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Summary
- 312 does not appear in the Bible, but Philippians 3:12 does, and it is Paul saying he has not arrived.
- He says it immediately after listing his credentials and calling them rubbish — written near the end of his life, from custody.
- “Forgetting what is behind” covers both the failures and the credentials. He listed them in order to drop them.
- Colossians 3:12 asks for compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience, using clothing as the image: daily, visible, not the same as the body underneath.
- Revelation 3:12 promises a pillar that never leaves the building — addressed to a city repeatedly wrecked by earthquakes, whose people had lived outside the walls.
Bibliography (Click to show)
Sources: Scripture quotations from the NIV via BibleGateway (Philippians 3:4-14; 4:6; Colossians 3:12; Revelation 3:12; Leviticus 19:26). Philadelphia’s earthquake damage and its inhabitants’ periods living outside the walls are reported by Strabo and are standard in commentary on Revelation 3. The attribution of chapter divisions to Stephen Langton (c. 1227) and of verse numbers to Robert Estienne (1551, 1555) follows standard histories of the Bible as a printed book.
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