πεπληρωμένοι καρπὸν δικαιοσύνης τὸν διὰ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ εἰς δόξαν καὶ ἔπαινον θεοῦ.
peplērōmenoi karpon dikaiosynēs ton dia Iēsou Christou eis doxan kai epainon theou.
πεπληρωμενοι καρπον δικαιοσυνης τον δια ιησου χριστου εις δοξαν και επαινον θεου.Parsing · 12 words
| πεπληρωμένοι | πληρόω | perf pass ptc nom masc pl | having been filled up — Perfect passive: a completed filling with abiding result; the agent is unnamed but is God (divine passive). |
| καρπὸν | καρπός | noun acc masc sg | fruit — Accusative of content after a passive verb of filling — a construction that survives from classical usage. |
| δικαιοσύνης | δικαιοσύνη | noun gen fem sg | of righteousness — Genitive open between source (fruit produced by righteousness) and epexegetical (fruit consisting in righteousness). |
| τὸν | ὁ | art acc masc sg | the [one] — Second-attributive article agreeing with καρπόν, not δικαιοσύνης — grammatically decisive. |
| διὰ | διά | prep + gen | through — Intermediate agency, not ultimate source (that is ἀπό/ἐκ θεοῦ). |
| Ἰησοῦ | Ἰησοῦς | noun gen masc sg | Jesus |
| Χριστοῦ | Χριστός | noun gen masc sg | Christ — Titular force still audible in Paul, though functioning here close to a name. |
| εἰς | εἰς | prep + acc | to, unto — Goal and result together, as fixed for εἰς + δόξα at Phil 2:11. |
| δόξαν | δόξα | noun acc fem sg | glory |
| καὶ | καί | conj | and |
| ἔπαινον | ἔπαινος | noun acc masc sg | praise — Praise directed to God, not praise received by the believer. |
| θεοῦ | θεός | noun gen masc sg | of God — Objective genitive governing both nouns under one article-less pair. |
having been filled up [with] fruit of righteousness — the [fruit] through Jesus Christ — to glory and praise of God.
filled up with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.
filled with the fruit of righteousness which is through Jesus Christ, unto the glory and praise of God.
[state:] having-been-filled-up | [content:] fruit of righteousness | [qualifier:] the-one through Jesus Christ | [goal:] toward glory and praise of God
Overview
This is the last clause of the long opening sentence that began at v. 3, and the last link in a chain of purpose: Paul prays (v. 9) that love may overflow in knowledge and discernment, so that they may test what matters (v. 10a), so that they may be pure and blameless at the day of Christ (v. 10b) — filled up with the fruit of righteousness (v. 11a) — to the glory and praise of God (v. 11b).
Three things carry the weight:
- πεπληρωμένοι is a perfect passive participle. Not something the Philippians do; something done to them, with lasting effect. The agent is unnamed — a divine passive, matching v. 6 (“the one who began a good work in you will bring it to completion”).
- καρπὸν δικαιοσύνης is an agricultural image with deep roots (Prov 11:30; Amos 6:12; Hos 10:12). Whether the fruit is righteousness or comes from righteousness is genuinely open, and the whole Protestant/Catholic reading of the verse has historically pivoted on it.
- τὸν διὰ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ — the masculine article pins the qualifier to fruit, not to righteousness. Christ is the channel through which the fruit arrives.
The clause ends where Paul’s arguments habitually end: not with the believer’s attainment but with God’s glory. Every gain in the chain is redirected upward at the last word.
πεπληρωμένοι
Perfect passive participle of πληρόω, nominative masculine plural, agreeing with the implied subject of ἦτε in v. 10.
The glossary policy fixed at Phil 2:2 stands: the vessel-filling image is live, not dead, and must not be abstracted to “made complete.” Here the metaphor is doubly apt — the participle governs an accusative of content (καρπόν), so the picture is of a container filled with something, and the reader should be able to see the container.
The perfect is doing real work. Paul does not write πληρούμενοι (being progressively filled) or πληρωθέντες (having been filled at a point). The perfect states a settled condition obtaining at the day of Christ: the filling is accomplished and its result stands. Rendered “having been filled up,” with the passive kept passive.
The unexpressed agent is the standard Pauline divine passive. Compare v. 6, where God is the one who completes; and Phil 2:13, where God works both the willing and the working. The reader who has v. 6 in view supplies the agent without being told.
καρπὸν δικαιοσύνης
καρπός — literal fruit or crop, extended in both Hebrew and Greek to the yield of a life or a course of action. The image is live (§8): retain “fruit,” do not resolve to “results” or “character.”
The accusative after a passive verb of filling is a genuine accusative of content, well attested in classical Greek and surviving in Koine (BDF §159). It is not a loose accusative of respect.
The substrate is thick. Prov 11:30 : ἐκ καρποῦ δικαιοσύνης φύεται δένδρον ζωῆς (“from the fruit of righteousness a tree of life springs up”). Amos 6:12 : καρπὸν δικαιοσύνης. Hos 10:12: σπείρατε ἑαυτοῖς εἰς δικαιοσύνην, τρυγήσατε εἰς καρπὸν ζωῆς. James 3:18 uses the same phrase (καρπὸς … δικαιοσύνης), as does Heb 12:11. Paul is not coining; he is reaching for a stock prophetic-wisdom idiom.
Genitive of source / producer — the fruit produced by righteousness. Righteousness (the forensic standing given in Christ) is the root; ethical fruit is what grows from it. This reading is supported by the qualifier τὸν διὰ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ: the fruit arrives through Christ because the righteousness that produces it is Christ’s gift. So O’Brien and Silva, with the Pauline δικαιοσύνη-as-gift usage in view (Phil 3:9).
Epexegetical / appositional genitive — the fruit consisting in righteousness, i.e. righteous conduct is itself the harvest. This matches the idiom most naturally (Prov 11:30 has no forensic sense) and fits the immediate context of moral testing and blamelessness (v. 10). So Fee, who resists importing the Romans/Galatians forensic sense into a paraenetic Philippian context.
Neither reading can be excluded on lexical grounds, and Paul’s δικαιοσύνη ranges across both. The rendering “fruit of righteousness” is retained precisely because English “of” preserves the ambiguity the Greek genitive carries. Any smoother phrasing — “the fruit that righteousness produces,” “the harvest of right living” — adjudicates silently.
Per the mandatory diachronic review list (§9), δικαιοσύνη is checked here: in first-century usage the noun covers both conformity to a norm (the dominant Hellenistic and -wisdom sense) and, in Paul distinctively, the status of being right with God as gift. Both are period-appropriate. The base gloss “righteousness” is retained and the ambiguity flagged rather than resolved.
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τὸν διὰ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ
The article τὸν is accusative masculine singular. καρπόν is accusative masculine singular; δικαιοσύνης is genitive feminine singular. Concord therefore attaches the whole qualifying phrase to fruit, not to righteousness.
This is not a trivial point. Had Paul written τῆς διὰ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ, the verse would say the righteousness comes through Christ — a Phil 3:9 statement. What he wrote says the fruit comes through Christ. The mediation is of the harvest, not (explicitly here) of the standing. A reading that transfers the phrase to δικαιοσύνης is grammatically unavailable, however congenial theologically.
The construction is the second-attributive pattern (noun + article + modifier), which in Koine typically adds a distinguishing qualification: this fruit, the kind that comes through Christ, as opposed to any other alleged crop.
διά + genitive marks intermediate agency. Christ is the channel; God (θεοῦ, final word) is the terminus. Paul keeps the prepositions doing distinct jobs — διά for Christ’s mediation, εἰς for the goal in God — and the translation should not level them.
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εἰς δόξαν καὶ ἔπαινον θεοῦ
εἰς here carries goal and result at once; per the policy fixed at Phil 2:11, English “to the glory of” holds both without tipping toward purpose alone.
δόξα — glory, the settled gloss ( equivalent of kābôd). ἔπαινον — praise, commendation, the verbal recognition of worth. The pairing is doxological formula: compare Eph 1:6, 12, 14 (εἰς ἔπαινον δόξης τῆς χάριτος αὐτοῦ) and 1 Pet 1:7. The single genitive θεοῦ governs both nouns.
ἔπαινος can denote praise received by a person (Rom 2:29; 1 Cor 4:5; 1 Pet 2:14). Here the genitive θεοῦ is objective — praise directed to God — because δόξα in the same phrase can only be God’s glory, and one genitive serves both. The verse does not say the believers’ fruit earns them commendation; it says the harvest terminates in God being glorified and praised. Any rendering that leaves “praise” floating (“to God’s glory and praise”) risks the wrong reading in English and should be avoided in favor of the explicit “to the glory and praise of God.”
The clause closes the whole thanksgiving-prayer period on God, which is Paul’s habit (cf. Phil 2:11; 4:20; Rom 11:36). Register is doxological and should not be flattened into plain prose (§7).
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Text-critical note
/ reads διὰ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ, supported by the great uncials and the bulk of the tradition.
Two variants are worth naming:
- τὸν διὰ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ vs. τῶν διὰ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ — a scattered minority substitutes a plural genitive article, apparently harmonizing to a plural “fruits.” The singular masculine accusative is secure.
- θεοῦ vs. θεοῦ καὶ ἔπαινον ἐμοί — a curious Western reading (attested in the Latin tradition, reflected in some Old Latin witnesses reading gloriam et laudem mihi) shifts the praise to Paul himself, presumably assimilating to Phil 2:16 (καύχημα). It is plainly secondary: it contradicts the doxological pattern and has no Greek support of weight.
Neither variant is doctrinally consequential, and neither dislodges the printed text. Recorded here rather than resolved silently (§4).
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Patristic reading
The Greek fathers uniformly read the verse as a statement about grace producing works, not works producing standing.
Chrysostom (Hom. in Phil. 2) notes that Paul says the fruit comes through Jesus Christ precisely to forestall the hearer crediting himself: the harvest is real and it is the believer’s, but its cause lies elsewhere. He glosses the perfect participle as denoting fullness — nothing lacking, no room left for a competing crop.
Theodoret of Cyrus reads δικαιοσύνη here in the broad ethical sense (the sum of the virtues), which is the epexegetical option above, and takes καρπός as the harvest of the whole Christian life presented at the judgment.
Ambrosiaster, in Latin, renders the phrase fructus iustitiae and connects it to the day of Christ in v. 10: the fruit is what is displayed on that day.
The patristic instinct is worth registering because it consistently holds together what later polemics separated — the fruit is genuinely the believer’s own and genuinely not his own doing. Both are in the syntax.
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Versions
: repleti fructu iustitiae per Iesum Christum, in gloriam et laudem Dei. Jerome’s repleti (perfect passive participle of repleo) tracks the Greek perfect passive exactly; in gloriam holds the goal/result sense of εἰς. Note that Latin loses the article and with it the visible attachment of per Iesum Christum to fructu rather than iustitiae — a case where the Greek is more determinate than the version.
renders with a passive participle and the preposition ܒܝܕ (“by the hand of”) for διά, preserving the mediation sense clearly.
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Genre and register
Genre tag (§10): epistolary thanksgiving moving into intercessory prayer report, with doxological cadence at the close.
The practical consequence: the connectives and the participial chain from v. 9 through v. 11 must stay visible, because the argument structure is the theology. The verse is not a free-standing sentence and the rendering should not be punctuated as one — it hangs on ἦτε in v. 10. The literal tier therefore opens with a bare participle and no supplied subject, and the smooth tier keeps the comma-continuation rather than manufacturing a main clause.
Nestle-Aland, Novum Testamentum Graece. 28th rev. ed. Stuttgart, 2012.
Metzger, B. M. A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament. 2nd ed. Stuttgart, 1994.
Bauer, W., F. W. Danker, W. F. Arndt, F. W. Gingrich. A Greek–English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature. 3rd ed. Chicago, 2000.
Muraoka, T. A Greek–English Lexicon of the Septuagint. Leuven, 2009.
Blass, F., A. Debrunner, R. W. Funk. A Greek Grammar of the New Testament. Chicago, 1961.
O'Brien, P. T. The Epistle to the Philippians. NIGTC. Grand Rapids, 1991.
Fee, G. D. Paul's Letter to the Philippians. NICNT. Grand Rapids, 1995.
Silva, M. Philippians. BECNT. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids, 2005.