A short, bitter sentence. Paul has just said he has no one else of the same soul as Timothy (v. 20); this verse tells why: οἱ πάντες … τὰ ἑαυτῶν ζητοῦσιν — “they all seek their own things.”

Three things carry the weight:

1. The verbal echo. τὰ ἑαυτῶν is the exact phrase from 2:4 (μὴ τὰ ἑαυτῶν ἕκαστοι σκοποῦντες). What Paul forbade the Philippians, and what the hymn shows Christ refusing (2:6–8), is what he finds in the people around him. The Timothy paragraph is not a travel note appended to the hymn; it is the hymn applied, with Timothy as the positive exhibit and “everyone else” as the negative one.
2. The scope of οἱ πάντες. The article makes it collective — “the whole lot,” a definable group — not a universal indictment of every believer alive. Which group is the live question.
3. The antithesis τὰ ἑαυτῶν / τὰ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ. Two neuter plurals, deliberately unspecified: “interests,” “concerns,” “affairs.” English must supply a noun; the Greek leaves it open on purpose, and the open form is what lets 2:4 and 2:21 rhyme.

γάρ is explanatory, grounding v. 20. The chain runs: I hope to send Timothy (19) → I have no one else like-souled (20) → for they all seek their own (21) → but you know his proven worth (22, δέ adversative).

Per §10, connectives in epistolary argument are preserved: render γάρ as “for,” not dropped or softened to a dash in the formal rendering. The δέ of v. 22 then does its proper work as the pivot back to Timothy.

Note the rhetorical shape: Paul does not say “most” or “some.” The blunt οἱ πάντες is stated, then immediately relativized by the exception already named (Timothy) and the exception about to be named (Epaphroditus, v. 25, called ἀδελφὸν καὶ συνεργὸν καὶ συστρατιώτην). The overstatement is felt, and the text should be allowed to feel overstated rather than pre-softened to “nearly all” (§6 of the guiding rules: if the text is hard, the translation is hard).

οἱ πάντες with the article is not identical to πάντες anarthrous. The article makes it the totality of a known group — “all of them,” “the whole company” (cf. 1 Cor 9:22; 10:17; 2 Cor 5:14, where οἱ πάντες designates a bounded set). BDF §275 treats articular πᾶς as collective/summarizing.

So the question is not whether Paul means “literally every Christian on earth” — he plainly does not — but which bounded set he has in view.

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The neuter plural article + genitive is a standard Greek idiom for “the affairs/interests/concerns of X.” It occurs four times in this chapter: τὰ ἑαυτῶν … τὰ ἑτέρων (2:4), τὰ περὶ ὑμῶν (2:19, 20), τὰ περὶ ἐμέ (2:23), and here.

The idiom is culturally transparent rather than opaque (§8): Greek says “the things of X” where English says “X’s interests.” Both are natural; neither is a live metaphor requiring the image be preserved. The literal column keeps “the things of themselves” so the reader can see the construction and the echo of 2:4; the modern column supplies “interests,” which is the semantic domain BDAG assigns to the substantival neuter plural.

On τὰ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ: the genitive is possessive/objective in a loose sense — the concerns that belong to Christ, i.e., his cause, his gospel, his people. Not “the things about Jesus Christ” (that would be τὰ περὶ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ, as in 2:19–20 for the Philippians). Paul is contrasting whose agenda is being pursued, not what topic is being discussed.

Worth noting: to seek τὰ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ is precisely what the hymn describes Christ himself doing — refusing to grasp what was his by right, taking the μορφὴν δούλου. The self-emptying of 2:7 is the definition of not seeking τὰ ἑαυτοῦ.

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ζητοῦσιν — present active indicative, “they seek, are seeking.” BDAG s.v. ζητέω 3: “to devote serious effort to realize one’s desire or objective, strive for, aim (at), try to obtain, desire, wish (for).” It is the language of sustained pursuit, not casual wanting.

The present tense is durative and characterizing: this is what they habitually do, their settled orientation. Not “they happened to seek” but “their pursuit is.” Preserving aspect matters here (§4) — an aorist would report an incident; the present reports a character.

Compare the same verb with the same antithesis in 1 Cor 10:24 (μηδεὶς τὸ ἑαυτοῦ ζητείτω ἀλλὰ τὸ τοῦ ἑτέρου) and 1 Cor 13:5 (ἡ ἀγάπη … οὐ ζητεῖ τὰ ἑαυτῆς). Paul has a fixed idiom for self-interest, and this verse deploys it against actual named-but-unnamed people rather than as general exhortation.

Note a slight shift from 2:4, where the verb is σκοποῦντες (“looking out for, keeping an eye on”). ζητέω is stronger — active pursuit rather than watchful attention. The indictment is sharper than the prohibition.

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NA28 prints Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ with 𝔓⁴⁶ א A B D and the bulk of the tradition. A scattering of witnesses transpose to Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ — the order Paul uses more often in this letter (1:1, 1:26, 2:5, 3:3, 3:12, 3:14). That very fact tells against the transposition: scribes were likelier to conform an unusual order to the author’s habitual one than the reverse.

The variant is not noted in Metzger’s Textual Commentary, which is a fair index of how little turns on it. No difference in sense; recorded here only because §4 requires that meaningful apparatus be visible rather than silently resolved — and in this case the honest report is that the seam is trivial.

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Patristic readers felt the sting and mostly softened it by restricting the referent.

John Chrysostom (Homilies on Philippians, hom. 9) takes οἱ πάντες to mean those then present with Paul, not the church at large, and reads the verse as praise of Timothy by contrast rather than as a census of Christian corruption. He presses the pastoral point: seeking τὰ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ means seeking the good of Christ’s people, since Christ himself has no needs to be served except in them.

Theodoret of Cyrus (Commentary on Philippians) similarly limits the scope, noting that Paul cannot mean all believers since he names Epaphroditus with honor a few lines later.

Ambrosiaster and the Latin tradition read quae sua sunt quaerunt and connect it to the ministerial self-seeking Paul flags in 1:15–17 — closer to option (b) above.

The patristic instinct to narrow the referent is exegetically defensible and matches the internal evidence of vv. 22 and 25. But it should be noted as interpretation, not read back into the rendering: Paul wrote οἱ πάντες, and the translation says “they all.”

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The register here is plain, disappointed prose — a sharp turn down from the hymn’s liturgical height. Per §10 and §7, it should read that way: no elevation, no rhetorical padding. Short clause, blunt negation, no verb in the second half.

Decisions taken:

• γάρ → “for” (retained, §10 epistolary connectives).
• οἱ πάντες → “they all” (collective force preserved; not narrowed to “most” or expanded to “everyone”).
• ζητοῦσιν → “seek” (present habitual; “are seeking” in the formal column to mark aspect).
• τὰ ἑαυτῶν → “their own interests” in the modern column, “the things of themselves” in the literal, so the 2:4 echo stays visible in at least one line.
• The elided verb in the second clause is left elided in the literal rendering; English tolerates “not those of Jesus Christ” without repeating “they seek.”

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