A letter to a small town in the Lycus valley warning against a teaching we cannot reconstruct, addressed to a city that an earthquake may have flattened around the time it was written.
What the book is
Colossians argues that Christ is sufficient — that the addressees do not need the additional observances, visions and intermediaries being urged on them. It contains a compact hymn on Christ as the image of the invisible God, a warning against a rival teaching, and a household code.
Paul had not visited Colossae. The church was founded by Epaphras, and the letter is written to people who knew Paul only by reputation.
How it is put together
Chapters 1 and 2 are theological argument, built around the hymn and the warning. Chapters 3 and 4 are ethical instruction and greetings. The final greetings are unusually detailed and overlap substantially with those in Philemon, which is addressed to the same town.
The relationship with Ephesians is the central literary fact about the letter: about a third of Ephesians has a counterpart here. Which direction the dependence runs, and whether either author is Paul, are connected questions.
The teaching it opposes
It cannot be reconstructed with confidence, and attempts to name it have varied over a century of scholarship: a Jewish mystical movement, a form of local syncretism, an early gnostic strand, a philosophical school. What the letter opposes is legible only through the rebuttal — food rules, festivals, ascetic practice, angelic worship, visionary claims.
This is a general problem with reading polemic. A letter attacking an opponent is evidence about what the author wanted his readers to think the opponent held, which is not the same as evidence about the opponent.
The dating question
If Paul wrote it, it comes from an imprisonment, roughly the same window as Philemon and Philippians — the mid-fifties if Ephesus, the early sixties if Rome.
A majority of critical scholars doubt Pauline authorship, arguing from a style with long strings of dependent clauses unlike Paul’s usual sentence structure, from vocabulary, and from a theology in which the resurrection of believers is presented as already accomplished rather than awaited. Defenders answer that a different subject and a secretary can account for the style, and that the ancient attestation is early.
A pseudonymous Colossians would belong to the following generation, roughly 70 to 90 CE.
One external fact bears on this. Tacitus records that Laodicea, a few miles from Colossae, was destroyed by an earthquake in the early sixties CE and rebuilt without imperial help. Whether Colossae suffered the same fate and whether it was still a functioning town afterwards is not established, but a letter to a town that had just been levelled would be odd, and the point is used in the dating argument on both sides.
Where the external record touches it
Colossae is one of the very few significant New Testament sites that has never been systematically excavated. The mound is identified and surveyed, but it has not been dug, which means the town itself contributes almost nothing.
Laodicea and Hierapolis, both named in the letter, are extensively excavated, and the Lycus valley’s textile and wool-dyeing economy is well documented.
Related: the overviews of Ephesians, the closest parallel text, and Philemon, addressed to the same town.