Colossians 1:15-20 · Featured Study
The Supremacy of Christ
Six verses, and the New Testament's densest run of high Christology outside John 1 and Hebrews 1. Paul does not argue for Christ's supremacy point by point — he states it, in a structured hymn that reaches for one word, all, eight times over: Christ made all things, holds all things together, is preeminent in all things, and reconciled all things to himself through the blood of his cross — with “all creation” at verse 15 and “all the fulness” at verse 19 rounding the count to eight. One phrase in the middle of it — firstborn of all creation — became the fault line of the fourth century's largest doctrinal fight, and it is handled here, not hidden.
The Hymn, Line by Line
— two balanced strophes — Christ and creation, then Christ and the new creationMany interpreters — across a wide range of positions — read 1:15-20 as a structured, possibly hymnic unit: rhythmic, parallel Greek that may echo early Christian worship material Paul is citing or adapting. That is a literary observation, not a settled fact, but the structure itself is plain on the page: two strophes, each opened by the same phrase — “who is.”
- Colossians 1:15a →eikōn — image
“Who is the image of the invisible God.”
Not a picture but the disclosure that perfectly represents its original — the same category Paul uses in 2 Cor 4:4. To see Christ is to see what God is.
- Colossians 1:15b →prōtotokos — firstborn
“The firstborn of all creation.”
A rank word, not a birth-order word — the single most contested phrase in the hymn. Presented at full strength and answered below.
- Colossians 1:16 →en, dia, eis — in, through, unto
“For in him were all things created … whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; all things have been created through him, and unto him.”
Three prepositions stack instrumental, mediating, and teleological causation onto Christ — a scope that includes the very powers a rival philosophy might venerate, since they too were made by and for him.
- Colossians 1:17 →synestēken — hold together
“And he is before all things, and in him all things consist.”
Not merely the originator but the continuous upholder — the same office Hebrews 1:3 assigns him: “upholding all things by the word of his power.”
- Colossians 1:18 →head of the body — firstborn from the dead
“And he is the head of the body, the church … the firstborn from the dead.”
Here prōtotokos is unambiguous — first to rise, preeminent among the raised. That reading is the interpretive key back into the harder use of the same word at verse 15.
- Colossians 1:19 →plērōma — fulness
“For it was the good pleasure of the Father that in him should all the fulness dwell.”
Nothing of deity held back or distributed among intermediaries. Calvin, commenting on this verse, reads the fulness as deposited in Christ for the church to draw on rather than hoarded (Commentary on the Epistle of Paul to the Colossians).
- Colossians 1:20 →reconciliation — the blood of his cross
“And through him to reconcile all things unto himself, having made peace through the blood of his cross; through him, I say, whether things upon the earth, or things in the heavens.”
The furthest-reaching reconciliation statement in Paul — read alongside verse 16's matching creation statement, an inclusio bracketing the whole hymn.
Both strophes open the same way — “who is” — and both turn on the same title: prōtotokos, sitting mid-clause in each (v15, v18). The second use — firstborn from the dead — is unambiguous. First to rise, preeminent among the raised, not the first member of a category he stands outside of. That is the reading the first strophe's harder use of the same word is asking to receive.
The Refrain — ALL, Eight Times
— the word that carries the hymn, isolated and countedAcross six verses Paul reaches for the same word eight times — six of them the flat phrase “all things,” joined by “all creation” at verse 15 and “all the fulness” at verse 19. It is not repetition for effect: each occurrence adds a distinct claim, and together they leave no category of reality, visible or invisible, outside Christ's agency, sustaining, preeminence, or reconciling work.
- 1“all creation”Colossians 1:15Scope — preeminent over the whole category
- 2“all things created”Colossians 1:16Agency — the one through whom everything came to be
- 3“all things … through him, and unto him”Colossians 1:16Teleology — the goal everything was made for, not only the means
- 4“before all things”Colossians 1:17Priority — existing prior to everything he made
- 5“in him all things consist”Colossians 1:17Cohesion — the ongoing coherence of everything that exists
- 6“in all things he might have the preeminence”Colossians 1:18Preeminence — the hymn's own stated purpose for everything above
- 7“all the fulness”Colossians 1:19Deity — the full divine essence, not a fraction of it
- 8“reconcile all things”Colossians 1:20Redemption — the scope of what the cross accomplished
Was Christ the First Thing Created?
— 1:15b — the phrase Arius built a christology on, opened rather than avoidedThe strongest case — the partitive reading
On its face, “firstborn OF all creation” sounds like Christ belongs to the class he is firstborn from — the way a firstborn son belongs to the family he is firstborn of. Arius, and in the modern era the Watchtower tradition, read the phrase this way: Christ as the first and highest-ranking member of the category “all creation,” not its maker.
The answer — three moves
- 1
The word's own biblical usage is rank, not birth order. Psalm 89:27 calls David — Jesse's youngest son, not literally first-born of anyone — God's “firstborn, the highest of the kings of the earth.” The word names supreme status, not birth sequence.
- 2
The very next clause gives the reason he is called firstborn: for in him all things were created (1:16) — which is incoherent if Christ is himself a member of the class he creates. A maker cannot belong to the category of things made.
- 3
The hymn's own parallel settles the grammar. “Firstborn from the dead” (1:18) plus a genitive of source clearly means first to rise, preeminent among the raised — not the first corpse. The identical construction in verse 15, read the same way, yields preeminent over all creation, not a member of it.
The same grammatical-and-contextual method answers the parallel misreading of John 1:1c (“a god”) — a hard form, misread by anti-Trinitarian movements, corrected by immediate context. For the wider identity-of-the-error question this verse sits inside, see the Colossians hub's Contested Points.
The Keynote Words
— four words carry the whole hymnThe same territory — wisdom hidden in Christ rather than distributed among intermediaries — is developed from its Old Testament root on Christ Our Wisdom, the Proverbs 8 study this hymn's plērōma language answers back to (Col 2:3).