Nine words, one of them missing. This verse is the hinge on which Philippians 2 turns: it closes the exhortation of vv. 1–4 (unity, humility, regard for others) and opens the great Christ-passage of vv. 6–11. Everything in the hymn hangs grammatically from this sentence.

Three things carry the weight:

1. φρονεῖτε is a present imperative, second person plural. Paul is not asking individuals for a private attitude adjustment; he is prescribing a shared disposition for a congregation. This is the fifth time the verb has appeared in eighteen verses (1:7; 2:2 twice, 2:5), and it will return (3:15, 19; 4:2, 10). φρονέω is not merely intellect — it is the settled orientation of mind, will, and affection.

2. The second clause has no verb. The Greek reads simply ‘which also in Christ Jesus.’ What the translator supplies decides the theology of the verse. Supply ‘was’ and the hymn becomes Christ’s own inner disposition, a pattern to imitate. Supply ‘is’ (with an existential or possessive sense) and it becomes the mindset proper to life within the sphere of Christ. The manuscripts do not settle this; the tradition is genuinely divided.

3. ἐν ὑμῖν is ambiguous in the same way. ‘Among yourselves’ (communal, matching vv. 1–4) or ‘in yourselves’ (interior)? The plural pronoun and the whole run of vv. 1–4 favour the communal reading, but the two are not finally separable.

The rendering here supplies ‘was’ and reads ἐν ὑμῖν as ‘among yourselves,’ but the alternatives are set out below rather than buried, because the choice is real and the evidence does not force it.

φρονεῖτε — present active imperative, 2nd plural. BDAG gives the range as ‘to have an opinion, think, form/hold an opinion,’ and then, more to the point here, ‘to give careful consideration to something, set one’s mind on, be intent on,’ with a further nuance of ‘to develop an attitude based on careful thought.’ The verb reaches past cognition into disposition and commitment. It is what one’s mind is set on, and therefore how one lives.

The Philippian concentration is striking. Ten of Paul’s twenty-three uses of φρονέω fall in this short letter. In 2:2 he has just used it twice — τὸ αὐτὸ φρονῆτε (‘think the same thing’) and τὸ ἓν φρονοῦντες (‘minding the one thing’). By 2:5 the verb is already loaded: it means the shared, self-forgetting orientation demanded in vv. 3–4. τοῦτο φρονεῖτε therefore does not introduce a new idea; it names the one already argued and grounds it in Christ.

Against modern English ‘think,’ which is too cerebral, and ‘attitude,’ which is too casual, ‘have this mindset’ / ‘be minded’ holds both the cognitive and volitional sides. In the LXX the verb carries the same weight of orientation — cf. Isa 44:18 (οὐκ ἔγνωσαν φρονῆσαι) of those whose minds are shut, and Wis 1:1 (φρονήσατε περὶ τοῦ κυρίου ἐν ἀγαθότητι), where it governs a whole posture toward God.

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The relative clause ὃ καὶ ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ has no verb. Greek tolerates this easily; English does not. What gets supplied is an interpretive act, and it decides the shape of vv. 6–11.

The rendering above follows (a) — supplying ‘was’ — because the syntactic parallel of ἐν ὑμῖν … ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ is close and because the hymn’s verbs (ἡγήσατο, ἐκένωσεν, ἐταπείνωσεν) narrate a subject’s own decisions. But the ‘ethical-reading’ tab preserves (b), and no reader should be left thinking the question is closed.

On καί: adjunctive, ‘also,’ marking the correspondence of the two spheres. It is not merely connective, and dropping it in English (‘which Christ Jesus had’) loses the explicit link Paul draws.

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ἐν ὑμῖν — ἐν + dative plural. Two readings:

• ‘among yourselves’ (distributive/communal). This matches vv. 1–4 exactly: σύμψυχοι, ἀλλήλους ἡγούμενοι, τὰ ἑτέρων. The problem Paul addresses is relational (cf. 4:2, Euodia and Syntyche), and the cure is a corporate mindset.
• ‘in yourselves’ (interior, distributed to each). Grammatically unobjectionable; ἐν + dat. plural of persons can mean ‘within’ each.

The communal sense is stronger here on contextual grounds, and it is what the plural imperative φρονεῖτε already implies. But the disjunction is soft: a mind held among a congregation is held in its members. English ‘among yourselves’ preserves the corporate force without excluding the interior one.

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The formula occurs some sixty times in the undisputed Paulines and is normally incorporative — denoting union with Christ, the sphere in which believers stand (Rom 8:1; 1 Cor 1:30; Gal 3:28; Phil 1:1, 4:21). That statistical weight is the backbone of reading (b) above.

But the formula is not invariably incorporative. Where the context is Christ’s own action or person, ἐν Χριστῷ can function straightforwardly of him (cf. 2 Cor 5:19, θεὸς ἦν ἐν Χριστῷ). Here the deciding factor is the immediately preceding ἐν ὑμῖν: two ἐν-phrases in one short sentence, in explicit correspondence signalled by καί. The most natural reading of a matched pair is that they function alike — ‘in/among you’ … ‘in Christ Jesus’ — which pushes toward a personal rather than incorporative sense for the second.

Note also the word order Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ (title first). In Paul this order tends to appear in formulaic and prepositional phrases; it is not by itself evidence for either reading.

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τοῦτο is cataphoric — it points forward, not back. Its content is delivered by the ὅ-clause and, through it, by vv. 6–11. Paul’s habit is to use τοῦτο retrospectively (‘this is what I have said’), so the forward reference here is worth flagging: it is what makes v. 5 a hinge rather than a conclusion. The imperative gathers up vv. 1–4 in substance while grammatically launching the hymn.

The neuter relative ὅ agrees with τοῦτο. There is no antecedent noun; the pronoun pair simply frames the content that follows.

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NA28 prints τοῦτο φρονεῖτε ἐν ὑμῖν ὃ καὶ ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ, with strong and early support (𝔓⁴⁶ א* A B C 33 and others).

The principal variant is the addition of γάρ after τοῦτο (τοῦτο γὰρ φρονείσθω ἐν ὑμῖν …), read by the majority of later Byzantine witnesses, together with a shift of the imperative from active plural φρονεῖτε to passive singular φρονείσθω (‘let this be minded among you’). A few witnesses have the middle/passive without γάρ.

The shorter, harder active-plural reading is almost certainly original. The Byzantine form smooths the syntax in two ways at once: γάρ supplies the missing logical connective between vv. 4 and 5, and φρονείσθω removes the awkwardness of a plural imperative followed by a verbless relative clause. Scribes tidy; they rarely roughen. The rating in the UBS apparatus is high, and the variant makes no doctrinal difference — but it is a clean specimen of how the Byzantine tradition eases a hard construction, and it is worth seeing rather than hiding.

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The patristic tradition is close to unanimous on the exemplary reading, and reads the hymn as Christ’s own humility offered for imitation.

John Chrysostom (Hom. in Phil. VI–VII) takes v. 5 as the introduction to a moral argument from Christ’s example, and presses the point hard against the Philippians’ vainglory: if the one who was in the form of God did not clutch at his dignity, the argument from lesser to greater is overwhelming. Chrysostom’s whole homiletic strategy assumes ‘which was also in Christ Jesus.’

Ambrosiaster, commenting in Latin (hoc enim sentite in vobis quod et in Christo Iesu — note the enim, the γάρ variant, in his text), likewise reads Christ’s condescension as the pattern for the believer’s disposition.

Augustine repeatedly cites the verse when arguing that Christ’s humility is the remedy for human pride (De Trin. I.7; Enarr. in Ps. 58), taking the mind of Christ as something the believer must put on.

The force of this near-consensus should be weighed but not overweighed: the Fathers were reading in Greek and Latin as native or near-native speakers of the ecclesiastical idiom, which counts for a good deal on a question of ellipsis. But they also had strong catechetical reasons to want the exemplary reading, and the incorporative sense of ἐν Χριστῷ is a Pauline datum they were not systematically tracking.

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The question is not merely grammatical. If v. 5 introduces Christ as exemplar, then vv. 6–11 are Christian ethics grounded in Christology — the highest claims about Christ’s identity are deployed to settle a quarrel between two women in a Macedonian congregation. That is a startling and characteristically Pauline move, and it should not be softened.

If v. 5 introduces the hymn as the story that constitutes the community, then the imperative is indicative-driven: become what you are.

Either way, two things hold. First, Paul does not treat Christ’s pre-existence and self-emptying as speculative doctrine; he treats it as morally binding. Second, the mind commanded is not an ideal to be admired but a disposition to be enacted — the present imperative demands continuance, and the plural demands it of a body, not a solitary believer.

Bauckham’s point about divine identity is relevant in a limited way here: what makes vv. 6–11 function as either example or ground is that the one described is included in the identity of the one God of Israel. The exhortation would be trivial if the subject were merely a heroic man.

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