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13. φανεροὺς ἐν Χριστῷ. Certainly connect these words. Briefly, they are as if he had written φανεροὺς ὡς ἐν Χριστῷ ὄντας. What was “manifest” about the captivity was that it was “in Christ”; it was due to no political or social crime, but to his union with his Lord.
γενέσθαι. Literally, “Proved, came to be.” But the aorist, as often, asks an English perfect to represent it; our English thought separates the present from the past less rapidly than the Greek’s. “Have proved” expresses, for us, the fact of recent incidents felt in a present result.
ἐν ὅλῳ τῷ πραιτωρίῳ. Πραιτώριον occurs in N. T. Mat 27:27; Mar 15:16; Joh 18:28; Joh 18:33; Joh 19:9; Act 23:35; always in the sense of the residence of an official grandee, regarded as a prætor, or military commander. (Not that the word, in Latin, always keeps a military reference; it is sometimes the near equivalent of villa, though always suggesting a grandiose scale. E.g. Sueton. Aug., 72; Juv. i. 75.) The A.V. rendering here is an inference from these cases; as if St Paul were imprisoned within the precincts of the residence of the supreme Prætor, the Emperor—the Palatium, the imperial House on the Hill of Pales, Mons Palatinus. In St Paul’s day this was a maze of buildings covering the whole hill, and more; Nero having built as far as the Esquiline (Sueton. Nero, 31) in constructing his “Golden House.” The rendering of the A.V. is accepted by high authorities, as Merivale (Hist. Rom., ch. liv.), and Lewin (Life &c. of St Paul, ii. p. 282). On the other hand Lightfoot, on this verse, and in an extensive detached note (Philippians, ed. 8, p. 99), prefers to render “in all the prætorian guard,” the Roman life-guards of the Cæsar; and he collects ample evidence for this use of πραιτώριον from both authors and inscriptions[1]. And meanwhile there is no evidence that the Palace was called Prætorium by Romans at Rome. To this however Lewin fairly answers that St Paul, a provincial, might easily apply to the Palace a provincial term for a Residency, especially after his imprisonment in Herod’s Prætorium (Acts 23, 24). But again it is yet more likely that, as Lightfoot suggests, the word πραιτώριον, in the sense of “the Guards,” would be often on the lips of the “soldiers who kept” St Paul; and so that this would now be to him the more familiar reference. On the whole we advocate the rendering of Lightfoot (and of R.V. text), “throughout the (whole) Prætorian guard.” Warder after warder came to the Apostle’s chamber (whose locality, on this theory, is left undefined; it may have been far from “the Palace,” or close to it), and carried from it information and often, doubtless, deep impressions, giving his comrades at large some knowledge of the Prisoner’s message and of the claims of the Saviour.
[1] He (p. 102) quotes from an inscription the words, Τι. Κλαύδιον οὐετρανὸν στρατευσάμενον ἐν πραιτωρίῳ, “a veteran, who served in the Guards.”
Other explanations of πραιτώριον are (a) the Barrack within the Palatium where a Prætorian detachment was stationed; (b) the great Guards’ Camp (castra prætoriana) just outside the eastern wall of Rome. But the Barrack was too limited a space to justify the phrase ἐν ὅλῳ κτλ.; and there is no evidence that the Camp was ever called τὸ πραιτώριον.
τοῖς λοιποῖς πᾶσιν. “To all other men”; to “the public” at large, whether through the soldiers, or as civilians of all kinds came and went as visitors to the Apostle. The words intimate a wide personal influence.