Verse 17 gave a positive command — become fellow imitators, and fix your attention on those who walk according to the pattern. Verse 18 supplies the reason with γάρ: there is a rival way of walking, and it is not hypothetical. The verse is built on one deliberate contrast of tense: ἔλεγον (imperfect, with πολλάκις — “I kept telling you, over and over”) set against λέγω (present, with a participle — “and now I am telling you, weeping as I do it”). The escalation is not in the content of the warning but in the cost of giving it.

Three things carry the weight. First, περιπατοῦσιν stands with no modifier: Paul reuses the walking verb from v. 17 and lets the negative sense be supplied by contrast, which is why English needs either a dash or a supplied phrase. Second, the adjunctive καί before κλαίων is ascensive, not merely connective — it marks the tears as the increment over the earlier warnings, and dropping it leaves only a bland temporal contrast. Third, τοὺς ἐχθρούς is accusative, standing in apposition to the relative οὕς rather than to the nominative πολλοί, so the identification is delivered as the content of what Paul says, held back to the end of the sentence for effect.

Who these people are is not stated, and the apparatus does not decide it.

Anarthrous πολλοί, substantival: “many [people].” Paul gives no name, no location, and no doctrinal label. The number is significant — this is not a fringe — but the referent is left open, and the whole exegetical difficulty of vv. 18-19 follows from that reticence.

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περιπατοῦσιν stands without adverb, prepositional phrase, or complement — unusual for Paul, who normally qualifies the verb (περιπατεῖν ἀξίως, Phil 1:27; κατὰ σάρκα, Rom 8:4; ἐν ἀγάπῃ, Eph 5:2). The qualifier here is recoverable only from οὕτω in v. 17: many walk, but not thus.

This is why every English rendering must add something. A bare “for many walk” is grammatical but empty in English, which does not use “walk” absolutely of moral conduct. Two honest options: mark the ellipsis typographically with a dash, or supply the contrast in brackets. What must not happen is the insertion of an unbracketed characterizing phrase (“many live as enemies,” “many conduct themselves badly”) into the literal tier, because that imports into the verb what Paul left to the paragraph.

Per the standing glossary entry, περιπατέω is rendered ‘walk’ and not flattened to ‘live’ — the motion image is live in this chapter, which has run on running, straining, and a mark to be reached since v. 12.

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The two tenses of one verb are the spine of the verse.

ἔλεγον is imperfect with πολλάκις, an unmistakably iterative combination: repeated past telling, not one occasion and not a single completed report. English present perfect (“I have often told you”) collapses the repetition into a single accomplished fact and severs it from the present tense that answers it. Per the standing glossary policy on imperfect + πολλάκις, the rendering keeps the durative shape: “I used to tell you often.”

λέγω is present, and its object is unexpressed. Greek can carry ὑμῖν over from the first clause; English generally needs to repeat “you” or leave the verb intransitive with a dash. The literal tier brackets the supplied pronoun.

One further note: ἔλεγον need not mean these warnings were delivered in person at Philippi rather than in earlier correspondence — the verb is neutral as to channel. Nothing should be built on it either way.

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The καί here is adverbial, not a connective joining clauses: it stands immediately before the participle and is ascensive. The sense is “and now, even weeping, I say it” — the tears are the new element, the increment over all the previous warnings.

This extends the policy already fixed at Phil 1:18 (adjunctive καί before a prepositional phrase) into the participial slot. Dropping the καί, as smooth English translations are tempted to do, leaves νῦν δέ carrying only a temporal contrast (“but now I tell you”) and loses Paul’s actual point, which is that the manner of telling has changed, not merely its date.

Some would take καί as adjunctive to νῦν (“and now too”), i.e. as marking the present instance as one more in the series. That is grammatically possible but weaker: the participle immediately following is the natural scope, and it is the participle that is new information.

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κλαίω is audible mourning, not quiet sadness. Its LXX and NT register is the wail over the dead and the lament over the doomed (Gen 37:35; Mark 5:38; Luke 19:41, Jesus over Jerusalem), and it must be kept distinct from δακρύω (“shed tears,” John 11:35) and λυπέομαι (“grieve,” inward). Paul is not reporting a mood; he is reporting behavior.

The participle is present, coincident with λέγω — attendant circumstance, not cause or means. Render “weeping” as a participle in the literal tier rather than converting to a prepositional phrase (“with tears”), which hides the verbal form.

The tears are exegetically load-bearing. Chrysostom takes them as evidence that these are people who once stood inside: one does not weep over an enemy army, but over the fallen among one’s own. Whether that inference is sound depends on the identity question left open above, but the tone is data and should not be softened into rhetorical convention. Compare Rom 9:2 and Acts 20:31, where Paul’s grief over insiders is explicit.

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τοὺς ἐχθρούς is accusative, and the case decides the syntax. It cannot be in apposition to the nominative πολλοί; it stands in apposition to the accusative relative οὕς, the object of ἔλεγον/λέγω. So the structure is:

many are walking — about whom I used to tell you often, and now tell you weeping — [namely,] the enemies of the cross of Christ.

The designation is thus the content of Paul’s speech about them, withheld until the sentence’s last breath. That word order is rhetorical: the identification lands after the tears, so the reader hears the grief before the verdict.

English must preserve this. Rendering “many walk as enemies of the cross” makes the phrase a predicate of the walkers and loses the appositional link to what Paul says; it also smooths away the deliberate suspension. The dashes in the smooth tier are the least intrusive equivalent.

A minority takes τοὺς ἐχθρούς as loosely appositional to πολλοί by attraction or anacoluthon, which Koine tolerates. That reading changes little in sense but does erase the withheld-verdict structure, and the plain case agreement with οὕς is decisive enough to prefer.

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ἐχθρός names a relation of standing hostility, and per the glossary it is rendered ‘enemy’ uniformly. Two guardrails apply.

First, the word does not by itself assert conscious intent. Rom 5:10 calls us ἐχθροί while we were still helpless, and the state there is objective standing rather than deliberate malice. So “enemies of the cross” need not mean these people set out to attack it; their walking is what puts them in that position. The rendering must not be strengthened to ‘opponents’ (reserved for the ἀντικείμενοι of Phil 1:28, where active opposition is in view) or ‘adversaries.’

Second, per §5 the term is translated at face value — neither softened (“those out of step with the cross”) nor sharpened. Paul’s language is severe; it stays severe in English, and the severity is not amplified by the note.

The LXX background is the psalmist’s and Israel’s enemies (Ps 26:11; 91:10 LXX), which colors the phrase without settling who is meant.

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The genitive after ἐχθρούς is objective: enemies of the cross, hostile toward it, not enemies belonging to it.

σταυρός is rendered ‘cross’ per the standing glossary entry; no alternative. But note what the noun is doing here. Paul does not write ἐχθροὶ τοῦ Χριστοῦ (“enemies of Christ”) but ἐχθροὶ τοῦ σταυροῦ — the enmity is aimed at the crucifixion specifically, at the pattern of self-emptying and obedience unto death that ch. 2 laid out and that vv. 10-11 made the shape of Paul’s own life. Whatever these people profess about Christ, their walking contradicts the cross. That is the charge, and it is narrower and sharper than general unbelief.

The doubled article (τοῦ σταυροῦ τοῦ Χριστοῦ) is ordinary Greek and needs no special weight, though articular Χριστοῦ keeps the titular force slightly audible — “the Christ.” Compare 1 Cor 1:17-18, where the cross is likewise the thing that can be emptied or found offensive, and Gal 6:12, 14, where hostility to the cross is expressly tied to avoiding the shame it brings.

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The verse is textually quiet. NA28 prints it without a bracket or a diamond, and the UBS apparatus records no variant of consequence for the reading adopted here; Metzger’s commentary passes over the verse.

The minor scribal movement that does exist is predictable smoothing: a handful of witnesses vary the order or add an object pronoun to λέγω to relieve the ellipsis, and there is the usual fluctuation over the article with Χριστοῦ. Neither touches sense. The absence of variation is itself worth noting, since the verse’s difficulty is entirely syntactic and referential rather than textual — scribes did not try to fix the unqualified περιπατοῦσιν, which suggests the ellipsis read naturally enough in Greek.

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The Vulgate reads multi enim ambulant quos saepe dicebam vobis, nunc autem et flens dico, inimicos crucis Christi — a close calque, and notably it keeps the accusative inimicos in apposition to quos, preserving the construction argued above. It also renders the ascensive καί with et flens, so the escalation survives.

Chrysostom (Hom. in Phil. 13) fastens on the tears: the weeping shows, he argues, that these are people whose condition Paul regards as ruinous and not yet beyond grief — the reaction of a father, not a prosecutor. He also reads the specification “of the cross” as the point of the charge, taking the offenders as those unwilling to bear suffering and so hostile to the cross by their manner of life rather than by open denial. Theodoret and Theodore of Mopsuestia move in the same direction, generally identifying the group as loose-living professing believers rather than the Judaizers of vv. 2-6 — which is to say the patristic tradition leans toward option (2)/(3) above without treating the matter as settled.

The patristic reading is recorded here as reception, not as lexical evidence for the identification (§9, §11).

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This is epistolary argument (§10), so the connectives are rendered: γάρ as “for,” δέ as the mild contrast, καί as “even.” The tone is grief, not invective, and the English should not be sharpened toward polemic — but neither should ἐχθρούς be blunted, since the verdict is Paul’s and it is hard (§6).

Decisions carried into the tiers:

• περιπατοῦσιν left absolute, with the contrast marked by punctuation rather than by an inserted characterization.
• ἔλεγον rendered with the English past habitual (“used to tell”) to hold the iterative imperfect.
• καί rendered “even” in every tier.
• τοὺς ἐχθρούς placed last, set off, so the appositional suspension survives.
• κλαίων kept as a participle.