04_Biblica_Collins_Layout 1 01/04/14 11:47 Pagina 64 Colossians 1,17 “hold together”: A co-opted term My interest here, arising from a study of how Colossians uses the Hebrew Bible, is the second clause of Col 1,17, “and in him all things hold together” (kai. ta. pa,nta evn auvtw|/ sune,sthken) 1. This specific verb in v. 17, “holds together” (suni,sthmi), is not used in this way in the parts of the Septuagint translated from the Hebrew Bible. Scholarly studies typically point to Wis 1,7 (“and that which holds all things together knows what is said”) and Sir 43,26 (“and by his word all things hold together”), as well as to other Second Temple Jewish sources. A major difficulty with these “parallels” lies in the fact that neither uses the same Greek verb for “holding together”: Wis 1,7 uses sune,cw, while Sir 43,26 uses sugkei/mai (and the un- derlying Hebrew is even more different). Is there any usage of terms, antecedent to these passages, against which the readers would have interpreted these texts? If the Hebrew Bible is not the source, then perhaps the proper background is something in the non-Jewish Hellenistic world — whether it be from the philosophers (who were tending toward monotheism), or from popular religion. There is already evidence for this phenomenon in the term “prov- idence” (pro,noia), which, apparently borrowed from Hellenistic philosophers, appears in Jewish Second Temple material (e.g., Wis 14,3; 17,2; 3 Macc 4,21; 5,30; 4 Macc 9,24; 13,19; 17,22), but not in the New Testament (in Acts 24,2 and Rom 13,14 it means some- thing different), and then is widely attested in the early Christian apologists and theologians. It appears likely that the Pauline image of the people of God as a “body” derives, at least in the form we find it in 1 Corinthians 12 and Romans 12, not from the OT, nor even from the Jewish milieu, but rather from the common Hellenis- 1 As a general rule, the translations from Greek and Hebrew follow the En- glish Standard Version with Apocrypha (Oxford 2009). I translate the LXX with the ESV (which is usually based on the MT) in mind. I generally take Graeco-Roman texts from the Loeb edition, adjusting translations to match the ESV as needed; and I generally adapt the Christian Fathers from the translations in the Ante-Nicene Fathers and Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (ANF, NPNF). BIBLICA 95.1 (2014) 64-87