What does Colossians 3:11 mean?

Colossians 3:11 comes near the beginning of Paul's practical instructions to the Colossian church about what it means to live as a person who has been raised with Christ. In the verses just before this one, Paul tells believers that they have "put off the old self with its practices" and "put on the new self," which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its Creator. Verse 11 describes the sphere of this "new self" — the renewed humanity that exists in Christ — where the old dividing lines that structured Greco-Roman society simply no longer apply.

In plain language, the verse says that in this new life in Christ, none of the old human categories that separated people from one another still count for anything. Greek and Jew was the great ethnic and religious divide of the ancient world. Circumcision and uncircumcision was the corresponding religious marker distinguishing observant Jews from Gentiles. Barbarian and Scythian represented the cultural divide between "civilized" Greco-Roman peoples and those considered outsiders or savages (Scythians were often seen as the most extreme example of an uncivilized foreigner). Bondservant and freeman marked the fundamental legal and economic divide of slave versus free person in the Roman world. Paul lists these pairs precisely because they covered the major fault lines of identity and status in his world — ethnicity, religion, culture, and class.

Paul wrote this letter, likely from prison, to a church he had not personally founded, in the city of Colossae in Asia Minor, addressing a community wrestling with false teaching that threatened to reintroduce