Scythians
Short answer: In Colossians 3:11, Paul writes that in the renewed humanity there can't be Greek and Jew, circumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bondservant, or free person, because Christ is all and in all. The Scythians were a nomadic people of the northern Black Sea steppe whom Greco-Roman writers treated as the extreme case of the uncivilized outsider. Paul names them at the far end of a list that moves from the most privileged categories to the most despised. The point is not that ethnic or social differences cease to exist, but that none of them any longer determines who belongs to Christ or who stands closest to him. The passage confronts every ranked view of human worth, ancient or modern.
Who the Scythians actually were
The Scythians were an Iranian-speaking nomadic confederation that dominated the steppe north of the Black Sea and the Caspian from roughly the seventh to the third century BC. They herded horses and cattle, moved with the seasons, and buried their dead in elaborate kurgan mounds that modern archaeologists have excavated. They traded with Greek colonies on the northern coast of the Black Sea and sometimes fought them. Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC, devotes a long section of his Histories to their customs, and much of what the Greek and Roman world thought it knew about them came from such accounts and from the stories traders carried home.
Their reputation in the Mediterranean world was fearsome. Ancient writers described hard-riding archers, scalping, and rituals that struck settled peoples as shocking. Whether or not every detail was accurate, the effect was to make the Scythian the standard example of the barbarian at the far edge of the known world. They were not merely foreigners; they were the foreigners, the people a Greek or Roman would name when reaching for the most extreme word for outsider he could find.
That reputation is exactly why Paul's choice of word matters. He is not giving a geography lesson. He picks the most loaded label available in his readers' vocabulary, the one that carried the most contempt, and places it inside the community that Christ creates. The list in Colossians 3:11 is deliberately arranged to travel from the honored to the dishonored.
How the list in Colossians 3:11 is arranged
The verse names Greek and Jew, circumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bondservant, and free person. The first pairs are the great religious and ethnic division of the ancient world. Jew and Greek, circumcised and uncircumcised, carried covenant history, temple privilege, and centuries of tension. Then the list shifts outward: barbarian, then Scythian. A barbarian was anyone whose speech a Greek could not understand; a Scythian was, in popular estimation, the barbarian's barbarian, the case so far out that no one expected him to be included in anything.
Then comes the social axis: bondservant and free person. Slavery was woven into the economy of the Roman world, and the free person looked down on the enslaved as a matter of course. Paul has now covered religion, ethnicity, culture, and class. He has not stacked a random pile of words; he has taken the most durable walls human beings build and named each one.
The structure matters for reading the verse rightly. Paul is not singling out the Scythian for special mention because Scythians were unusually important to the Colossian church. He places the Scythian at the lowest rung so that everything above it is also covered. If the Scythian is included, no one can claim exclusion on the grounds of being too foreign, too uncultured, or too far away.
What Paul means by Christ is all, and in all
The second half of Colossians 3:11 supplies the reason the list collapses: but Christ is all, and in all. This is not a claim that distinctions have been erased from the created order. Greeks remained Greeks, slaves remained slaves in the legal sense, and a Scythian did not become a Judean. The claim is about standing before God and within the church. Christ is the whole of what makes a person acceptable, and Christ is present in every person who belongs to him, whatever their label.
Paul has already argued this direction earlier in the letter. In Colossians 3:9-10 he describes believers as having put off the old man and put on the new, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. The verse that follows is the explanation of that renewal. If the new humanity is being remade according to its maker's image, then the divisions that sin erected cannot be the organizing principle of the church.
So Christ is all means he is the entire basis of acceptance, and Christ is in all means no believer is a second-class member. The Scythian is not tolerated in the corner; he is indwelt by the same Christ as the freeborn Greek. That double statement is the engine of the whole verse and the reason Paul can say there can't be these divisions in the community Christ is building.
Why a Scythian in the list is more than trivia
It would be easy to read past the word Scythian as an obscure ancient detail. That would miss the pastoral force of the verse. Every church in every age has its own Scythians, the people whose inclusion feels like a concession, whose background or manners or accent or history makes them seem unlikely candidates for full membership among the respectable. Paul puts the Scythian in the same sentence as the Jew and the Greek and says the same thing about all of them.
Notice that Paul does not tell the Colossians to pretend differences do not exist. He does not ask the Scythian to become a Greek or the slave to become free before being welcomed. He says the categories no longer function as qualifications. That is a harder and more honest instruction than pretending everyone is the same. It means the church can be full of genuinely different people and still be one body, because the unity is located in Christ rather than in shared culture.
This is also a warning against any Christian community organized around the prestige of its members. If Christ is all, then a congregation's standing does not rest on the education, wealth, ethnicity, or manners of its people. The moment a church treats some background as more Christian than another, it is rebuilding a wall Paul says has no place in the new man.
The old humanity and the new in Colossians 3
Colossians 3:11 does not stand alone. It is the climax of a paragraph about putting off the old humanity with its practices and putting on the new. Paul has just told the Colossians not to lie to one another, because they have stripped off the old man and clothed themselves with the new one being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. Then, as if to define what that renewal looks like, he writes the list about Greek and Jew, barbarian and Scythian, slave and free.
The flow of thought is important. The unity Paul describes is not a project the Colossians must manufacture by trying harder to like each other. It is the consequence of a change that has already happened in them. The old humanity was characterized by the very divisions named in the verse; the new humanity is characterized by Christ being all and in all. The ethical instructions that follow, about compassion, kindness, humility, and love, are the shape this new identity takes in daily life.
Read this way, the verse is both a declaration and a summons. It declares what is true of those in Christ. It summons them to live in a way that matches what is true. The Scythian in the list is a test case: if the reality described here is real, it will show up in how the church treats the person it would naturally be tempted to rank lowest.
Scythians, barbarians, and the ancient world's rankings
The ancient Mediterranean world ran on status. Citizenship, birth, education, and command of Greek or Latin placed a person on a ladder, and nearly everyone knew where everyone else stood. Barbarian was the word for those outside the language and culture of the Greek-speaking world. It was not a neutral descriptor; it carried the assumption of inferiority. Within that framework, the Scythian was the extreme.
This is the social world into which the gospel came, and the New Testament does not pretend it away. Instead it repeatedly undercuts the ladder. The letter to the Colossians was written to a church in a prosperous city of the Lycus valley, made up of people from different backgrounds, and this verse tells them what holds them together. It is not shared status but shared Christ.
Modern readers should resist the temptation to hear the verse as ancient sentimentality. It was a genuinely countercultural claim in its setting. To say that a Scythian stood on the same footing as a Greek in the assembly was not a platitude; it was a reordering of the world as Paul's readers had learned to see it. The same reordering is what the verse asks of every generation that reads it.
What this means for the church today
Applied to the present, Colossians 3:11 rules out any version of Christian community built on ethnic superiority, cultural refinement, or social class. It does not require congregations to be identical in language, custom, or background. It requires them to stop treating those differences as grounds for rank. The person who is hardest for a given church to welcome is likely the one Paul had in mind when he wrote Scythian.
This also guards against a subtle error in the other direction: treating diversity itself as the goal. Paul's goal is not a mix of backgrounds for its own sake. His goal is that Christ be all and in all, which means the unity he describes is real only where Christ is genuinely central. A congregation can be outwardly varied and still be built on status, and it can be outwardly uniform and still be faithful. What matters is whether Christ is the whole basis of belonging.
Practically, this verse asks church leaders and members to examine who is actually treated as fully included. The teaching is uncomfortable because it reaches the preferences and instincts we rarely say out loud. Paul leaves no room for a hierarchy of belonging among those who are in Christ. The Scythian is not a footnote in the verse; he is the point at which the verse either becomes real in a congregation or does not.
Biblical fidelity check
Colossians 3:11 establishes that, among those who are in Christ, no ethnic, cultural, or social category determines standing before God or full membership in his people. It does not establish that all human distinctions vanish, that cultural differences must be erased, or that the church must become uniform in language and custom. The verse is about the ground of acceptance, not the abolition of created variety. It also does not teach that the categories of slave and free were immediately abolished in society; Paul addresses the standing of persons in the community, and the New Testament elsewhere speaks to how slaves and masters should conduct themselves without treating the institution as the church's central concern.
A common misreading treats the verse as a slogan about generic equality or as proof that the church should ignore all distinctions. That is wrong because it flattens the specific argument Paul is making. He is not celebrating diversity as such; he is saying that Christ, and Christ alone, is the basis on which anyone is included, and that Christ indwells every believer without exception. Another misreading treats the list as exhaustive of every possible division, which misses that Paul's categories are representative. The principle extends to any barrier we invent, but the ground of unity remains Christ, not shared identity of any kind.
Other passages that speak to Colossians 3:11
The same logic runs through the New Testament. What Does Acts 1:6–11 Mean? Context, Theology, and Application shows the disciples still thinking in terms of restoring a kingdom to Israel, a reminder of how deeply such categories run. What Does Acts 1:8 Mean? Context, Theology, and Application traces the outward movement of the gospel from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth, the very reach that eventually includes Scythians. Acts 1:9-11 Prophecy: Jesus’s Promised Return from Heaven keeps the goal in view, and Acts 10: Peter and Cornelius: God Shows No Favoritism provides the decisive narrative of a boundary being crossed in practice.
Frequently asked questions
Who were the Scythians in the Bible?
They appear by name only in Colossians 3:11, where Paul lists them among the categories that no longer determine standing in Christ. Historically, the Scythians were a nomadic people of the northern Black Sea steppe, known to the Greeks and Romans as the archetypal barbarians. Paul's use of the name draws on that reputation rather than offering information about the people themselves. The point is that even the most despised outsider is fully included in the community Christ creates, because Christ is all and in all.
Does Colossians 3:11 mean all human distinctions are erased?
No. The verse speaks about the basis of acceptance before God and full membership among his people, not about the disappearance of created or cultural variety. Greeks remained Greeks, and the legal status of slaves was not immediately abolished in society. What the verse denies is that any of these categories can make a person closer to God or more central to the church. Christians differ on how far the social implications extend in a given society, but the standing of every believer in Christ is equal.
How should a church apply a verse about Scythians today?
A church applies it by examining who is actually treated as fully included. The principle covers any barrier a congregation has built, whether ethnicity, class, education, language, or manners. Paul's list moves from the most honored to the most despised, so the test is how the church treats the person it would naturally rank lowest. The application is not to erase differences but to stop using them as grounds for rank, since Christ is the whole basis of belonging and is present in every believer.
