What Does Colossians 2:11 Mean?

(11) **The circumcision made without hands.**—This abrupt introduction of the idea of circumcision would be difficult to understand, were it not for the knowledge of the enforcement of Jewish observance so strangely mixed with this “philosophy” at Colossæ. (Comp. Ephesians 2:11, “Ye who are called Uncircumcision by that which is called Circumcision in the flesh made with hands.”) The phrase “made without hands” is so constantly used of heavenly realities (as in Mark 14:58; 2Corinthians 5:1; Hebrews 9:11; Hebrews 9:24), as opposed to earthly symbols, that it comes to have the positive sense of “spiritual.” It is defined below as “the circumcision of Christ”—that which Christ has given us in Himself—in contradistinction to the old circumcision which is now “nothing.” (On the treatment of this subject in the Epistles of this period, comp. with this passage Ephesians 2:11-12; Philippians 3:2-3, and see Notes there.) **In putting off the body . . .**—The words “of the sins” are not found in the best MSS. They are, no doubt, an explanatory gloss to soften the harshness of the phrase “the body of the flesh.” (1) What “the body of the flesh” is we see clearly by Colossians 3:9, “having put off the old man.” It is, like the “body of sin” (in Romans 6:6) and the “body of death” (in Romans 7:24), the body so far as it is, in the bad sense of the word “flesh,” fleshly. The body itself is not “put off:” for it is not evil; it is a part of the true man, and becomes the temple of God. It is only so far as in it the flesh rebels against the spirit, and the “old man is gradually corrupted by the lusts of deceit” (Ephesians 4:22), that it is to be “put off.” (2) But why the “body of the flesh,” and not the “flesh” simply? The answer is, no doubt, that which Chrysostom here gives, that the bodily circumcision was but of one member, in mere symbolism of one form of purity; the spiritual circumcision is the putting away of the whole of the power of the flesh, and that, too, not in symbol, but in reality.