“Barbarian, Scythian, slave, free”
Colossians 3:11
Cultural referenceSettledPaul
Here there is no Greek or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, or free, but Christ is all and is in all. (Colossians 3:11 BSB)
What it sounds like today
'Scythian' is a dead word to modern readers.
The cultural key
The Scythians were the steppe nomads of the Black Sea north, and Greco-Roman writers made them the proverbial extreme of savagery: Herodotus retails their scalping and skull-cups, and 'Scythian' functioned the way 'the ends of the earth' does. So the list does not just pair opposites; it escalates past 'barbarian' to the barbarian's barbarian, the least civilizable human the audience could name.
Recovered meaning
Paul runs the world's sorting labels to their outer limit and voids them all in one clause. Even the byword for irredeemable savagery sits at the same table, because the only description left standing is 'Christ is all, and in all.'
Parallels: Romans 1:14; Galatians 3:28