Verse 10 states what the whole ledger of vv. 7–9 was for. Paul has written off his entire inherited capital (κέρδη → ζημία → σκύβαλα) with two purposes stacked by ἵνα in v. 8 — that he might gain Christ and be found in him — and now a third construction, τοῦ γνῶναι, carries the aim one step further: to know him.

Three things are then named as the content of that knowing: him, the power of his resurrection, and participation in his sufferings. The order is deliberately not chronological. Resurrection power comes first, sufferings second — Paul is not describing a career path from cross to crown but the shape of present Christian existence, in which the risen Lord’s power is what makes the fellowship of his sufferings survivable at all.

The closing participle συμμορφιζόμενος binds the verse to the Christ-hymn. The μορφ- root has not appeared since 2:6–7 (ἐν μορφῇ θεοῦ … μορφὴν δούλου), and it will appear once more at 3:21 (σύμμορφον τῷ σώματι τῆς δόξης αὐτοῦ). Paul is being shaped now into the form of the death Christ died, in expectation of being shaped then into the form of the body he now has. The verse is the hinge of that arc.

Everything difficult here is grammatical rather than textual: how τοῦ γνῶναι relates to what precedes, whether the two καί’s are additive or explanatory, and how a present passive participle attaches to a genitive infinitive.

Article + aorist infinitive in the genitive. In classical Greek this is chiefly purpose or (with nouns) epexegesis; in Koine, and especially in the LXX under Hebrew influence, τοῦ + infinitive has expanded to cover purpose, result, content, and even something close to a bare complementary infinitive (BDF §400).

The candidates here:

1. Purpose, dependent on the ἵνα clauses of vv. 8–9: I count all things loss … so that I may gain Christ and be found in him, in order to know him. This makes v. 10 the terminus of the whole chain.
2. Epexegetic/appositional, unpacking εὑρεθῶ ἐν αὐτῷ (v. 9): to be found in him is to know him.
3. Result: with the consequence that I know him.

O’Brien argues for purpose but notes that in a sentence this long the categories blur; Fee treats it as further defining the ἵνα clause rather than subordinating to it. The practical difference is small but real: reading (1) makes knowing the goal of justification, reading (2) makes it its definition.

The rendering so as to know him was chosen because English ‘so as to’ carries purpose while stopping short of the tight subordination of ‘in order that,’ leaving the epexegetic reading audible. Note that Paul does not repeat ἵνα — he switches construction, and the switch is itself a signal that a new but related movement is beginning.

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The aorist infinitive of γινώσκω, not οἶδα. The distinction matters and has been fixed earlier in this corpus: οἶδα is settled knowledge as a state (Phil 1:19, 25), γινώσκω is knowledge as something entered into.

The LXX background is decisive. יָדַע as rendered by γινώσκω regularly denotes relational, covenantal, experiential knowing — of a spouse (Gen 4:1), of YHWH by his people (Jer 31:34 / 38:34 LXX; Hos 6:3, ‘let us press on to know YHWH’), and of his people by YHWH (Amos 3:2). Hosea 6:3 is particularly close in idiom: διώξομεν τοῦ γνῶναι τὸν κύριον — the same verb of pursuit Paul uses two verses later (διώκω, v. 12) and the same τοῦ γνῶναι construction. Whether Paul is consciously alluding is not demonstrable, but the register is unmistakably that of prophetic covenant-knowledge, not Hellenistic γνῶσις.

That matters against the second-century Gnostic reading of this verse, which the Fathers already resist. Chrysostom, commenting here, glosses the knowing entirely in terms of the resurrection’s effect and the believer’s participation in it, not in terms of hidden information.

The aorist is best taken as ingressive-complexive — to come to know, viewed as a whole — rather than as denoting a single momentary event. Paul makes clear in vv. 12–14 that the knowing is not yet finished.

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γνῶναι governs αὐτόν, then τὴν δύναμιν, then κοινωνίαν. The question is what the two καί’s are doing.

Additive: three distinct things are known — him, and resurrection power, and suffering-fellowship.

Epexegetic: the first καί introduces an explanation of αὐτόν — to know him, that is, the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings. On this reading the two nouns spell out what knowing Christ concretely amounts to.

A structural detail is often pressed here. τὴν δύναμιν has the article; κοινωνίαν does not. Some (Lightfoot’s line, followed by many) invoke the Granville Sharp–type unity of a single article governing both nouns — but the shared-article rule does not apply, because the article stands only on the first noun and the second is separated by its own genitive. Fee argues that the anarthrous κοινωνίαν is simply Paul’s normal freedom with abstract nouns after a preposition-less coordination, and that δύναμιν and κοινωνίαν form one complex object. O’Brien is more cautious, keeping the two as related but distinguishable.

The rendering uses em dashes to hold the two readings open: the dashes let the two nouns read either as further objects or as an unpacking of ‘him.’

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Power — effective capacity to act, not abstract potential. In Paul the noun is characteristically the power of God actualized in the gospel (Rom 1:16), in the cross (1 Cor 1:18, 24), and in the raising of Jesus (Eph 1:19–20, where δύναμις is heaped up with ἐνέργεια, κράτος, ἰσχύς precisely of the resurrection).

The genitive τῆς ἀναστάσεως αὐτοῦ is best taken as subjective/source: the power that his resurrection exerts, released into the believer. It is not the power by which he was raised viewed abstractly, still less merely the doctrine of resurrection.

The key exegetical question is temporal. Is this power something known now — the risen Christ’s life operative in present existence (Rom 6:4–11; 8:11) — or something known then, in the believer’s own future resurrection (anticipating v. 11)? Because the participle συμμορφιζόμενος is present tense and describes present conformity to Christ’s death, the present sense must be primary; but v. 11’s εἰς τὴν ἐξανάστασιν shows the future is not absent. Paul’s ordering — resurrection before sufferings — is itself the argument that the power is presently available.

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Resurrection — literally a standing-up (ἀνά + ἵστημι). The Greek word had no fixed technical sense in classical usage; it is the LXX and Jewish apocalyptic tradition (2 Macc 7:14; 12:43; Dan 12:2 in the Greek versions) that gives it the meaning of bodily rising from the dead, and the NT that fixes it.

Particularly worth noting: to a first-century Greek ear, ἀνάστασις did not obviously mean what Paul means by it. Acts 17:32 records the reaction at Athens. The Christian usage is a semantic takeover of an ordinary word, and it stands here without explanation because Paul’s readers already know the vocabulary.

Note that in v. 11 Paul does not repeat ἀνάστασις but coins ἐξανάστασιν — a point taken up in that verse’s apparatus.

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The standing corpus decision on κοινωνία distinguishes fellowship (relational), participation (sharing in a thing), and partnership (joint enterprise with material stake). With a genitive of the thing shared — παθημάτων — the second sense governs: sharing in his sufferings. Compare 1 Cor 10:16, κοινωνία τοῦ αἵματος τοῦ Χριστοῦ, the same construction.

παθήματα is the plural of πάθημα, ‘something undergone.’ In Paul it denotes concrete sufferings, not a disposition, and is used both of Christ’s passion (2 Cor 1:5) and of the believer’s afflictions, with the two deliberately merged (Rom 8:17, συμπάσχομεν ἵνα καὶ συνδοξασθῶμεν; Col 1:24).

κοινωνία is rendered participation rather than fellowship here because the object is a thing undergone, not a company of persons — though the liturgical tier retains ‘fellowship’ for the historic register.

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NT hapax. Present passive participle of συμμορφίζω, σύν + μορφ-: to be brought into the same form as something.

Three things carry weight.

The morpheme. This is the μορφή root of 2:6–7, where Christ existed ἐν μορφῇ θεοῦ and took μορφὴν δούλου. The corpus glossary fixes μορφή as form — the mode of existence expressing what a thing actually is, as against σχῆμα, outward appearance. Paul is not saying he resembles Christ’s death externally; he is saying he is being given the form of it. The same root returns at 3:21 in σύμμορφον, and there the form is that of Christ’s glorified body. The two must be rendered with a visibly shared English root, which is why ‘conformed’ is used at both and not, say, ‘made like.’

The σύν-. Philippians runs on σύν-compounds (σύμψυχοι 2:2, συνεργός 2:25, συστρατιώτης 2:25, συναθλέω 1:27; 4:3, συμμιμηταί 3:17). The prefix here means ‘into the same form as,’ not ‘together with others,’ but the letter’s cumulative use of σύν- is part of why Paul reaches for this word.

The passive. Paul is not conforming himself. The agent is unexpressed — a divine passive, consistent with 1:6 and 2:13, where God is the one at work. Rendering this as a middle (‘conforming myself’) would reverse the theology.

The tense. Present, therefore ongoing and unfinished, which vv. 12–14 immediately confirm.

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NA28 reads συμμορφιζόμενος with the earliest witnesses (𝔓⁴⁶ ℵ* A B). A large body of later manuscripts, including the Byzantine tradition behind the Textus Receptus, reads συμμορφούμενος, from the alternative verb συμμορφόω.

The difference is morphological, not semantic — both mean ‘being conformed.’ The later form is almost certainly an assimilation to the commoner cognate σύμμορφος (which Paul uses at Rom 8:29 and Phil 3:21) and to the more familiar -όω verb pattern. The rarer -ίζω formation is the harder reading and has the older attestation; there is no plausible reason a scribe would create it. Metzger’s committee does not treat the variant as sufficiently significant to require discussion, which is itself an indication of how settled it is.

A handful of witnesses also read τῇ ἀναστάσει for τῆς ἀναστάσεως, again with no serious claim.

Nothing doctrinal turns on either variant. This is the ordinary texture of the manuscript tradition: abundant witness, minor divergence, no doctrinal consequence.

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Chronologically Christ suffered and then rose. Paul names the resurrection first. The inversion is not careless.

Read within the letter, it recovers the logic of 2:6–11 from the far side. There the movement was descent (emptying, slavery, death, cross) then exaltation. Here it is resurrection-power then suffering-fellowship then conformity to death. Paul’s own experience runs in the reverse direction from Christ’s history, because the believer stands after Easter: the power that raised Christ is the precondition of being able to share the sufferings at all, not the reward for having done so.

This is the same structure as Rom 6:4–11 and 2 Cor 4:7–12, where the treasure in clay jars means that the dying of Jesus is carried in the body so that his life may be manifest. It also guards against two distortions the sequence would otherwise permit: a triumphalism that takes resurrection power as exemption from suffering, and a morbidity that makes suffering meritorious.

Early readers saw this. Chrysostom, preaching on the passage, ties the fellowship of sufferings directly to baptism and to the daily dying of the Christian, and insists the power is what makes the suffering bearable rather than what removes it.

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‘so as to know him’ — τοῦ γνῶναι rendered with a purpose marker loose enough to leave the epexegetic reading standing.

Em dashes rather than a plain list — English commas would force the additive reading of καί; dashes let the two nouns read as either coordinate objects or as an unpacking of αὐτόν.

‘participation in his sufferings’ rather than ‘fellowship of his sufferings’ — κοινωνία with a genitive of the thing shared. The liturgical tier preserves ‘fellowship,’ which is the historic English wording, but it is not the base rendering, since ‘fellowship’ in modern English has drifted toward sociability.

‘being conformed’, passive and present — agent unexpressed, action unfinished. The same English root is used at 3:21.

Repeated ‘his’ — αὐτοῦ occurs three times (resurrection, sufferings, death) and is retained each time. The insistent repetition is Paul’s, and flattening it to one possessive would lose the way every element of the verse is anchored to the one person named in αὐτόν.