MISSIONARY. CHURCH PLANTER. Pastor. Trusted advisor. All of these descriptions apply to the apostle Paul. He played many different and shifting roles in a slew of churches from Antioch to Rome, and probably felt a sense of responsibility to all of them. The Christian movement, after all, was still in its infancy, and Paul was one of the men most responsible for the spread of the gospel. The church was constantly under threat, whether from persecution, false teaching, or the inability of new believers to keep their newfound faith uncontaminated by their former beliefs and practices.

For all his confidence in Christ, for all the clear evidence of the presence and work of the Holy Spirit in the churches, Paul worried over these congregations. He prayed for them.

And he wrote them letters.

I don’t know about you, but when I’m carrying a load of responsibilities, unfinished business weighs on my mind and heart. Sometimes, when I wake up in the middle of the night, I can’t go back to sleep because I can’t stop thinking about the things that need to be done — even things over which I have less control than I would like.

Imagine, then, what it would be like to worry about a situation — or multiple situations! — in which the only thing you can do is write a letter. You’ve heard about the problem from someone else. You can’t pick up a phone and call, and you have other responsibilities that prevent you from making a visit. All you can do is carefully and prayerfully write a letter which must be hand-carried and may have to travel a long distance. Not only will the letter take time to reach its destination (and who knows what might happen in the meantime), it will also be quite a while before you receive a letter or report back.

Paul seems to have been under constant stress from hearing reports of what was happening in the churches. That’s why, when cataloguing to the Corinthians all the ways he’s suffered for the gospel, he ends the list with these words:

Besides everything else, I face daily the pressure of my concern for all the churches. Who is weak, and I do not feel weak? Who is led into sin, and I do not inwardly burn? (2 Cor 11:28-29, NIV)

“Besides everything else,” he says. What’s the “everything else”? It’s quite the résumé: being repeatedly beaten in a variety of ways, having stones thrown at him with the intent to kill, being shipwrecked and lost at sea, enduring sleeplessness, hunger, and thirst. His life is filled with danger; indeed, the word Paul uses for “danger” or “peril” only occurs nine times in the New Testament, and eight of them are packed into a single verse in his résumé of suffering. But even if he didn’t have to endure all these things, Paul seems to say, he would still bear the emotional burden of his loving concern for all the churches.

But I’ve left something out of Paul’s list of sufferings: he claims to have “been in prison more frequently” than the false apostles who are trying to undermine him in Corinth (2 Cor 11:23). How many times was Paul imprisoned? At least four that we know of: first, in Philippi, then in Caesarea, then twice in Rome. That last imprisonment, according to tradition, ended with his execution under the emperor Nero.

Four of the letters attributed to Paul are known collectively as the “Prison Letters”: those written from prison to the Ephesians, the Philippians, the Colossians, and to a man named Philemon. But Paul doesn’t say where he’s incarcerated; surely the recipients of his letters already knew. In my podcast on the book of Philippians, for example, I take the position that Paul was writing to them while under house arrest in Rome. But that assumption is far from uncontroversial: some scholars argue that Paul was in Caesarea instead, or even Ephesus, despite the lack of definitive evidence that Paul was ever imprisoned there.

The same can be said of the letter to the Colossians. Some interpreters argue that Paul was incarcerated in Rome when he wrote it; some say Caesarea; some say Ephesus, which was by far the location closest to the city of Colossae. The evidence for an Ephesian imprisonment is purely speculative, based on Paul’s statements that he experienced great hardship in the province (2 Cor 1:8) and “fought wild beasts” in Ephesus (1 Cor 15:32). But as New Testament scholar N. T. Wright insists, where Colossians is concerned, it’s the location that makes the best sense of the scant clues that we have. Other scholars, of course, would insist otherwise.

Thus, unfortunately, we can’t answer the question of where the letter was written with any certainty. And to some extent, the question of when depends on the where. If Paul wrote from Ephesus, then the letter was probably written earlier in his ministry, sometime between the years 52 and 56 AD. If he wrote from Rome, the date could be a decade later, closer to 67 or 68 AD, when he was martyred.

And perhaps more importantly, the answer to the question of when feeds back into the question of who. A later date leaves more room for the development of Paul’s theology, particularly in the way he speaks about Christ and the beliefs that were contaminating how the Colossians understood the gospel and the Christian life. That’s a partial answer to those who, on the basis of the theology of Colossians, believe that Paul didn’t write the letter.

Such are the questions with which interpreters wrestle as they fit together the pieces of the Colossian puzzle. Here, I will assume that Paul was the sole or main author of the letter, but will remain noncommittal on the questions of when and where. That leaves us with the questions of what Paul wrote and why. Let’s start with a general overview to get a sense of the whole before we begin unpacking the letter a few verses at a time.