1Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus through the will of God, and Timothy our brother, 2to the saints and faithful brothers in Christ at Colossae: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
3We give thanks to God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, praying always for you, 4having heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love which you have toward all the saints, 5because of the hope which is laid up for you in the heavens, of which you heard before in the word of the truth of the Good News 6which has come to you, even as it is in all the world and is bearing fruit and growing, as it does in you also, since the day you heard and knew the grace of God in truth, 7even as you learned from Epaphras our beloved fellow servant, who is a faithful servant of Christ on your behalf, 8who also declared to us your love in the Spirit.
9For this cause, we also, since the day we heard this, don’t cease praying and making requests for you, that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, 10that you may walk worthily of the Lord, to please him in all respects, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God, 11strengthened with all power, according to the might of his glory, for all endurance and perseverance with joy, 12giving thanks to the Father, who made us fit to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light, 13who delivered us out of the power of darkness, and translated us into the Kingdom of the Son of his love, 14in whom we have our redemption, the forgiveness of our sins.
15He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. 16For by him all things were created in the heavens and on the earth, visible things and invisible things, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things have been created through him and for him. 17He is before all things, and in him all things are held together. 18He is the head of the body, the assembly, who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things he might have the preeminence. 19For all the fullness was pleased to dwell in him, 20and through him to reconcile all things to himself by him, whether things on the earth or things in the heavens, having made peace through the blood of his cross.
21You, being in past times alienated and enemies in your mind in your evil deeds, 22yet now he has reconciled in the body of his flesh through death, to present you holy and without defect and blameless before him, 23if it is so that you continue in the faith, grounded and steadfast, and not moved away from the hope of the Good News which you heard, which is being proclaimed in all creation under heaven, of which I, Paul, was made a servant.
24Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and fill up on my part that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh for his body’s sake, which is the assembly, 25of which I was made a servant according to the stewardship of God which was given me toward you to fulfill the word of God, 26the mystery which has been hidden for ages and generations. But now it has been revealed to his saints, 27to whom God was pleased to make known what are the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. 28We proclaim him, admonishing every man and teaching every man in all wisdom, that we may present every man perfect in Christ Jesus; 29for which I also labor, striving according to his working, which works in me mightily.
1 Timothy 3:16 “God was revealed in the flesh"
“And we all agree, our religion contains amazing revelation:
He was revealed in the flesh,
vindicated by the Spirit,
seen by angels,
proclaimed among Gentiles,
believed on in the world,
taken up in glory.” (NET)
The line “He was revealed in the flesh,” however, is not found in all ancient manuscripts. Most of the later ones have instead “God was revealed in the flesh.”
The evidence that ‘he’ instead of ‘God’ is authentic, however, is compelling. First, the oldest and best manuscripts have ‘he’ here. In fact, no original wording of any manuscript before the 8th/9th century had ‘God.’ In Greek, the difference between ‘he’ and ‘God’ is a single letter: ‘he’ would be written ΟΣ; ‘God’ as ΘΣ (ancient mss often use abbreviated ΘΕΟΣ as ΘΣ, with a line above ΘΣ). One can easily imagine a scribe adding a stroke in the middle of the omicron to turn ‘he’ into ‘God.’ None of the ancient versions have ‘God’ and no church father testifies to ‘God’ here until the end of the 4th century.
Second, on the surface the grammar of ‘he’ is awkward. It is actually the relative pronoun ‘who,’ a reading that scribes would naturally want to change to something more suitable (the harder reading is usually the original reading, and is one that scribes routinely altered to an easier, more palatable reading). Significantly, the Latin manuscripts virtually all have ‘which,’ a reading that could not have come from ‘God’ but only from ‘who.’ They testify to a second-century Greek manuscript as their ancestor.
Is the word ‘he’ (or ‘who’) so difficult that it should be considered spurious? No. In reality, the line “He was revealed in the flesh” is the first line of a six-strophe hymn. Many hymns in the Greek New Testament started with the relative pronoun ‘who’ (e.g., Rom 4:25; Phil 2:6; Col 1:15; Heb 1:3). Once the genre is taken into account, the relative pronoun fits well in the passage and should be considered authentic.