Colossians

Colossians, The Epistle to the, is an Epistle written by St. Paul to the church at Colossae in Phrygia, probably towards the end of the apostle's first imprisonment at Rome, along with the Epistles to the Ephesians and Philipplans. Its object was to caution the recipients against false teachers, whose ritual observances were akin to those of the Essenes (q.v.), and who held a doctrine of angel-worship like that afterwards developed by the early Gnostics. The rest of the Epistle resembles that to the Ephesians. The Epistle is referred to by Justin Martyr, and quoted by Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, and Tertullian. Some German critics like Baur and Pfleiderer, the latter of whom regards most of the Pauline epistles as post-Pauline pamphlets in that controversy between the supporters of Jewish ritual and those of spiritual Christian worship, the opening of which is referred to in Acts xv. and Galatians ii., regard it as a forgery, belonging to the end of the first or beginning of the second century.