A single short sentence, and it does more work than its length suggests. Paul has just said he will send Timothy as soon as he sees how his own case turns out (v. 23). Verse 24 is the counter-move in that pair: δέ answers the μέν of v. 23. Timothy is the one being sent; Paul is the one who expects to come himself.

Three things carry the weight:

1. πέποιθα — a perfect, not a present. Paul is not reporting an optimistic mood but a settled conviction he now stands in. English ‘I am confident’ is right, provided one hears the settledness in it.
2. ἐν κυρίῳ — the confidence is located, not merely religiously decorated. Paul does not say he is confident that the Lord will do it; he says his confidence has its sphere and ground in the Lord. This is the same qualification he attaches to the Timothy plan in v. 19 (ἐλπίζω … ἐν κυρίῳ), and it quietly keeps the whole travel itinerary from becoming self-assurance.
3. καὶ αὐτός — ‘I myself also’. The intensive pronoun is the point of the verse: not just my emissary, but me.

Register is plain epistolary prose, and the rendering should stay plain. The hymn is over at v. 11; from v. 19 Paul is doing travel arrangements, and the translation should sound like it.

The second perfect πέποιθα functions as a present with resultative force: ‘I have been persuaded, and therefore stand convinced.’ BDAG treats this perfect of πείθω as a distinct entry — ‘depend on, trust in, be confident’ — precisely because the perfect has lexicalized away from the active ‘persuade.’

The LXX makes the same move constantly, using πέποιθα to render Hebrew bāṭaḥ, ‘trust’ (e.g. Ps 24[25]:2; Prov 3:5), which is why the form carries a faith-colored resonance rather than a merely psychological one. Paul uses it that way elsewhere in this letter: he is πεποιθὼς that the one who began a good work will complete it (1:6), and πεποιθὼς regarding his own remaining and continuing (1:25). The verse before us belongs to that chain.

Rendering choice: ‘I am confident’, not ‘I trust’ (which in modern English collapses toward ‘I hope’) and not ‘I have been persuaded’ (accurate to the morphology but stilted, and it foregrounds the process rather than the resulting state). The literal column keeps the morphology visible; the reading text does not.

Built onbdag · muraoka-lxx · obrien-nigtc

Anarthrous κυρίῳ is nonetheless definite — the standard Pauline formula, where the prepositional phrase regularly drops the article. Render ‘in the Lord.’

The force of ἐν here is debated in a low-stakes way, and the options are not mutually exclusive:

• Sphere: Paul’s confidence exists within the realm of union with Christ — the same ἐν κυρίῳ that governs ἐλπίζω in v. 19 and προσδέχεσθε in v. 29.
• Ground/basis: the Lord is what the confidence rests on.
• Attendant qualification: a Christian equivalent of the Hellenistic deo volente, which is how the sense lands in James 4:15 (ἐὰν ὁ κύριος θελήσῃ).

O’Brien and Fee both resist reducing this to a pious formula: for Paul the phrase marks that his plans are not his own to guarantee. The rendering ‘in the Lord’ preserves all three possibilities and should not be resolved into ‘the Lord willing’ in the main text, which would collapse a locative phrase into a conditional clause.

Per the standing glossary decision, κύριος is rendered ‘Lord’ throughout. Note that the referent here is Christ (cf. v. 19, ἐν κυρίῳ Ἰησοῦ), not the Father — the Greek is left as written, without importing the divine name.

Built onbdag · obrien-nigtc · fee-nicnt · bdf

καί here is adjunctive (‘also’), not connective (‘and’), and αὐτός is the intensive nominative — ‘I myself as well.’ BDF notes that nominative αὐτός with an unexpressed verbal subject is emphatic by definition; Greek needs no pronoun for a first-person future, so its presence is deliberate.

The contrast is with Timothy, not with anyone else’s arrival. Paul is saying: the visit will not be by proxy only. Placing ‘also’ next to ‘I myself’ in English (‘I myself will also come’) reproduces the emphasis without overloading it. Rendering merely ‘I will come soon’ loses the whole rhetorical point of the verse.

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ταχέως can mean ‘quickly, swiftly’ (manner) or ‘soon, shortly, without delay’ (time). Here it is temporal, matching its use of Timothy’s dispatch in v. 19 (ταχέως πέμψαι). The point is imminence, not speed of travel.

A caution worth naming: ταχέως in Paul can carry a note of ‘sooner than one might expect’ (cf. Gal 1:6, οὕτως ταχέως, of a defection that came surprisingly fast). Nothing in this context requires that nuance, so ‘soon’ is the right weight — neither ‘immediately’ (too strong) nor ‘eventually’ (too weak).

Built onbdag · muraoka-lxx

Verses 23–24 form a μέν … δέ pair, and the connective structure carries the argument: τοῦτον μὲν οὖν … πέμψαι (v. 23) / πέποιθα δὲ … (v. 24). ‘Him, on the one hand, I hope to send … but as for myself, I am confident.’

Since μέν is not naturally rendered in modern English, the contrast has to be carried by δέ plus the emphatic ‘I myself.’ Translating δέ as a bare ‘and’ flattens the pairing; ‘but’ overstates the opposition, since these are complementary plans rather than alternatives. ‘But’ with a light touch, or ‘and … myself,’ both work; the reading text uses ‘And … I myself also,’ letting the pronoun do the contrastive work.

Built onbdf · silva-becnt

The verse is textually stable. NA28 prints no variation unit here, and the reading is supported across the major witnesses without division.

One minor orthographic/scribal matter appears in the tradition: a few later witnesses expand ἐν κυρίῳ to ἐν κυρίῳ Ἰησοῦ, plainly under the influence of v. 19. Metzger’s committee does not treat this as a significant variation unit; the shorter reading is original and the longer is a transparent harmonization. Nothing doctrinal turns on it, but it is a useful specimen of how scribes smoothed a passage toward its own immediate context.

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The Greek commentators read the verse pastorally rather than theologically. John Chrysostom, in his homilies on Philippians, notes that Paul does not simply promise a visit but hedges it in the Lord — his point being that the apostle keeps even his own itinerary subject to God, and that this is the model for the readers’ own planning. Theodoret of Cyrus takes the same line, reading ἐν κυρίῳ as the apostle refusing to speak of the future as though it were in his hands.

The early readers thus locate the theological content of the verse exactly where the syntax puts it: not in the promise, but in the qualification attached to it. Whether Paul in fact reached Philippi is not something this verse settles, and the fathers do not press it.

Citations here are to the patristic homilies and commentaries themselves rather than to the modern works listed in the bibliography.

The reading text — And I am confident in the Lord that I myself will also come soon — makes four decisions:

• ‘am confident’ over ‘trust’ or ‘have been persuaded’: keeps the perfect’s stative force in idiomatic English.
• ‘in the Lord’ left unresolved: does not become ‘the Lord willing,’ which would decide the ἐν question the Greek leaves open.
• ‘I myself will also come’: preserves both καί (adjunctive) and αὐτός (intensive) rather than dropping one as redundant.
• ‘soon’: temporal ταχέως, matched to its sense in v. 19 for internal consistency.

Register stays conversational. This is a letter about travel plans, and inflating it into liturgical cadence would misrepresent the genre.