Verse 12 denied two things — that Paul has already taken (ἔλαβον) and that he has already been completed (τετελείωμαι). Verse 13 restates the first denial in sharper personal terms and then, without finishing the sentence, pivots into the image that carries verses 13–14: a runner.

Three features do the work.

1. The denial is doubly emphatic. ἐγὼ ἐμαυτόν stacks an unnecessary subject pronoun on top of a reflexive object. Paul is not merely saying “I haven’t arrived”; he is saying I, for my own part, do not count myself to have arrived — whatever others may be counting.
2. The sentence breaks off. ἓν δέ has no verb. Greek can do this; English can too, with a colon. Supplying “I do this one thing” smooths a rhetorical fracture that is part of the argument’s urgency.
3. The two participles are one picture, not two. Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead are the front and back of a single racer’s posture — head forward, body extended, the track already run irrelevant. The chapter’s ledger metaphor (κέρδη/ζημία, vv. 7–8) has given way to the stadium, and ἐπεκτεινόμενος — a word found nowhere else in the New Testament — is the hinge.

What Paul denies is possession, not progress. The perfect infinitive κατειληφέναι denies a settled state of having laid hold. The present participles assert continuous action. The verse is about a man in motion who refuses to file a completion report.

Greek verbs carry their subject in the ending, so an expressed ἐγώ is always marked. Here it stands beside the reflexive ἐμαυτόν, which functions as the accusative subject of the infinitive κατειληφέναι. Nothing grammatically requires the pronoun.

The stacking has a polemical edge in context. Verses 15 and 19 show that some in or around the Philippian orbit hold a different self-assessment (ἑτέρως φρονεῖτε), and v. 12’s ἤδη τετελείωμαι reads as a denial of a claim someone was making. The emphatic ἐγώ says: my accounting of myself differs.

Note also that οὐ negates the finite verb, not the infinitive. Paul does not say “I reckon that I have not laid hold”; he says “I do not reckon myself to have laid hold.” The difference is small in effect but real in form, and the literal tier preserves it.

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λογίζομαι is a bookkeeping word before it is a psychological one. BDAG’s first sense is to determine by mathematical process, to reckon or calculate; the derived sense is to hold a considered view as the result of such reckoning. Hellenistic commercial papyri use it of entering sums in a ledger, and the LXX uses it for reckoning something to a person’s account (Gen 15:6; Ps 31:2 LXX).

That matters here because Philippians 3 has been running an accounts metaphor since v. 7: κέρδη entered on one side, ζημία on the other, ἥγημαι and ἡγοῦμαι as the verbs of valuation. λογίζομαι belongs to the same domain. Paul is auditing himself and declining to post the entry.

‘Consider’ or ‘think’ is too soft. ‘Count’ and ‘reckon’ both keep the accounting register; ‘reckon’ is used in the literal tier for its precision, ‘count’ in the smooth tier for readability.

Keep it lexically distinct from ἡγέομαι (‘consider, regard,’ vv. 7–8) — both are valuation verbs and Paul uses both in this chapter, so the English should not merge them.

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The perfect active infinitive of καταλαμβάνω, the same verb used twice in v. 12 (καταλάβω, κατελήμφθην). The κατά- prefix is perfective: not merely take (λαμβάνω, v. 12) but seize, grasp down, get full hold of. In athletic contexts the verb is used of overtaking and catching a competitor or reaching the goal.

The perfect tense is the point. An aorist would deny that the seizing ever happened. The perfect denies a present state of having seized — the completed-with-abiding-result aspect. Paul is not denying that Christ has laid hold of him (v. 12 says the opposite, in the aorist passive). He is denying that his own laying hold stands finished.

The object is unexpressed in Greek. Later scribes felt the gap and filled it (see the textual note). English must supply something or leave the verb dangling; ‘laid hold of it’ supplies the least, pointing back to the ἐφʼ ᾧ of v. 12 without naming a referent Paul withheld.

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After κατειληφέναι the critical text leaves the object unstated. The manuscript tradition divides:

• οὐ (‘not’) — 𝔓⁴⁶, ℵ*, A, D*, and others; adopted by NA28.
• οὔπω (‘not yet’) — ℵ², D², Ψ, and the Byzantine majority.

The variant is small but not empty. οὔπω softens the denial into a temporal ‘not yet,’ which is doctrinally comfortable and rhetorically flatter. The harder, blunter οὐ is better attested in the earliest witnesses, and the shift from οὐ to οὔπω is the sort of clarifying assimilation scribes make — quite possibly under the influence of the ἤδη … ἤδη of v. 12, which supplies exactly the temporal frame οὔπω makes explicit. The reverse change is hard to motivate.

Metzger’s committee treated the external evidence for οὐ as decisive while noting the intrinsic pull toward οὔπω. In practical terms the sense Paul intends is scarcely different: v. 12’s ἤδη already establishes the ‘not yet.’ But the text should be printed as written, and the reader should see that the bluntness is original and the softening secondary.

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ἓν δέ — ‘but one thing’ — has no verb, no article, and no clear syntactic anchor. It is an accusative of respect or a nominative absolute; the grammarians decline to settle it because Greek does not require settling. The construction is aposiopetic: Paul begins a contrast and abandons the frame for the image.

Three ways of handling it in English:

1. Supply a verb (‘but one thing I do’). Makes a smooth sentence; erases the fracture.
2. Supply a colon (‘but one thing:’). Preserves the ellipsis while signalling that what follows unpacks it.
3. Leave it bare with a dash. Most faithful to the Greek’s abruptness; hardest to read.

This apparatus uses (2) in the smooth tier and (3) in the literal tier. The supplied-verb solution is rejected because the missing verb is not recoverable — is it ‘I do,’ ‘I pursue,’ ‘I say,’ ‘matters’? Choosing one invents information.

The ἕν also does real work against the chapter’s list-making. Verses 5–6 catalogued seven credentials; v. 8 tallied πάντα as loss. Against that inventory, one thing.

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The correlative pair τὰ μὲν ὀπίσω … τοῖς δὲ ἔμπροσθεν is a balanced antithesis, and per standing policy (§10) the correlation is rendered rather than dropped. English handles it with ‘the things behind … and the things ahead’ where the parallel word order itself carries the correlation; ‘on the one hand / on the other’ is retained in the wooden tier only, since in modern English it reads as pedantic where Greek reads as tidy.

Note the case shift: τὰ ὀπίσω is accusative (direct object of the middle ἐπιλανθανόμενος, which in Koine takes either accusative or genitive), while τοῖς ἔμπροσθεν is dative, governed by the ἐπι- of ἐπεκτεινόμενος. The two participles are formally parallel but syntactically distinct, and the second’s dative is what gives the straining its direction.

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ἐπιλανθάνομαι is not memory failure. In the LXX it is the standard word for the covenantal failure to keep in view — Israel forgetting YHWH (Deut 6:12; 8:11, 14; Hos 4:6), or God forgetting the afflicted (Ps 9:13, 19 LXX). It denotes ceasing to take something into account, letting it drop out of the reckoning that governs action. That is precisely the sense here, and it pairs neatly with λογίζομαι earlier in the verse: what Paul refuses to enter on the ledger, he also refuses to look back at.

The present tense is durative: a sustained refusal to attend, not a single act of erasure.

What is τὰ ὀπίσω?

The English keeps ‘what lies behind’ open. Any specification (‘my former achievements,’ ‘my Jewish past’) resolves a question the Greek leaves unresolved.

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A New Testament hapax, and a rare word generally: ἐπ-εκ-τείνομαι, ‘stretch myself out toward.’ Two prefixes on τείνω (stretch): ἐκ- gives extension outward from the body, ἐπι- gives direction toward a target. The middle voice makes the subject the one doing the stretching to himself.

The image is anatomically specific. The runner near the finish has head thrust forward, torso leaning past the feet, hands reaching — the whole body committed ahead of where it currently is. This is not general eagerness; it is a described posture. Per §8 the live metaphor stays literal: ‘straining forward,’ ‘stretching out toward.’ Renderings like ‘pressing on’ or ‘eager for’ discard the body.

The athletic frame is not read into the text from outside. It is fixed by v. 14’s βραβεῖον (the prize awarded by the βραβεύς, the games official) and κατὰ σκοπόν (toward the mark), and it belongs to a live Pauline metaphor family (1 Cor 9:24–27; Gal 2:2; Phil 2:16 ἔδραμον).

Chrysostom (Hom. Phil. 11) reads the participle exactly this way — the runner who has not yet grasped, whose body is already past his feet — and draws from it the pastoral point that the one who thinks he has arrived has stopped running. The image was felt as live in the fourth century AD, which is evidence it was not a dead idiom in the first.

Coordination with the main verb. Both participles are grammatically subordinate to διώκω in v. 14, so v. 13 does not stand as a complete sentence. The comma at the end of the printed verse is correct; the thought runs on.

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Standing policy applies: masculine plural rendered ‘brothers,’ with the mixed-sex referent noted rather than absorbed into the text. Philippi’s congregation demonstrably included women in leadership (Euodia and Syntyche, 4:2–3, described with the same συναθλέω used of the whole church at 1:27), so the referent here is certainly mixed. The Greek’s masculine plural is the language’s default for such a group, and that default is data (§3).

The vocative marks a discourse boundary. Paul used it at 1:12 to open the report on his circumstances and at 3:17 to open the imitation appeal; here it signals that vv. 13–14 restate and intensify v. 12 rather than continuing it.

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The verse became a load-bearing text in the patristic argument about Christian perfection.

Chrysostom takes the denial at face value and turns it into method: Paul, who had been caught up to the third heaven, does not count himself to have laid hold — therefore the mark of maturity is precisely the refusal to claim maturity. He notes the paradox with v. 15 (ὅσοι οὖν τέλειοι), where Paul does call himself and others τέλειοι, and resolves it by distinguishing relative maturity from final attainment.

Theodoret of Cyrus reads τὰ ὀπίσω as the labors already accomplished, and stresses that Paul forgets them so as not to be slowed by satisfaction — closer to the ‘past Christian attainment’ reading above than to the pedigree reading.

Gregory of Nyssa (Life of Moses, Hom. in Cant.) made ἐπεκτεινόμενος into a technical term: epektasis, the doctrine that the soul’s progress into the infinite God has no terminus, so that perfection consists in never ceasing to advance. This is a genuine theological development from the text rather than an exegesis of it, and per §9 it is recorded here as reception, not folded into the rendering. But it shows how strongly the fourth century felt the forward-leaning force of the participle.

The patristic consensus on the immediate point is uniform and worth stating plainly: nobody in the early Church read this verse as Paul denying he was saved. They read it as Paul denying he was finished.

The verse is easily misheard in two directions, and the grammar rules out both.

Against anxiety. Paul is not uncertain of his standing. Verse 12 states that he has been laid hold of by Christ (κατελήμφθην, aorist passive) — the decisive act belongs to Christ and is stated as accomplished fact. Verse 9’s righteousness ἐκ θεοῦ is not in question. What is denied is arrival at the goal of v. 11 (the resurrection from the dead) and the completion of v. 12 (τετελείωμαι). The security is Christ’s grasp; the incompleteness is Paul’s.

Against complacency. Equally, the perfect κατειληφέναι rules out treating the Christian life as a transaction concluded. The two present participles are unfinished business by design. This is the same logic as 2:12–13: work out your own salvation because God is the one working in you — the divine accomplishment grounds rather than replaces the human straining.

The verse thus sits exactly where Philippians keeps putting things: what Christ has done is settled and past; what the believer does is present and continuous; and the second follows from the first rather than competing with it.

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• ‘I do not count myself’ over ‘I do not consider myself’: keeps λογίζομαι in the accounting register that vv. 7–8 established, and keeps it distinct from ἡγέομαι.
• ‘to have laid hold of it’ with a bracketed-supplied object in the literal tier: the Greek object is absent and the earliest witnesses do not supply one. English cannot leave the verb transitive-and-bare, so the least is supplied.
• ‘But one thing:’ with a colon rather than an invented verb. The ellipsis is preserved.
• ‘what lies behind / what lies ahead’ in the smooth tier, ‘the things behind / the things ahead’ in the literal: the neuter plurals are unspecified and must stay so.
• ‘straining forward’ rather than ‘pressing on’: retains the body. ‘Pressing on’ is also wanted for διώκω in v. 14 and must not be spent here.
• Trailing comma retained. The sentence is incomplete; v. 14 finishes it.