Philippians 4:21

Salute every saint in Christ Jesus. The brethren that are with me salute you. All the saints salute you, especially they that are of Caesar's household. The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit.

Hendriksen, like many others, has supposed that Paul might have written these final verses with his own hand, as he sometimes did, thus making such an inscription a kind of signature.

Knight wrote that "One would expect in a personal letter such as this to find in the closing salutations a number of names."[36] Despite the fact of many scholars accepting such a proposition, such an expectation as that mentioned by Knight is as fantastically unreasonable as any that could be contrived by the imagination. In no other scholarly assumption is there such a vacuum of intelligent reasoning as in this. Think a moment. If Paul saluted a few friends by name at the end of this epistle, it would have been an insult to a hundred others whom he personally knew in Philippi. We have already seen under Philippians 4:3 how the great apostle had avoided getting involved with writing any more personal names (see comment); and for him gratuitiously to have included a list of names here was unthinkable. Any minister who ever served a large church with hundreds of his personal friends members of it will instantly recognize what an unconscionable blunder it would have been for Paul to tack on a list of personal greetings here, unless he had been planning to name "all of those" whom he knew and loved at Philippi. Thus the objection voiced by Knight uncovers no fault of the apostle's but it does show the fuzzy thinking of many scholars on this point.

Salute every saint ... "Only here in the New Testament does [Greek: hagios] (saint) occur in the singular (fifty-seven times in the plural), and even here it is prefaced by every, a strong reminder that Christianity is a corporate affair."[37]

Saints in Caesar's household ... As Barclay said, "This is what we would call the Imperial Civil Service."[38] Caesar's household was all over the empire, wherever his servants or officers were carrying out the emperor's orders. Despite this, it should be remembered that Paul was in Rome when this was written, justifying the conclusion that "Christianity had infiltrated into the highest positions in the empire."[39]

Lightfoot took a step in the direction of identifying some of these with some of the individuals saluted in Romans 16. See my Commentary on Romans under that reference. If slaves of a nobleman in the provinces were willed to the emperor, then upon the death of the nobleman, the slaves would be transferred to Rome, but still retain their family identity, as the "household of Aristobulus" for example; and Lightfoot thought some of the "household" mentioned here might formerly have lived at Philippi. He wrote:

This supposition best explains the incidental character of the allusion. Paul obviously assumes that his distant correspondents know all about the persons thus referred to. If so, we are led to look for them in the long list of names saluted by St. Paul some three years before in the epistle to the Romans.[40]

The Lord Jesus Christ ... The prevalence of this expression in Philippians is significant. Almost every other line in the epistle has it in one form or another, making it rank along with "in Christ" as a distinctive mark of the Pauline theology. All people should praise God for the remarkable beauty and effectiveness of this priceless personal letter preserved through so many dangers and centuries to bless the saints of all ages.

[36] John A. Knight, op. cit., p. 352.

[37] Robert H. Mounce, op. cit., p. 777.

[38] William Barclay, op. cit., p. 87.

[39] Ibid.

[40] J. B. Lightfoot, op. cit., p. 173.