So far we have seen that Jesus Christ is the centre of Paul's thought and message in the letter. Our next task is to explore how the readers are related to him. Pursuing our metaphor of the building, we aim to see how the individual stones relate to the foundation. Paul uses three key phrases in this letter to express the relationship between Christ and Christians: ‘in Christ’, ‘with Christ’ and ‘knowing Christ’.

‘IN CHRIST’

The phrase ‘in Christ’ (and equivalents) is used about 165 times in the Pauline corpus to express the relationship of believers to Christ. It plays a dominating role in Philippians, occurring twenty-one times (as frequently as in Romans).

Difficulties have sometimes arisen in understanding it because it is assumed that it must have the same force every time it is used. In the most careful study of this phrase in English E. Best has observed that the phrase occurs in nine types of expression. The occurrences in Philippians are allotted by Best to five of his categories. It may be helpful to summarise his analysis and then make some observations starting from it.

Some revision of this allocation is needed. In particular, several of the examples allotted to other groups seem to belong to the category Best calls ‘ordinary’ – cases in which the use of ‘in’ arises out of normal Greek syntax. Let us attempt a reclassification.

Ordinary usage

First of all, Paul can use a verb that is naturally and normally followed by ‘in’, and there is no ‘technical’ use of the phrase.