While there are clearly literary distinctiveness within the writing of the colossian letter including a full thirty-four hapax legomena and a further ten words shared only by Colossians and Ephesians^[4], a similarly disputed letter of Paul, the argument that this, in and of itself, represents cause to reject pauline authorship is dubious. As Kümmel notes, “clear stylistic peculiarities that exist in other pauline letters, give not cause to doubt the Pauline origin of the epistle.”^[5] N.T. Wright goes further suggesting that the writing is in many ways typically pauline with themes stated briefly and poetically^[6] and that textual problems are not in fact significant for authorial conclusions^[7]. That said, both Wright^[8] and Kümmel^[9] acknowledge that the more legitimate questions of authorship surface as we move from style to content.

While Colossians is generally connected to the undisputed Philemon letter^[10] it was Mayerhoff who was the first to call pauline authorship into question in 1838. He pointed toward a dependence on Ephesians and what he called “un-Pauline” ideas within the letter^[11]. F.C. Baur similarly rejected pauline authorship as he read the letter in response to the Ebonite heresy^[12], a controversy that would date the letter post-Paul. While we will need to discuss the occasion of the writing of Colossians letter at greater length as we move forward but we leave that discussion for now. Schweizer ascribed the letter to Timothy^[13] a contemporary of Paul, perhaps reflecting the similarities in household code between this letter and the later pseudoepigraphal letters written to the named Timothy. While Wright himself, holds to pauline authorship, he does notes the peculiar absence of “justification” as a theme in the letter^[14] which could be pointed towards as problematic in assigning the content to Paul.