Open English Translation COL Introduction

Introduction

This letter of Paul was written to the believers in Colossae, a town in Asia Minor (also called Anatolia, now part of modern Turkey) that’s almost 500km overland east of Ephesus. Paul had not yet visited Colossae, but he was very concerned for them and he had sent helpers from Ephesus.

Paul had heard that there were false teachers influencing the believers there in Colossae. They taught that if a person wants to be saved and wants to deepen their faith in God, it’s not sufficient to have faith in the messiah because they said that it’s necessary to obey other restrictions and customs as well as worshipping angels.

So Paul wrote to the believers there in Colossae and explained the truth concerning Yeshua the messiah. He told them that it’s Yeshua who made everything around us, therefore he’s greater than the angels and other unseen powers. He also saw the godliness of his father, and there’s no other source of life for believers other than him. So then it’s necessary that the believers don’t follow human customs and traditions, but rather, it’s necessary that they simply follow the messiah.

It should be noted here that this letter, like most of the scriptures, was dictated to a scribe (See 2 Thess 3:17), so it was an oral letter, quite different from our modern letters which we edit with word-processing software, adding a word back in a previous sentence, combining two short sentences, or breaking an over-long sentence. Oral letters tend to contain a lot of run-on sentences where the thoughts keep flowing without a break, thus 1:3-8 and 1:9-16 are considered by most Greek experts to be long sentences (like this one is 😀), however for us as readers, sentences with around a hundred words in them are very difficult for us to absorb, hence this Reader’s Version breaks those long Greek sentences into a number of smaller sentences, in fact, this kind of adjustment is regularly done throughout the Bible by all major English translations in order to make them easier for us to read, but the disadvantage is that we can sometimes lose whatever the connection was between the consecutive thoughts. The OET tries to be more transparent about such adjustments by placing the Literal Version right beside this text so that the serious student can compare the two.

This is still a very early look into the unfinished text of the Open English Translation of the Bible. Please double-check the text in advance before using in public.