The Carmen Christi: How the Earliest Christians Sang the Deity of Christ (Philippians 2:6-11)

Sometime around the year 112, a Roman governor named Pliny the Younger wrote to the emperor Trajan, puzzled about what to do with a stubborn new sect. He had interrogated some of them, and reported one detail almost in passing: before dawn, they would gather and "sing a hymn to Christ as to a god" — carmen Christo quasi deo.¹ It is one of the earliest outside glimpses of Christian worship, and what it shows is a movement that sang about a crucified Galilean using the language reserved for deity. The remarkable thing is that, decades before Pliny's letter, the Christians were already doing exactly that — and we have one of their songs.

The text and its strange music

Tucked into a letter Paul wrote from prison, probably in the early 60s, is a passage that has stopped readers in their tracks for nineteen centuries:

"Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father." (Philippians 2:5–11, ESV)

Even in English the passage reads differently from the prose around it — balanced, rhythmic, almost liturgical. In 1928 the German scholar Ernst Lohmeyer argued in Kyrios Jesus that the lines fall into a deliberate strophic structure, and that Paul is not composing here but quoting.² Most twentieth-century scholarship followed. The standard modern treatment is Ralph P. Martin's Carmen Christi ("Song of Christ"), the title under which the passage is now widely known.³

Why "pre-Pauline" matters so much

If Paul is quoting an existing piece — a hymn, a confession, a creedal fragment — then its theology is older than the letter that contains it. Philippians was written around AD 60–62; and if Paul is indeed quoting prior material, that material predates the letter — plausibly reaching back into the 40s, within a couple of decades of the crucifixion. (The inference is only as secure as the pre-Pauline premise itself, which, as noted below, some scholars question.) This is the linchpin of what scholars call the early high Christology debate. The older liberal model assumed that a "high" view of Jesus — pre-existent, divine — evolved slowly, drifting upward as the church moved from Jewish Palestine into the Greek world. But if a hymn this exalted was already sung in the church's first generation, the timeline for legendary development is badly compressed.⁴ As Martin Hengel argued, more happened in Christology in the years between the crucifixion and Paul's letters than in the seven centuries of doctrinal development that followed.⁵

Reading the Greek with a layperson's eyes

"In the form of God" (morphē theou)

The hymn begins by saying Christ was en morphē theou hyparchōn — "existing in the form of God" (v. 6). The word morphē does not mean mere outward shape, as if Christ only looked divine. The decisive clue is internal: a few words later the same noun describes what Christ became — the "form of a servant" (morphē doulou, v. 7). His servanthood was not a costume; he genuinely became a servant. By the logic of the parallel, the "form of God" he started in must be equally real.⁶ The phrase points to Christ's sharing in the very condition and glory of God.

The hardest word in the New Testament: harpagmos

Christ "did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped" — harpagmon (v. 6). This noun is so rare and difficult that scholars have called it among the most contested words in the New Testament. The root harpazō means to seize or snatch, but what does the noun mean here? Two broad readings compete, traditionally labeled with Latin tags. On a res rapienda reading, equality with God is a thing not yet possessed that Christ refused to seize — he declined to grab at a higher status. On a res rapta reading, it is a thing already possessed that he refused to exploit or cling to.⁷

A widely cited study by Roy W. Hoover (1971) examined the idiom harpagmon hēgeisthai ("to consider something harpagmos") across Greek literature and argued it consistently meant treating something already at one's disposal as a prize to be used for one's own advantage.⁸ N. T. Wright built on Hoover in an influential 1986 article and in The Climax of the Covenant, arguing that the verse is not about Christ refusing to grab deity but about his refusing to exploit a divine equality he already had.⁹ On this now-common reading, the verse renders something like: "he did not regard equality with God as something to be used for his own advantage." The shape of the hymn is then striking: precisely because he was equal with God, he did not treat that equality as a perk to be exploited, but spent it in self-giving.

"Emptied himself" (ekenōsen) — by adding, not subtracting

"But emptied himself" — heauton ekenōsen (v. 7). From this verb comes the theological term＊What "emptied himself" meansIs sayingChrist "emptied himself" by adding — taking the form of a servant and veiling his glory (the Greek names no thing he emptied himself of).Not sayingNot that he set aside, lost, or diminished his deity. He "remained what he was and became what he was not"; full deity and immutability are intact. kenosis. The image is striking, and easily misread. It does not say Christ emptied himself of anything — the Greek has no genitive "of his deity." Grammatically, the sentence tells us how he emptied himself: "by taking the form of a servant." On the reading Gordon Fee defends, the self-emptying is the taking-on, not a laying-down: Christ "emptied himself" precisely by adding humanity, by taking the form of a slave.¹⁰ (How exactly to understand the "emptying" has itself been debated — kenotic theologians have read it as a real self-limitation in the incarnation — but the grammar at least cautions against simply assuming he emptied himself of his deity.) The mystery is not subtraction (deity minus something) but addition and concealment: the one in the form of God veiled that glory beneath the form of a servant. As the older confession says, he remained what he was and became what he was not.

The name above every name, and a borrowed text about YHWH

The hymn pivots at "Therefore God has highly exalted him" (v. 9). The exalted Christ receives "the name that is above every name" — and the climax (vv. 10–11) quotes Isaiah 45:23: "every knee should bow... and every tongue confess." In its original context this is one of the most fiercely monotheistic passages in all of Scripture. In Isaiah, YHWH declares, "I am God, and there is no other," and swears that to him alone "every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear." It is a text about the worship owed to the one God of Israel and to no one else. The hymn takes that text and applies it to Jesus.¹¹ The "name above every name" that Jesus is given is almost certainly the divine name itself, rendered Kyrios ("Lord") — the Greek Old Testament's standard substitute for YHWH. The confession "Jesus Christ is Lord" thus places Jesus on the divine side of the line that Jewish monotheism drew most sharply.

The case, defended

Two of the most important New Testament scholars of the last generation have made this argument with care. Richard Bauckham calls it a "Christology of divine identity." His point is that Second Temple Jews defined the one God not by an abstract essence but by who he is: the sole Creator, the sole sovereign, the only one worthy of worship. The Philippians hymn, drawing on the most insistently monotheistic chapter in Isaiah, includes Jesus within that unique identity — he receives the worship and the name that belong to YHWH alone, "to the glory of God the Father."¹² This is not a demigod squeezed into a crowded pantheon; it is Jesus placed inside the identity of the one God, without abandoning monotheism.

Larry Hurtado approached the same evidence from the angle of practice. In Lord Jesus Christ, he argued that the earliest Jewish believers underwent a startling "mutation" in their devotional life: while firmly maintaining one God, they began to reverence Jesus alongside the Father — singing to him, calling on his name, confessing him as Lord. Philippians 2 is a prime exhibit, and it shows this pattern was not a late Hellenistic drift but erupted astonishingly early among Jews who knew exactly how seriously they were treating the Shema.¹³

The strongest objections, fairly stated

James Dunn and the second Adam

The most serious challenge comes from James D. G. Dunn. In Christology in the Making, Dunn argued that the hymn is best read as Adam Christology, not as a story of a pre-existent being descending to earth. Adam, made in the image of God, grasped at equality with God (Genesis 3) and was condemned to death; Christ, the second Adam, faced the same archetypal choice, refused to grasp, accepted obedience and death, and was exalted. On this reading every line maps onto a contrast between two men, and the hymn need not assert that Christ personally existed before Bethlehem at all.¹⁴ Dunn pressed the point candidly: in his judgment the clearest statement of personal pre-existence in the New Testament is in John's Gospel.¹⁵ (In the second-edition foreword Dunn nuanced his position in response to critics, without abandoning the Adam reading.) Dunn's is a serious reading, argued from the text, and it deserves an answer on the text rather than a caricature.

The ambiguity of harpagmos, and "exaltation" Christology

Two further objections deserve a hearing. First, the harpagmos debate is genuinely unsettled; not everyone is persuaded by Hoover. The word is so rare that confident lexical certainty is impossible, and critics note that the Adam reading actually fits a "grasping at what one does not have" sense rather neatly. Second, some read the hymn as an exaltation Christology: the emphasis falls on the "therefore God exalted him" of verse 9, suggesting reward or adoption — Jesus was elevated because of his obedience — rather than the round-trip descent and return of an incarnate divine person.

The reply — conceding what should be conceded

Here the critic deserves the first word, and then a careful answer. The strongest reply to Dunn was offered by N. T. Wright and Gordon Fee. Wright grants the genuine Adam echoes but argues they are woven into a frame the Adam reading cannot carry: a merely human second Adam was never "in the form of God" before "taking the form of a servant" and being "born in the likeness of men." That sequence — being in God's form, then becoming human — describes a transition Adam never made.¹⁶ Fee adds that the parallel morphē theou / morphē doulou resists being flattened into two human postures.¹⁷ On harpagmos, the honest concession is that the word is contested; but the Hoover–Wright reading does not depend on it alone — it is reinforced by the morphē language and the Isaiah 45 climax, neither of which fits a purely human Jesus comfortably. And against pure exaltation Christology, two things tell. Bauckham's point stands: the one exalted receives worship that Isaiah reserves for YHWH alone, a strange reward to confer on a creature, however obedient. And the hymn's own grammar resists the adoptionist drift: the "therefore" of verse 9 rewards the self-humbling of one who was already "in the form of God" (verse 6, before the "therefore"). The exaltation restores and publicly vindicates a status already possessed, and confers a name — a public station — not a divine nature the exalted one had previously lacked. We should still grant the critics something real: the hymn is poetry, not the creed of Chalcedon, and it leaves much unspoken about how the divine and human are related.

The honest state of the scholarship

Several things are widely (not universally) agreed, and several remain contested. That Paul is quoting pre-existing material is the majority view, though some — including Hurtado himself — have questioned whether "hymn" is the right genre label and whether the strophic reconstructions are secure.¹⁸ The "exploited / used to advantage" reading of harpagmos is now common in major commentaries, but the word remains the subject of live philological dispute. And the pre-existence question — Dunn versus Wright, Fee, Bauckham, and Hurtado — is a real and ongoing scholarly debate, not a settled rout. A careful reader should label the harpagmos rendering and the strict "hymn" classification as contested, while recognizing that the weight of recent scholarship has moved toward reading genuine pre-existence and divine identity in the text.

Conclusion: what it does and doesn't establish

The Carmen Christi does not, by itself, deliver the full doctrine of the Trinity or the two-natures formula of Chalcedon; those took centuries of reflection to articulate. Read alone, it is one strand of New Testament Christology, and a poetic one. But it is an extraordinary strand. It shows that, if Paul is indeed quoting earlier material — the majority view — then within perhaps two decades of the crucifixion, Jewish followers of Jesus were confessing him as one who shared the "form of God," who was given the divine name, and to whom they applied a text that the prophet Isaiah had reserved for YHWH alone. Whatever the unresolved questions about a single Greek word, the trajectory is clear: the worship of Jesus as God is not a late accretion but is found, already confessed (and, if as most have held, already sung), at the headwaters of the Christian movement. Pliny, writing fifty years later, was only catching up.