text: Composition Starting in the 1960s, a consensus emerged among biblical scholars that Philippians was not written as one unified letter, but rather as a compilation of fragments from three separate letters from Paul to the church in Philippi. However, this consensus has been currently abandoned by most biblical scholars. According to Philip Sellew, Philippians contains the following letter fragments:
  Letter A consists of Philippians 4:10–20. It is a short thank-you note from Paul to the Philippian church, regarding gifts they had sent him.
  Letter B consists of Philippians 1:1–3:1, and may also include 4:4–9 and 4:21–23.
  Letter C consists of Philippians 3:2–4:1, and may also include 4:2–3. It is a testament to Paul's rejection of all worldly things for the sake of the gospel of Jesus.
  In support of the idea that Philippians is a composite work, Sellew pointed to the abrupt shifts in tone and topic within the text. There also seem to be chronological inconsistencies from one chapter to the next concerning Paul's associate Epaphroditus:
  These letter fragments likely would have been edited into a single document by the first collector of the Pauline corpus, although there is no clear consensus among scholars regarding who this initial collector may have been, or when the first collection of Pauline epistles may have been published.