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, in the mid-50s or 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 in the mid-50s or early 60s, depending on where Paul was imprisoned; 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 took up 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. In the fourth century, Gregory of Nazianzus put it exactly: “What He was He continued to be; what He was not He took to Himself” (Oration 29.19).

Read this way, the self-emptying is not a fact to be managed around Christ’s deity but one of the New Testament’s most searching windows into it. The hymn’s whole point is moral — “Have this mind among yourselves” (v. 5) — and it presses the Philippians toward humility by holding up a God who, secure in his equality, did not clutch it but poured himself out in downward love: to a servant’s form, to obedience, to a cross. On the orthodox reading the descent reveals the divine character rather than suspending the divine nature. A deity that had to be laid aside to reach the manger would make the incarnation a smaller thing; a deity fully present in the self-humbling makes it the greater.

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.

The hymn guards that last point with its own final line: the universal confession of Jesus as Lord does not rival the Father or divide the Godhead — it redounds to the Father’s glory (v. 11). That the Son’s worship glorifies the Father is exactly why the earliest Jewish believers could bow to Jesus without supposing they had gained a second god. Far from breaking the Shema, the hymn’s climax is monotheism doing something new: the one God glorified in the exaltation of the Son who bears his name.

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 argues from the text, so the answer must come from the text. Paul genuinely uses Adam–Christ typology, and it is one of his richest ways of asserting Christ’s true humanity. But the typology does not reduce Christ to a merely human second Adam.

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 argue that the Adam reading fits a "grasping at what one does not have" sense. 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 is the 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.

Bart Ehrman and the angel who was promoted

The most searching recent objection comes from the other direction. Where Dunn doubts that the hymn describes a pre-existent person at all, the agnostic scholar Bart Ehrman grants that it does — and argues that the pre-existent one was an angel. In How Jesus Became God (2014) he contends that Paul understood Christ as a heavenly, angelic being, the Angel of the Lord, before he became human.¹⁸ His key text is Galatians 4:14, where Paul reminds the Galatians that they “received me as an angel of God, as Christ Jesus.” Ehrman had long read that as a comparison; he now argues that when Paul uses this construction he “is not contrasting two things; he is stating that the two things are the same thing,” so that the Galatians received Paul “as they would an angel, such as Christ” — and “by clear implication, then, Christ is an angel.” He supports the grammar with a parallel from Paul’s own letters (1 Corinthians 3:1). Read through that lens, the hymn tells the story of an angelic being who humbly became human, obeyed to the point of death, and was rewarded. In Ehrman’s own words: “Christ is a divine being before coming into the world; and at his exaltation he was made equal with God.”¹⁹ On this reading equality with God is the prize at the end of the story, not its starting point. The objection has to be answered on its own terms: it leans on the hymn’s “Therefore God has highly exalted him,” and it claims to explain both what the hymn plainly says (pre-existence) and what it plainly shows (worship) without Christ being God before Bethlehem. As with Ehrman elsewhere, the dispute is about kind, not date: what he denies of the pre-existent figure is not his early date but his rank.

Here is the answer, and it starts with the hymn’s own order. Everything Ehrman places at the end, the hymn names at the beginning. “In the form of God” and “equality with God” both stand in verse 6 — before the incarnation, before the cross, and before the “therefore” of verse 9. On the Hoover–Wright reading defended above, that equality was already his, and the verse says he refused to exploit it. The honest concession is that harpagmos is contested, and Ehrman’s reading needs the other sense, an equality not yet possessed. But the case does not depend on that word alone — it is reinforced by the morphē language and the Isaiah 45 climax. The “form of God” is paired with the “form of a servant”; his servanthood was not a costume, and by the logic of the parallel the “form of God” he started in must be equally real. So the exaltation, as argued above, 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. And the one exalted is the one who took the form of a servant: he is exalted as truly man, without ever ceasing to be what he was.

The decisive difficulty is the text the hymn quotes. Ehrman’s story needs God to raise a being who was not God into the worship the hymn describes. But the hymn describes that worship in the words of Isaiah 45:23, and Isaiah surrounds those words with the very denial a promotion would break: “there is no other god besides me… there is none besides me” (45:21); “I am God, and there is no other” (45:22); and elsewhere, “my glory I give to no other” (42:8).²⁰ An angel lifted into that oath is precisely the “other” the oath excludes. The reward Ehrman’s reading requires is the one the prophet the hymn quotes rules out — a strange reward to confer on a creature, however obedient. Grant, for argument’s sake, that God’s name and authority could be entrusted to a supreme agent; the worship still could not be. Either the hymn contradicts the very text it quotes, or the one who receives YHWH’s oath of worship is not “another” beside YHWH at all — which is what Bauckham means by including Jesus within the identity of the one God (a reading James F. McGrath contests, as noted below). And the hymn’s last line closes the way to a second god: the universal confession of Jesus as Lord does not rival the Father — it redounds to the Father’s glory (v. 11).

Notice, too, who is bowing. The hymn’s knees bend “in heaven and on earth and under the earth” (v. 10): the heavenly beings themselves bow to Jesus. Within the New Testament, when a man falls at an angel’s feet, the angel refuses: “You must not do that! I am a fellow servant with you… Worship God” (Revelation 19:10; so again 22:8–9).²¹ Faithful angels do not accept worship. And where the angel of the LORD receives such reverence in the Old Testament (Exodus 3:2–6; compare the “commander of the army of the LORD” whom Joshua worships, Joshua 5:13–15), the text speaks of him as the LORD himself; that figure gives Ehrman no creature promoted into worship.²² That is exactly why the angel in Revelation — himself God’s messenger — refuses the worship the Lamb accepts. Ehrman’s reading asks us to picture an angel who, alone among his fellow servants, accepts from heaven and earth the worship they refuse. Larry Hurtado, reviewing the book, pressed the same point from the Jewish evidence: he found no evidence of angels receiving worship in any known Jewish circles of Paul’s day, so calling Jesus an angel does not make his worship any easier to explain.²³ A figure you worship and pray to, while confessing God is one, has already outrun the category of supreme agent.

That leaves Galatians 4:14, and it cannot bear the weight laid on it. The grammar allows Ehrman’s reading; it does not require it. Hurtado noted that even Charles Gieschen, whose work Ehrman follows here, offers that reading only as a “possibility,” and that most scholars read the verse as “a kind of stair-step statement,” with “angel of God” and “Christ Jesus” as “ascending categories”: you welcomed me as you would an angel — indeed, as you would Christ himself. Kenneth Schenck makes the same point more simply: the verse implies that angels and Christ are alike in some respect, not that they are the same; and he judges the angel reading of Paul “a bit of an outlier.”²⁴ Paul’s plain statements, meanwhile, put Christ on the other side of the line. Angels appear among the powers that cannot “separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38–39); and Christ is the “one Lord” “through whom are all things” (1 Corinthians 8:6) — and the one by whom every created thing was made cannot himself be one of the created things. One disputed verse, read against its most natural sense, cannot outweigh all of that.

Hebrews shows an early Christian writer facing exactly this question. Its whole first chapter is a sustained argument that the Son is categorically higher than the angels: “to which of the angels did God ever say, ‘You are my Son’?” and “Let all God’s angels worship him” (Hebrews 1:5–6); and the Son is the one “through whom also he created the world” (1:2).²⁵ Hebrews is not Paul, and it cannot settle what Paul meant. But it answers the inference the objection draws from “Therefore God has highly exalted him.” Hebrews too uses exaltation language — the Son is described as “having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs” (1:4) — in the same passage that names him the one through whom the world was made. For this early writer, then, exaltation language did not mean a Christ who began as an angel; it meant the public enthronement of the Creator’s own Son. Exaltation language alone cannot carry Ehrman’s conclusion.

So the honest answer to the objection is no: the Philippians hymn does not fit an angel Christology. Ehrman is right that the hymn teaches pre-existence, and right that it describes a real exaltation after a real obedience. But to make its pre-existent one an angel, his reading has to move “equality with God” from the hymn’s opening line to its ending; make the prophet the hymn quotes give his glory to another; have an angel accept from heaven the worship his fellow servants refuse; and lean, for its Pauline evidence, on one verse that most interpreters read another way. The verdict is bounded, as this essay’s conclusion is: the hymn shows that the one it sings is no angel, not that it states the whole doctrine of Nicaea by itself. The one who was “in the form of God” took the form of a servant and became truly man, and it is he — fully God and fully man — at whose name every knee, in heaven and on earth, will bow.

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 the pre-Pauline origin is itself debated — Gordon Fee argues Paul composed the hymn — and some, including Hurtado himself, have questioned whether "hymn" is the right genre label and whether the strophic reconstructions are secure.²⁶ 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 in the text. Bauckham's divine-identity reading is widely influential, though the category itself is debated (James F. McGrath disputes it).²⁷

One further point of candor matters most, because it answers the worry this whole section keeps raising. If the entire case rested on the pre-Pauline dating, a reader could simply set the hymn aside and be done. It does not. As Gordon Fee observed, Paul nowhere sets out to prove that Christ pre-existed; across more than a decade of letters he everywhere assumes it, in the offhand way a writer treats settled common ground (Gordon D. Fee, Pauline Christology: An Exegetical-Theological Study [Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2007]). An assumption that pervasive is harder to explain away than any explicit proof would be. The same descent surfaces in letters no one reads as a hymn: “though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor” (2 Corinthians 8:9) reads most naturally—though a metaphor of earthly poverty is possible—as a transition from a prior state (a man born poor did not “become” poor for anyone’s sake), and it works as an appeal at all only because its readers already shared the conviction it takes for granted. So even if the Philippians hymn were set aside entirely, the pre-existence it sings would still stand in Paul. (That cumulative, hymn-independent case is developed in the companion essay, Christ Before Bethlehem: Preexistence in Paul.)

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. We hold that this worship is rightly placed — that the one they sang to is, as Nicaea confessed, true God from true God, one God with the Father and the Spirit, a mystery we confess rather than a formula we have mastered. That case is argued from Scripture and the resurrection, and it begins where this essay ends. The gospel needs him to be, and joyfully confesses him to be, fully God and fully man.