Did Paul Write an Epistle to the Laodiceans?

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily match my own. - Dr. Bart D. Ehrman

Near the end of Colossians, the author instructs the Colossians to have their letter read at Laodicea and to read the letter that is coming ‘from Laodicea.’ The wording has traditionally prompted speculation about a separate letter to the Laodiceans, but the Greek does not unambiguously identify it as such. But if this means that Paul wrote a separate letter to the Laodiceans, where is it, and what does it say?

In this article, I’ll look at this mysterious letter and the reference to it in Colossians for which ancient Christian writers offered competing explanations. I’ll also investigate other biblical references to Christians at Laodicea and the reliability of Colossians as a source, comparing it to other Pauline letters in terms of style and content.

Quick note: If you're interested in early Christian writings that didn't make it into the New Testament, check out New Insights into the New Testament: Apocrypha and Canon.

Reference to the Letter in Colossians

The Epistle to the Laodiceans is a noncanonical letter attributed to Paul. However, even the notion of its existence was originally based solely on a brief sentence from Colossians 4:16:

What do we know about Laodicea? It was an ancient Greek city in western Asia Minor and located near the modern city of Denizli, Turkey. It was about 11 miles from the city of Colossae and about 100 miles from Ephesus. There are, of course, Pauline letters written to churches in Colossae and Ephesus, but although Laodicea was close to Colossae and lay within the region of Paul's missionary activity, Colossians 2:1 specifically portrays the Laodiceans as people who had not personally seen Paul.

In addition, in the book of Revelation, John of Patmos writes a short letter, dictated by Christ, to the church at Laodicea, although this was long after Paul’s death. The letter warned the Laodiceans to repent of their lack of enthusiasm for God:

Nevertheless, unlike the canonical letters of Paul, any original Greek Epistle to the Laodiceans appears to have been mislaid early and no version of the letter is seen until the early Middle Ages. However, one ancient Christian writer, Hippolytus of Rome, believed the epistle "from Laodicea" mentioned in Colossians 4 was never actually a lost letter. Instead, material transmitted by Epiphanius in his work The Panarion (Haer. 42) and apparently derived from Hippolytus associates the Laodicean reference with the Marcionite handling of Ephesians. Specifically, Hippolytus seems to have believed that Paul had simply rewritten one of his earlier letters to send to a different church.

In Hippolytus' lost work, he also argued vehemently against the biblical canon made by the 2nd-century heretic Marcion, claiming that Marcion had simply distributed the Epistle to the Ephesians under the name of Laodiceans instead. A 2nd-century author named Tertullian claimed the same thing.

Whether this was truly the case is impossible to confirm with any certainty. In fact, this claim may have been based on the fact that some of the earliest manuscripts of Ephesians—such as Papyrus 46 and Codex Vaticanus—do not contain the words “in Ephesus” in Ephesians 1:1. However, before looking into the Epistle to the Laodiceans any further, we need to examine the source from which the existence of an Epistle to the Laodiceans is indicated: the Epistle to the Colossians.

Is Colossians a Reliable Source?

Critical scholars have known for many years that some of the letters attributed to Paul in the New Testament are actually forgeries. How do they know this? Well, focusing only on Colossians for the moment, Bart Ehrman notes that in the first place, the style of Paul’s letters was quite different from that of Colossians. Here’s an analysis (Ehrman bases these findings on a highly technical book by Walter Bujard):

In other words, statistical stylistic analysis has identified significant differences between Colossians and Paul's undisputed letters. Critics regard these differences, together with other differences in vocabulary and syntax, as cumulative evidence against Pauline authorship. But what about the content of Colossians?

Ehrman remarks that the content differs from Paul’s usual message as well.

But what about Ephesians? If Hippolytus was correct and the Epistle to the Laodiceans was simply a renamed Ephesians, did Paul write Ephesians? Again, a majority of critical scholars say no. For instance, Bart Ehrman again weighs in:

But as with Colossians, the content of Ephesians does not agree with Paul’s own writings, according to Ehrman:

So to sum up, Colossians, the letter from which we learn of an Epistle to the Laodiceans, was not written by Paul. Furthermore, even if Hippolytus was correct in assuming that Laodiceans was actually Ephesians, that book wasn’t written by Paul either. This opens up an important question.

Did the Letter to the Laodiceans Exist at All?

At this point, the case for the existence of a letter written by Paul to the Laodiceans is wearing thin. First, the Greek version of such a letter seems to have been lost for many years. Next, Ehrman notes that although the Muratorian Fragment—a canon list probably written toward the end of the 2nd century—lists most of the books of our current New Testament, it also

Despite all this, there is a Latin version of an Epistle to the Laodiceans in a copy of the Vulgate, a 4th-century Latin version of the Bible, from the year 546 CE, although H.A.G. Houghton writes that the Latin version of the letter was likely based on a third-century Greek composition.

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The letter is extremely short—only 20 verses, in fact. In Early New Testament Apocrypha, Philip Tite notes that although Jerome, the primary translator of the first complete Latin Bible, rejected the letter in the 4th century (he actually said “it is rejected by everyone.”), many Latin translations of the Bible contained this brief epistle for hundreds of years. Even early English translations of the Bible, such as that by John Wycliffe in the Middle Ages, included the letter, translating it from Latin to English.

However, Tite also writes that the Eastern Churches rejected the letter early on as inauthentic, eventually making it official at the Second Council of Nicaea in 787. Modern critical scholars have long agreed with Jerome that the letter is a fake, based partly on the fact that it seems to be a mere cobbling together of verses from other Pauline letters without any substantive message. For instance, scholars like Knopf and Kruger wrote that the letter was “nothing other than a worthless patching together of Pauline passages and phrases, mainly from the Epistle to the Philippians.”

This can be confirmed by checking the sources for the phrases in the Latin letter. The greeting from verses 1–2 is clearly adapted from Galatians 1:1 and Philippians 1:2. The exhortation in verses 3–5 is rephrased from Philippians 1 and Colossians 1. Verses 6–8 on Paul's captivity are drawn from Philippians 1:13–21. The ethical instructions from verses 9–19 are almost a direct copy of Philippians 4:4–9, and the conclusion in verse 20 merges Philippians 3:1 and 4:23 with a reference to Colossians 4:16.

So if this “letter” was not written by Paul (except in the sense that it takes verses directly from his authentic writings) and if, as scholars note, it contains little distinctive theology and is heavily dependent on earlier Pauline texts, why was it created in the first place?

Why a Forged Epistle to the Laodiceans May Have Been Written

We’ve all but confirmed that Paul probably never wrote the fabled Epistle to the Laodiceans and that the Latin version which enjoyed canonical status for years was a forgery. But since the letter doesn’t try to convince readers of any important spiritual truths, why even go to the effort? In his book Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics, Bart Ehrman argues that it was made as an anti-Marcionite forgery.

It was widely believed, as seen in the 4th-century writings of Epiphanius, for instance, that the Marcionites had created a forged letter to the Laodiceans in order to use Paul’s authority to push their agenda (although we have no concrete evidence of this). Ehrman thus writes that this Marcionite version,

In other words, Ehrman believes that, in a misguided attempt to discredit Marcion and his canon, someone created the Latin version we have now to make abundantly clear that the letter referred to in Colossians 4:16—which the author believed was written by Paul—really did exist separately. This would take authority away from any Marcionite version. Ehrman goes on to say

A letter that was too original-sounding or broke new theological ground could have been dismissed as a fraud. Hence, the boring copy of several of Paul’s phrases from his real letters, “proving” that the rumored Marcionite version was a fake.

Conclusion

Did Paul write an epistle to the Laodiceans? The evidence does not provide a compelling case that he did. The entire question begins with Colossians 4:16, but if Colossians was not written by Paul, then its reference to a “letter from Laodicea” cannot straightforwardly be treated as evidence for a lost Pauline epistle. Even if one accepts the traditional Pauline authorship of Colossians, the passage itself does not necessarily mean that Paul wrote a letter to the Laodiceans; it could refer to a letter that had been sent from Laodicea.

Hippolytus and Tertullian connected the passage with Marcion's alleged use of a renamed Pauline letter, while later Christian writers continued to debate what exactly Colossians 4:16 meant. The Latin Epistle to the Laodiceans that eventually circulated in the Western Church does not solve the problem. Its dependence on Paul's authentic letters, its lack of distinctive theological content, and its late appearance all strongly indicate that it was a pseudepigraphical composition rather than a surviving letter written by Paul. The fact that Jerome rejected it and that the Eastern churches likewise refused to accept it as canonical, reinforces that conclusion.

There is, however, an important distinction between saying that the surviving Epistle to the Laodiceans is a forgery and saying that no Pauline letter to Laodicea ever existed. The former conclusion is supported by considerable evidence; the latter cannot be proved with absolute certainty. If Colossians 4:16 preserves an authentic tradition about correspondence between Paul and the Laodicean church, the original letter may simply have been lost. But if Colossians itself is pseudonymous, even that possibility becomes considerably less certain.

The most plausible explanation for the surviving Latin letter is therefore not that it preserves a lost work of Paul, but that it arose much later in response to debates about Paul's letters and the Marcionite movement. As Ehrman's argument suggests, its very ordinariness may be part of the explanation for its existence: a collection of familiar Pauline phrases could serve as a purported “real” Laodicean letter without introducing new theology that might expose it as a fabrication.

Ultimately, the mystery of the “letter from Laodicea” remains unresolved, but the evidence points in one direction. We have no reliable surviving Pauline Epistle to the Laodiceans, and the medieval Latin letter bearing that name is almost certainly not a letter Paul wrote. What began with a single ambiguous sentence in Colossians 4:16 eventually produced centuries of speculation, competing theories, and even a forged letter. Rather than giving us access to a forgotten Pauline epistle, the history of the Laodicean letter instead provides a fascinating example of how ambiguous biblical passages, disputes over the canon, and attempts to defend theological authority could generate new Christian literature.