris. ¹⁵ In other words, familia Caesaris is emphatically an ancient phrase, and it meant a particular local group of slaves, not a bureaucratic network of slaves and freedmen throughout the entire Empire, as many New Testament scholars have suggested. In antiquity, the phrase certainly did not evoke the wealthy, influential freedmen beside the emperor in Rome. ¹⁶ Familia was the preferred term for a particular group of slaves (e.g. familia urbana, familia monetalis, etc.) and it is attested on many inscriptions. (So clear is this terminology in Latin that on inscriptions, freed and slave groups are distinguished as liberti et familia Caesaris). ¹⁷ Likewise, in Greek the term οἰκέτης means ‘domestic slave’ because it derives from οἰκία, the ‘domestic establishment’. The identity marker Caesaris/Καίσαρος was also the preferred term for individual imperial slaves, whether in the Latin West or the Greek East, and this identity marker is again attested on inscriptions. One of the most instructive examples comes from late first-century Athens where an imperial slave named Antiochus describes himself in Latin as Antiochus Caes(aris) n(o)s(tri) and then in Greek as Ἀντίοχος Καίσ(αρος) δοῦλ(ος). ¹⁸ Although the terms Caesaris and familia could have flexible meanings, depending on how the ancient sources chose to use them, when they were joined together the resulting phrase familia Caesaris stressed the slave origins of the individuals under discussion. ¹⁹

These specific groups of imperial slaves (who even referred to themselves as familia Caesaris) were present in every corner of the Empire, including, interestingly enough, right in Paul’s backyard. On an inscription from the city of Coela on the Hellespont, the vital crossing point between Roman Asia and Macedonia, a group of imperial slaves is specifically called familia Caesaris as a counterpart to ‘the locals’ (populus). And this familia Caesaris was in Coela during the Neronian period, 55 ce to be precise; Paul would have passed by them several times as he transited between Asia and Macedonia. ²⁰ Another group, imperial couriers of the emperor Tiberius who lived and worked in ancient Narbo (Gallia Narbonensis) call themselves a familia tabellarii Caesaris and describe their group as a collegium as well, that is, a socio-religious club. ²¹

Still another, more idiosyncratic, example comes from the Alexandrian Jew Philo (c. 38–42 ce). The Judean prince Herod Agrippa had spent much of his life in the imperial household in Rome as a friend of the then-future emperor Caligula. Later, when Agrippa was returning to Judea to claim his throne, he stopped in Alexandria to wait for favorable winds and a good ship, as the emperor Caligula had advised him to do. According to Philo, despite Agrippa’s wholly modest arrival in Alexandria, companions of the evil governor Flaccus stirred up trouble against Agrippa, and Flaccus himself soon became resentful of the new Judean king. Publicly, Flaccus was amiable, but behind Agrippa’s back he encouraged the city to mock him. The Alexandrians apparently did so constantly, even employing poets and jesters to deride Agrippa with dirty farces. Exasperated with what he perceived as incredible disrespect (βλασφημία) for a king, Philo exclaimed: ‘Even if he [Agrippa] wasn’t a king, but one of those from Caesar’s household (τις τῶν ἐκ τῆς Καίσαρος οἰκίας), wasn’t he owed some privileges and honor?’ ²²

Now, it has been suggested that by the phrase ἐκ τῆς Καίσαρος οἰκίας Philo meant ‘people in the emperor’s entourage’. This has then been cited as an aggrandizing analogue to Paul’s use of τῆς Καίσαρος οἰκία in Phil. 4.22. ²³ But ‘people in the emperor’s entourage’ is a misleading translation that misconstrues the rhetoric of Philo’s remark. In his exposé, Philo tried to contrast a guest-king in the emperor’s house with his utter and anonymous (τις) opposite; a slave was an apt counterpoint to Agrippa. ²⁴ In effect, Philo said: Even a slave from Caesar’s household who arrived in Alexandria should have garnered more respect than Agrippa did. That Philo intended to conjure up images of slaves with his phrase τις τῶν ἐκ τῆς Καίσαρος οἰκίας becomes clearer when considering his interrelated treatise Embassy, in which he decries the emperor Caligula’s house (οἰκία) as comprising a company of despicable domestic slaves (οἰκέται) who, unfortunately for Philo, held the keys to his diplomatic mission. ²⁵ Back in Alexandria, we can easily imagine that one of the ‘insults’ mimed at Agrippa’s expense was to depict him as one of Caligula’s household slaves – a Judean king carrying a chamber-pot across the stage would have been a real knee-slapper.

So, although evidence for the exact Greek phrase Καίσαρος οἰκία from Paul’s time is scattered, just as evidence of the exact Latin phrase familia Caesaris is; and while there is some flexibility to the meanings of these phrases, as the above examples demonstrate, there are indeed direct ancient attestations for both, and these imply servile status. The term that Paul uses at the end of his letter to forward greetings from the saints from Καίσαρος οἰκίας is the exact Greek equivalent of the Latin familia Caesaris (Phil. 4.22). There is no other way to express familia Caesaris in Greek – none that I know of at least. Paul’s Greek phrase Καίσαρος οἰκία referred to a local group of imperial slaves, just as the term familia Caesaris most often would. In fact, in the earliest Christian interpretation of Phil. 4.22, from the second-century story called the Martyrdom of Paul, this is exactly how ‘Caesar’s household’ is interpreted. The phrase that the Martyrdom of Paul uses to describe Paul’s new converts is precisely Καίσαρος οἰκίας, and it refers directly–and repeatedly–to a particular group of slaves. In a euphemistic sense only, these are the members of Nero’s palace. In reality they are the οἰκέται, household slaves (Mart. Paul 1). ²⁶ (Here, the Martyrdom of Paul is weaving together both Phil. 4.22 and canonical Acts to create a story for Paul’s death in Rome). The exact phrase Καίσαρος οἰκίας also appears in the early third-century work known as the Refutation of All Heresies, traditionally attributed to Hippolytus of Rome. Here the exact phrase is used in reference to a banker named Carpophorus who is introduced as a member of Καίσαρος οἰκίας. His slave, Callistus, is called as an οἰκέτης (9.7). ‘Hippolytus’ refrains from stating Carpophorus’s exact status outright and most likely has no need to because the language of Καίσαρος οἰκίας evokes an imperial slave (an emperor’s slave owning a domestic slave was a common enough arrangement). At a minimum, nothing in this text overrules the usual connotations of Καίσαρος οἰκίας as a reference to imperial slaves; to the contrary, the mention of an οἰκέτης in close proximity to the expression only underscores the servile etymology of Καίσαρος οἰκίας. ²⁷

Because Καίσαρος οἰκία designates a discrete, local group of imperial slaves, a second observation that should stimulate new approaches is that Philippians was a regional letter. The context was the northern Aegean. Paul and the Philippians were connected across that micro-region. Some recent studies of the Roman colony of Philippi underscore that, from the earliest days, through family networks and economic exchange, the colonists and foreign residents there had connections with neighboring cities, specifically with northwestern Asia Minor (Brélaz 2018). The historical impact of Paul’s key references (praetorium and ‘Caesar’s household’) is not in the longue durée of early Christianity but in the immediate context of Paul’s Aegean mission.

Third, and finally, the letter was provisional. In Phil. 1.13 Paul was boasting a bit, or at least trying to convince the Philippians that their continued financial support of him was not some kind of epic failure. And yet his chains ‘becoming known’ throughout the whole praetorium is a fleeting reference. It alludes to one moment in time. Those people connected to the praetorium building who came to know Paul’s chains, and whom Paul, in turn, deemed significant enough to mention, could have later forgotten Paul’s chains. Likewise, sending greetings from the ‘saints from Caesar’s household’ was not the apostle’s victory lap. It does not mean that, from that point on, Caesar’s household always had ‘saints’ or that ‘once a saint always a saint’ or that ‘saint’ meant one particular thing (like ‘newly-converted Christian’; Flexsenhar 2019a: 39-40). And although the ‘saints’ and Paul’s Philippian addressees already knew each other (Paul was not introducing the two), we do not know what happened next. We do not know how the story ends. To me, that is an opportunity – an open door, as Paul would say (2 Cor. 2.12) – for new explorations.