The form of God

Aaron, these are helpful comments. Let me respond.

The practice of divinizing emperors after death would not have been irrelevant for the christological narrative. In Phil. 2:6-11 Christ is given the status of Lord after death, but he is exalted not because he aspired to seize the glory that accompanies imperial power but because he took the form of a servant.

Augustus claimed the status of ’son of god’ - son of the divine Julius. Paul does not use the title here, but according to Romans 1:4 Jesus is ’designated Son of God in power... by his resurrection from the dead’.

You’re probably right, however, to stress the paradigmatic significance of Antiochus Epiphanes. My argument in The Coming of the Son of Man is that Daniel’s account of Antiochus’ assault on Judaism provides the template for the apocalyptic story of the ’man of lawlessness’ in 2 Thessalonians 2:1-12, who in effect makes himself equal to God. Paul envisages an archetypal opponent like Antiochus emerging from the matrix of Roman imperial ideology, but I don’t think we need to be too precise about the actual identity of that figure.

This is not necessarily to discount the argument that Genesis 1-3 is in the background - indeed it may be that the story of the fall presupposes the polemic against pagan imperial apotheosis. But it’s not altogether compelling. Paul has the unusual morphē rather than eikōn; ’taking the form (morphē) of a servant’ (Phil. 2:7) becomes problematic under this reading; and the serpent offers likeness to God in knowing good and evil but not equality of status.

Paul addresses Philippians to the whole church and highlights, as you point out, the responsibility of the overseers and deacons (1:1). The context for this is given, I think, in 1:29-30 - the church is facing severe opposition and suffering, comparable to Paul’s own suffering. This is what is causing selfishness and disunity (2:1-4), so he urges them to respond to these circumstances by adopting the mind of Christ (2:5), who willingly accepted the path of suffering, even to the point of death. The anti-imperial polemic is not of direct substantive relevance to this argument, but it is at least contextually appropriate.