Paul has just denied that he is speaking καθʼ ὑστέρησιν (v. 11) and claimed to have learned self-sufficiency. Verse 12 unpacks that learning as a curriculum, and it does so with three moves worth watching.

First, the shape. The verse is built out of paired opposites, four pairs in all, and every pair is bound by correlative καί … καί — not ‘and’ but ‘both … and.’ The rhetoric is deliberate: Paul refuses to name deprivation as the only thing requiring skill. Abundance is on the syllabus too, and it is listed second in three of the four pairs, which is where Greek puts the item receiving weight.

Second, the verbs are passive. ταπεινοῦσθαι, χορτάζεσθαι, ὑστερεῖσθαι — Paul is brought low, fed full, made to lack. Only περισσεύειν and πεινᾶν are active in form, and both are intransitive states rather than achievements. Paul is not describing a Stoic mastery over circumstance; he is describing competence in being handled. Verse 13 will name the one who does the handling.

Third, μεμύημαι. At the center of the verse sits a word Paul uses nowhere else in the NT: the technical verb of mystery-cult initiation. Paul has been let into a secret. This is either the boldest word in the verse or a piece of dead vocabulary, and the scholarship is genuinely split on which — see below.

The lexical spine is also load-bearing for the letter as a whole. ταπεινόω is the verb of Christ’s self-abasement at 2:8 and of the σῶμα τῆς ταπεινώσεως at 3:21. περισσεύω is the overflow-word of 1:9 and 1:26. ὑστερέομαι is cognate with the ὑστέρησις of the preceding verse. Paul is not reaching for fresh vocabulary; he is applying the letter’s own words to his own stomach.

οἶδα is perfect in form and present in force — settled knowledge rather than the process of coming to know (contrast γινώσκω, 3:10). The glossary already fixes it as ‘know,’ kept distinct from πέποιθα (‘am confident,’ 1:6, 25) and ἐλπίζω.

With a following infinitive the construction is idiomatic for acquired competence: not ‘I know that I am brought low’ but ‘I know how to be.’ BDAG lists this under the ‘be able, know how’ heading (Matt 7:11; Luke 12:56; 1 Thess 4:4; 1 Tim 3:5). English requires the supplied ‘how’; the literal tier keeps the bare infinitive so the construction stays visible.

Note the relation to v. 11’s ἔμαθον (‘I learned,’ aorist). The aorist named the completed schooling; οἶδα names the standing competence that resulted. Paul is not claiming a temperament — he is reporting the outcome of an education.

The verse contains six instances of καί and none of them is a plain connective joining two clauses.

The first two (οἶδα καὶ ταπεινοῦσθαι, οἶδα καὶ περισσεύειν) are the harder pair. Two readings are defensible: (a) each καί is adjunctive with its own infinitive — ‘I know how to be brought low as well as I know how to overflow’; or (b) the two form a distributed correlative pair — ‘I know both how to be brought low and how to overflow.’ BDF treats repeated καί with parallel members as correlative, and the three unambiguous correlative pairs later in the verse make (b) the more likely reading of the whole design.

The last four (καὶ χορτάζεσθαι καὶ πεινᾶν, καὶ περισσεύειν καὶ ὑστερεῖσθαι) are unmistakably correlative: ‘both … and,’ twice. Rendering these as bare ‘and’ loses the claim that the two poles are equally items of learned competence — which is precisely Paul’s point against any reading that makes hardship the only teacher.

What this means for translation is simple and non-negotiable: the correlatives get rendered. Epistolary connectives are argument structure (§10), and here the structure is the argument.

The glossary fixes the ταπειν- family to a single English root (‘humble, abase / humility of mind / humiliation’), and the reason is on display here: ταπεινοῦσθαι is the same verb Paul used of Christ at 2:8 (ἐταπείνωσεν ἑαυτόν) and the same root as the σῶμα τῆς ταπεινώσεως of 3:21.

Two points of precision.

The voice is passive, not middle. At 2:8 Christ humbled himself — active verb, reflexive pronoun. Here the form is passive and no reflexive stands with it. Paul does not abase himself; he is brought low. The distinction is not pedantic: it is the difference between an ascetic program and a providence.

The domain is material, not moral. The LXX uses ταπεινόω of social and economic lowering (Gen 16:9; 2 Kgdms 13:12; Isa 53:8 of the Servant), and the following pairs (hunger, lack) fix the sense here as straitened circumstances, not humility of disposition. ‘Humbled’ in modern English has drifted toward the moral-attitudinal, so brought low is preferred in the smooth tier; ‘abased’ remains available in the higher register, where the social-status dimension is what the reader needs to hear.

περισσεύω is already fixed in the glossary as overflow / abound, with the vessel-and-harvest image treated as live (§8) rather than dead. Three occurrences of the verb cluster in vv. 12 and 18, and the concordance link runs back to 1:9 (love overflowing) and 1:26 (boasting overflowing) and forward to 4:18 (περισσεύω of the gift received).

Here the verb is intransitive: to have surplus beyond need. Note that ‘abound’ and ‘overflow’ both keep the surplus image; ‘to have plenty’ and ‘to prosper’ do not, and the latter drags in an economic-success register that the Greek does not carry.

The positioning matters. περισσεύειν stands second in its pair each time, and in Greek the second member of a correlative pair is the emphatic one. Paul is not conceding that abundance also requires skill as an afterthought; he is putting the weight there. For a man writing from custody to a church that has just sent him money, learning how to receive well is the live pastoral problem.

μεμύημαι (perfect passive of μυέω) is a NT hapax and the most striking word in the verse. In Hellenistic Greek it is the technical term for initiation into a mystery cult — the candidate is made a μύστης, admitted to knowledge closed to outsiders. The noun μυστήριον is from the same root, and the cognate verb is standard in the inscriptional and literary evidence for Eleusis, Isis, and the Dionysiac associations. LXX usage is marginal (3 Macc 2:30 of enrollment in the rites), which means Paul’s readers in a Roman colonia would have heard the cultic word, not a biblical one.

The perfect passive is doubly significant. Perfect: the initiation is complete and its result stands — Paul possesses the knowledge now. Passive: someone initiated him. The agent is unexpressed, as with every divine passive in this letter, and v. 13 supplies it in a prepositional phrase rather than as a grammatical subject.

Policy adopted here: retain an initiation-word in the main text (‘I have been initiated’ in the literal and liturgical tiers; ‘I have been let into the secret’ in the modern tier), keep the passive, and flag the faded reading rather than resolving it. What is excluded is a flat ‘I have learned,’ which both duplicates ἔμαθον from the previous verse and silently adopts the weaker of two live options.

χορτάζω derives from χόρτος, ‘fodder, grass,’ and in classical Greek is used of feeding animals to satiety. By the Koine period it has been extended to humans without pejorative force: the LXX uses it of God satisfying the poor with bread (Ps 131:15 LXX; Lam 3:15), and the Gospels use it of the crowds at the feedings (Mark 6:42; 8:8) and in the beatitude (Matt 5:6).

The rendering must keep the fullness rather than the mere act of eating. ‘Be fed’ loses the satiety; ‘be well fed’ introduces a quality-judgment about the food. ‘Be fed full’ carries both the passive voice and the repletion, and stays in the same domain as πληρόω/ἀναπληρόω elsewhere in the letter without borrowing their vocabulary.

Against it stands πεινᾶν, the plain verb ‘to be hungry.’ The contract infinitive is printed πεινᾶν in NA28; the α-contraction in -ᾶν rather than the expected -ῆν is a well-attested Koine feature of this verb (BDF on -άω verbs assimilating to the -έω pattern), and some witnesses regularize. Nothing exegetical hangs on it. Note that Paul does not say ‘to fast’ — no religious discipline is in view. He means going without food.

ὑστερέω means to be behind, come short of a standard, be in want. The middle/passive here means to be left lacking. The form is morphologically ambiguous between middle and passive; the sense is the same either way, and the passive-leaning rendering is preferred for consistency with the surrounding passives.

The critical point is the concordance link. Verse 11 opened with καθʼ ὑστέρησιν — Paul denying that he speaks ‘out of lack.’ Verse 12 closes with ὑστερεῖσθαι — Paul affirming that he knows how to lack. The two verses are stitched together by the root, and English must show it: ‘lack’ or ‘fall short’ in both places. Rendering v. 11 ‘need’ and v. 12 ‘be in want’ hides Paul’s own connective tissue.

Avoid ‘suffer need’ (imports a suffering-verb the Greek lacks) and ‘be poor’ (a social category rather than a condition). ‘Fall short’ in the smooth tier keeps the root sense of coming up behind a measure; ‘be in lack’ in the literal tier keeps the noun-link to v. 11 audible.

The singular-then-plural doubling is not a stylistic tic. ἐν παντί (dat. neut. sg.) is Paul’s standard idiom for ‘in every single case’ (2 Cor 4:8; 7:5; 9:8; 11:6; Phil 4:6 uses it two verses later). ἐν πᾶσιν (dat. neut. pl.) sums the cases into a totality.

Rendering adopted: ‘in everything and in all circumstances’ — ‘everything’ for the distributive singular, ‘all circumstances’ for the comprehensive plural, with a supplied noun bracketed in the literal tier. The doubling is preserved; flattening to a single ‘in all things’ discards a deliberate feature.

Word order also matters. The phrase is fronted before μεμύημαι, which is topicalizing: the scope of the initiation is stated before the initiation itself.

The verse is textually calm. NA28 prints the text above without a variation unit in the main apparatus, and Metzger’s Textual Commentary passes over v. 12 entirely — a fair indication that nothing here troubled the committee.

Minor orthographic and word-order matters visible in the witnesses:

• πεινᾶν — the contract infinitive appears as πεινᾷν and (rarely) πεινῆν in some minuscules. Orthographic; no semantic consequence.
• ἐν παντὶ καὶ ἐν πᾶσιν — a handful of witnesses omit the second ἐν, giving ‘in every and all things.’ The reading with both prepositions is the harder and better-attested form, and the doubled preposition is what makes the singular/plural contrast audible.
• μεμύημαι — occasional itacistic misspellings, no variant reading.

Verse 11’s αὐτάρκης is Stoic and Cynic vocabulary, and v. 12 reads at first like a page from Epictetus or Seneca: the wise man is indifferent to fortune, equally composed in plenty and in want. The parallel is real and should not be denied — Paul is writing in a world where this was a recognized ideal, and he uses its words.

But the grammar of v. 12 breaks with it at two points.

The verbs are passive. The Stoic sage achieves independence from circumstance by an act of the will. Paul is brought low, fed full, made to lack. He is the object of the verbs, not their agent.

The knowledge is received, not attained. μεμύημαι is passive; someone initiated him. The Stoic αὐτάρκεια is self-generated by definition — that is what the auto- means. Paul’s is conferred, and v. 13 names the source: ἐν τῷ ἐνδυναμοῦντί με, ‘in the one empowering me.’

The upshot is that Paul has taken over the vocabulary of self-sufficiency and relocated its ground outside the self. Diachronically (§9) the words mean what they meant in the Hellenistic moralists; theologically Paul has broken them. Both facts belong in the reader’s view, and neither should be suppressed to protect the other.

Chrysostom (Homilies on Philippians, hom. 15) reads the verse as a lesson in the difficulty of abundance, not of want. His observation is that Paul lists both poles because both are hard, and that many who endure poverty well are ruined by plenty — ‘to know how to overflow’ is the rarer skill. He also presses the passives: Paul boasts of no accomplishment, since to be fed and to hunger are both things done to him.

Theodoret notes the two οἶδα clauses as a claim to a doubled competence, and takes ταπεινοῦσθαι of material lowliness rather than of humility — a lexical judgment worth recording, since it shows a Greek-speaking reader in the 5th century AD taking the word in the circumstantial sense the modern lexica assign it.

On μεμύημαι the Greek Fathers generally hear the initiation-word without embarrassment and gloss it as instruction in a divine secret. The Latin tradition renders it institutus sum (‘I have been trained’), which is the faded reading and quietly loses the mystery-language — a reminder that the Vulgate is reception (§11) and not lexical evidence for how a first-century reader in Philippi heard the verb.

Decisions carried into the English, in order:

1. οἶδα + inf. as competence — ‘I know how to,’ with ‘how’ supplied unbracketed in the smooth tier and the bare infinitive kept in the literal.
2. Anaphora preserved — ‘I know … I know.’ Paul did not elide the second verb; English should not either.
3. Correlatives rendered — ‘both … and’ at all three unambiguous pairs, and a correlative reading of the first pair as well.
4. Passives kept passive — ‘be brought low,’ ‘be fed full,’ ‘fall short’ (or ‘be in lack’). No active recasting, since the voice carries the theology.
5. ταπειν- root held to one English family across 2:8, 3:21, 4:12.
6. περισσεύω rendered with a surplus image at every occurrence in the letter.
7. ὑστερ- root visibly linked to v. 11.
8. μεμύημαι kept as initiation-language, with the faded sense flagged rather than adopted.
9. The singular/plural doubling preserved, not compressed.

What has deliberately not been done: the verse has not been smoothed into a maxim. The Greek is a list of paired infinitives with a perfect indicative dropped into the middle of it, and the English should read as terse and asymmetrical as that.