Before delving into the analysis of the hymn, the author exposes its scholarship which touches on the exegesis of key phrases and terms, origin, authorship, structure, significance within the letter, its background, social context and theological analysis. Gordley notes some general features about this hymn that: 1) it is constructed in Jewish psalm style, 2) it is imbedded with some key Jewish and Greco-Roman motifs, 3) the story is about Jesus, and 4) it is directed to a community that seeks for an identity in the midst of the challenges in their environment. The Philippian hymn presents Jesus’ humiliation and exaltation in a rich manner which has caught the attention of scholars. He opines that it is necessary to understand the broad ancient category of hymn which includes prose and poetry, freestanding song and literary praise of gods so as to be able to recognize New Testament hymns and to avoid dismissing them that they do not fit a particular aspect of ancient conceptions of hymnody.Īfter examining the background and the key features of the ancient context of early Christian worship, the author takes up the analysis of the New Testament hymns beginning with the first three major ones: Phil 2, Col 1 and John 1. The New Testament hymns show that Jesus is praised for his divine origin, exceptional accomplishments and divine honors, while also providing a kind of resistance to the Roman imperial ideology and meet the needs of the present community. In their hymns of praise, the early Christians align with these practices of antiquity, but at the same time diverge from them. They help to shape the hearers and community’s worldview.
They had the role of bringing their audience into an encounter with ultimate reality. Hymns were used in the praise of the divine (gods or divinized rulers) by poets and hymnographers. This shows that the practice of hymns was widespread in antiquity. Here, he discusses hymns in their rhetoric, style and content, and collections of hymns preserved from the ancient world. He is consistent in situating this analysis within the cultural matrices of Greco-Roman hymnody and early Jewish worship with specificity on the Second Temple period. In his analysis of these hymns, he provides a comparative analysis with respect to their culture, literary and theological contexts, while noting the continuities and innovations brought about. With special attention to the features that make the passages (under exploration) hymnic, the author is more convinced especially when they are viewed in light of the conventions of ancient Jewish and Greco-Roman hymnody. It is obvious that he limited his expression to the three passages he is concerned with.
Matthew Gordley does not explicitly show that this could make a passage representing pre-existing material, he is prudent by admitting that the high concentration of these features “that are also shared by a selection of texts across the spectrum of New Testament writings” could make one say that Phil 2, Col 1 and John 1 “were written in such a way that they draw on specific kinds of traditional material” (p. 31). But when these criteria are objectively and broadly considered within a text, one must be confronted with a question: how does one explain this unique difference within the context of the passage? The high concentration of these features and the presence of the criterion of multiple attestations within the New Testament writings is a high sign of the presence of pre-existing material. Other critics include Ralph Brucker, Peppard Michael. A scholar like Fowl Stephen, for example, dwells on two criteria, namely, uniqueness of vocabulary and evidence of redaction based on stylistic abnormalities. The shortcoming on the part of the critics is that they do not consider the criteria as a whole but choose some and argue only for them.
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