Verse 14 has just said that most of the brothers, emboldened by Paul’s chains, are speaking the word fearlessly. Verse 15 immediately complicates that good news: the boldness is real, but the motives are not uniform. Paul splits the preachers into two groups with a single balanced sentence, and then — this is the point — gives them one verb. Both groups κηρύσσουσιν τὸν Χριστόν. The object of the preaching is not in dispute; only the interior driver is.

Three things carry the verse:

1. The μέν … δέ frame is a clean two-part division, not a slur followed by an afterthought. Paul builds the taxonomy deliberately, and English has to show both halves.
2. The two adjunctive καί’s are the hardest small words here. They are not the connective ‘and.’ Each one means roughly ‘even’ — it is remarkable that Christ gets preached from this motive, and (as v. 18 will confirm) Paul finds it remarkable both times.
3. διά + accusative is causal, and with vice-nouns it names motive, not instrument. These men do not preach by means of envy; they preach because of it.

The verse also sets up a real interpretive fork that Paul himself does not close: are the envious preachers rivals of Paul personally, or purveyors of a different gospel? Verse 18 (‘Christ is proclaimed, and in this I rejoice’) strongly suggests the former, since Paul is capable of anathematizing the latter (Gal 1:8). But he never names them, and the apparatus should not name them for him.

A textbook correlative pair: Τινὲς μέν … τινὲς δέ, ‘some … others.’ In epistolary argument the correlation is structural and must survive into English (§10). Dropping μέν as ‘untranslatable’ loses the fact that Paul has built a two-column list, not thrown out an aside.

The glossary policy on μέν … δέ (fixed at Phil 2:23-24) requires the pairing to be marked in English rather than silently dropped. Here the cleanest solution is to let the indefinite pronouns do the work — ‘Some … but others’ — while flagging μέν’s concessive coloring with ‘indeed’ or ‘it is true.’ The concessive tinge matters: Paul is conceding something he does not like before he says what he does with it in v. 18.

Note also that δέ here is mildly adversative but not strongly so. The contrast is between the two motives, not between two messages; the message is held constant by the single verb at the end.

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Both καί’s in this verse (before διὰ φθόνον and before διʼ εὐδοκίαν) are adjunctive/ascensive adverbs, not connectives. Neither joins clauses; each modifies the prepositional phrase that follows: ‘some — even out of envy … others — even out of goodwill.’

The first is easy to feel: it is startling that Christ should be preached out of envy at all. The second is harder. Why would ‘even out of goodwill’ be surprising?

Whichever account is taken, the rendering should not silently delete either καί. The literal tier keeps ‘even’ twice; the smooth tier may carry the first with ‘indeed’ and let the second ride on the contrast, but the note must record what was compressed.

διά with the accusative is causal — ‘because of, on account of’ — as against διά with the genitive, which is instrumental or spatial. This is not a fine point here: with abstract nouns of disposition it names the motive from which the action springs, exactly parallel to the κατά + accusative usage already fixed at Phil 2:3 (κατʼ ἐριθείαν, ‘out of rivalry’).

So: not ‘by envy’ (instrument) and not ‘with envy’ (accompaniment), but ‘out of envy’ / ‘because of envy.’ The men are driven by it. The English ‘out of’ preserves the causal-motive force without the clumsiness of ‘on account of.’

The elided form διʼ before the vowel of εὐδοκίαν is ordinary Koine orthography and carries no weight.

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φθόνος is envy in the strict sense: pain at another’s good, coupled with the wish to see it diminished. It is not the broader ζῆλος, which can be positive (zeal) or negative (jealousy) depending on object. φθόνος has no positive register in Greek at all — Aristotle in the Rhetoric classes it among the pains, and the moralists treat it as unambiguously vicious.

In the NT it sits in vice-catalogues (Rom 1:29; Gal 5:21; 1 Tim 6:4; Titus 3:3; 1 Pet 2:1) and famously as the motive attributed to the authorities at the trial: διὰ φθόνον παραδεδώκεισαν αὐτόν (Matt 27:18; Mark 15:10) — the identical construction, διά + accusative + φθόνον. That parallel is worth pausing on: the same causal phrase that explains the handing over of Jesus explains, here, the preaching of Jesus.

The object of the envy is unstated. Most naturally it is Paul himself — his standing, his converts, his reputation now amplified rather than destroyed by the chains (v. 13).

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ἔρις is contention, quarrelsomeness, the outward fight that envy produces. φθόνος is the interior disposition; ἔρις is what it does in a community. The pairing is near-formulaic: Rom 1:29 (φθόνου, φόνου, ἔριδος), Gal 5:20-21, 1 Tim 6:4.

Keep this distinct from ἐριθεία (Phil 1:17, 2:3), already fixed in the glossary as ‘rivalry / selfish ambition.’ The two words are unrelated etymologically — ἐριθεία derives from ἔριθος, ‘hired canvasser,’ not from ἔρις — and Paul uses both within three verses of each other here. If both are rendered ‘strife’ the reader loses the distinction Paul draws between the fighting (v. 15) and the factional self-seeking that generates it (v. 17).

Policy: ἔρις = ‘strife’ in the literal tier, ‘rivalry’ or ‘contention’ acceptable in smooth registers; ἐριθεία = ‘rivalry / selfish ambition’ per the standing entry. Where both appear in one context, differentiate visibly.

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εὐδοκία is the standing glossary term rendered ‘good pleasure’ — the LXX equivalent of Hebrew rāṣôn, denoting sovereign gracious favor and purpose when God is the subject (Phil 2:13; Eph 1:5, 9; Luke 2:14; Matt 11:26).

Here the referent is unambiguously human: these are men who preach Christ from a well-disposed heart. The glossary entry already anticipates this deviation and prescribes it: where the referent is clearly human (Rom 10:1; Phil 1:15), render ‘goodwill’ and footnote the shift. That is done here.

What εὐδοκία is not: it is not merely ‘good intentions’ in the weak modern sense, and it is not the same as ἀγάπη, which v. 16 will supply as the parallel (οἱ μὲν ἐξ ἀγάπης). The two verses stack complementary descriptions of the same group — goodwill as disposition, love as its substance. Note too the preposition shift from διά + acc. here to ἐκ in v. 16, both causal-source, with ἐκ foregrounding origin.

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The verb comes last and governs both halves of the μέν … δέ pair. This is the architecture of the verse and the ground of v. 18: however divided the motives, the predicate is single and identical.

τὸν Χριστόν is articular and fronted before the verb. The article with Χριστός in Paul often retains titular force (‘the Messiah’) rather than functioning as a name, and the fronting is topicalizing: Christ is the constant, held out in front of the verb, common to both groups. Preserving the word order in English is awkward but the structural rendering above does it, because the emphasis is exegetically live.

κηρύσσω is the herald’s verb — public proclamation by an authorized announcer, not private persuasion or teaching (διδάσκω) or reasoned argument (διαλέγομαι). The present tense is durative: this is ongoing activity in Paul’s immediate environment while he writes. Note that v. 17 will switch to καταγγέλλουσιν for the hostile group, and v. 18 to the passive καταγγέλλεται for the summary; the verbs are near-synonymous and the variation is stylistic, but the shift should be visible in a concordance rather than smoothed to one English word.

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Paul twice writes τινές, ‘some.’ He knows who they are and declines to say. That reticence is data.

On the second group, v. 16 identifies them as acting ἐξ ἀγάπης and as those who know Paul is set here for the defense of the gospel. These are most plausibly the same ‘majority of the brothers’ of v. 14 whose courage his chains have stiffened.

A note on register and prejudice (§5): the verse is a description of intra-Christian rivalry, not an ethnic or party verdict. The translation should be as hard on the envy as Paul is — ‘envy and strife’ is not softened — and no harder. Paul’s own final judgment on the situation is joy, not condemnation, and the rendering must not preempt it.

The patristic tradition worried at exactly the point the modern reader does: how can preaching from a bad motive be a thing to rejoice over?

Chrysostom, in his homilies on Philippians, takes the envious preachers as sound in doctrine but corrupt in intention, and reads Paul’s response as the mark of a soul wholly free of self-interest — Paul cares about Christ’s being named, not about who names him. Chrysostom is emphatic that the envy is directed at Paul, not at Christ.

Theodore of Mopsuestia and the Antiochene tradition read similarly, locating the fault in rivalry over apostolic standing rather than in the message.

Ambrosiaster and later Latin commentators press the pastoral inference: the efficacy of the proclamation does not depend on the preacher’s interior state — an argument that would be taken much further in the Donatist controversy, though Paul himself makes no sacramental claim here.

The patristic consensus, in short, is that the content is orthodox and the motive is not, and that Paul’s joy is directed at the content. That reading is not proof, but it is the earliest available reading, and it converges with the strongest modern argument from v. 18.