Colossae has very few archeological remains uncovered and the place is not often visited. About forty-five years ago one of the authors and Miss Olive Greene tried to find the site with the aid of the only guidebook to the area in existence then, A Handbook for Travellers In Asia Minor edited by Major-General Sir Charles Wilson in 1895. The guidebook said that Colossae was situated at “the head of the gorge, a little below the junction of three streams”. It was an occasion like the discovery of a cave full of treasure when we finally made out the citadel with some of its walls still standing, a necropolis, and the cavea of a theater.
We are told by Herodotus that Colossae was an important city in his day. In Xerxes’ march to Sardis and later to Thermopylae he stopped in Colossae in about 481 B.C. Another famous Persian, Cyrus the Younger, marched through in 401 B.C. Pliny the Elder, the first century A.D. naturalist, says that Colossae was one of several famous cities, perhaps because of the revenue from a soft wool dyed a purple “colossinus”.
Apparently the city diminished in importance because of the rise of Laodicea and Hierapolis. It was destroyed in the great earthquake of 60 A.D., but people continued to live there into the eighth century A.D. Arab and Turkish invasions took their toll; now the closest town is Honaz on the slopes of Mt. Cadus (Honaz Dagi) to the south.
Scholarship is divided over whether the Letter to the Colossians is genuinely Paul’s or not; the weight seems to be in favor of his authorship. The main thesis of the letter is the need to keep the truth of the gospel pure, to guard it from the heresy of a syncretism of Judaism and pagan religions. Paul may here have been referring to the priests of the mystery cults, people who “try to enter into some vision of their own” (Colossians 2:18). Or he may have been talking about other oracular events. The first readers of the letter would have understood what Paul was referring to; he did not need to spell out for them or to Immortalize the details of that heresy. Today we are left free to interpret his meaning for ourselves and for our time.
Paul probably did not visit Colossae; the Christian communities there and in the neighboring cities were the result of the work of Epaphrus. Paul knew of them through Epaphrus’s report to him in prison in Caesarea or in Rome.
Another source of Paul’s information about Colossae undoubtedly came from the slave, Onesimus, to whom he became deeply attached. Onesimus’s owner was Philemon of Colossae, the one to whom the remarkable Letter to Philemon was addressed. Paul had apparently converted Onesimus to the Christian faith, loved him as a son, and saw in him the possibility of a leader in the church. The letter pleads with Philemon to free Onesimus and return him to Paul. So far there is no proof that this happened, but it is remarkable if it is only coincidental that Ignatius, the Bishop of Antioch at the end of the first century, talks about an Onesimus who was Bishop of Ephesus about the time that the group of Paul’s letters was published and that this “personal” letter was included.
Colossae,