Philipians, Especially Chapter 4, as a "Letter of Friendship": Observations on a Checkered History of Scholarship

Abstract

This chapter concentrates on a Forschungsbericht about the relatively brief history of research on Philippians as a letter of friendship, a history which turns out to be rather checkered at points. The friendly type of letter was made more accessible to New Testament (NT) studies when in 1977 Abraham Malherbe published texts and translations of Ancient Epistolary Theorists, including specifically the first of twenty-one kinds of letters in Pseudo-Demetrius. In the mid-1980's a number of treatments of Philippians began to refer to all or parts of the document as a letter involving friendship. Klauck's pupil, Martin Ebner, treated Phil 4:10-20, on the relation of friendship and autarchy, in his dissertation on Peristasenkataloge . One way in which to test perceptions of ancient epistolary and rhetorical forms and topoi in a Pauline letter is to ask how the church fathers in subsequent centuries may have perceived the NT documents. Keywords: letter of friendship; New Testament (NT); Pauline letter; Philippians