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Updated: September 25, 2025
It slyly takes advantage of the connection of the name of Ignatius with Syria in the letter of Polycarp to the Philippians; assumes that Syria is the eastern province; and represents Ignatius as a bishop from that part of the empire on his way to die at Rome.
Letters in those days could commonly be sent only by special messengers, or friends traveling abroad; and the Philippians had made a suggestion to Polycarp as to the best mode of keeping up their correspondence. They had probably some co-religionists in Psyria; and a letter sent there to one or other of them, could, at the earliest opportunity, be forwarded.
In the letters attributed to Ignatius of Antioch, the martyr describes himself as a solitary sufferer, hurried along by ten rough soldiers from city to city on his way to Rome; in the letter of Polycarp to the Philippians, Ignatius is only one among a crowd of victims, of whose ultimate destination the writer was ignorant.
So Paul in the letter to the Philippians attributes to 'the peace of God which passeth understanding' a military function, and says that it will 'garrison the heart and mind, and keep them 'in Christ Jesus, which is but the Christian way of saying, 'Great peace have they which love Thy law; and there is no occasion of stumbling in them.
Among these are the Epistles to the Galatians, the Ephesians, the Philippians, the Colossians, and a touching little appeal to Philemon concerning a runaway slave who had become one of Paul's converts at Rome. We are almost certain that the Apostle was released for a time so that he was enabled to revisit many of his converts, as he so earnestly desired to do.
During this imprisonment, probably in 62, he wrote the letters to the Colossians, the Ephesians, the Philippians, and Philemon. From the first imprisonment he seems to have been released; and to have gone westward as far as Spain, and eastward as far as Asia Minor, preaching the gospel. During this journey he is supposed to have written the first letter to Timothy and the letter to Titus.
He used, as a kind of text for his discourse, the famous passage from the Philippians. "Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are elevated, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are amiable, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, have these in your mind, let your thoughts run upon these."
The current feeling of our peers is what we instinctively turn to when we would know whether such and such a course of conduct is right or wrong; and so Paul clenches his list of things that the Philippians were to hold fast with the words, "whatsoever things are of good fame"-that is to say, he falls back upon an appeal to the educated conscience of his age.
In the celebrated passage, "Philippians" ii. 6-11, the aeon Jesus is described as being the form or visible manifestation of God, yet as humbling himself by taking on the form or semblance of humanity, and suffering death, in return for which he is to be exalted even above the archangels.
The Cross is the foundation of His kingdom. In his great passage in Philippians the Apostle brings together, in the closest causal connection, His obedience unto death, the death of the Cross, and His exaltation and reception of 'the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow. The title over the Cross was meant for a gibe. It was a prophecy.
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