Polycarp speaks of the proper living of wives, widows, deacons, younger men, virgins and elders (4–6) and offers prescriptions for how a Christian community ought to be organized and to conduct itself.^[15]


Wives:


Widows:


Deacons:


Young Men:


Virgins:


Elders:


Widows’ most significant mention is in Pol. Phil. 4.3, where they are spoken of as ‘knowing that they are an altar of God’. He invokes it without clarification of its meaning. This in itself is notable because he seems to presume that his audience will understand why he employs this particular figure of speech and will know upon what discourses he draws in so doing. Perhaps this is an image with which Polycarp assumes his intended audience will be familiar. This is one of a number of such references in eight early Christian texts generally dated to the second through the fifth centuries AD. In addition to Pol. Phil., these texts are: Tertullian Ad uxorem, Methodius' Symposium, the Didascalia Apostolorum, the Apostolic Constitutions, Pseudo-Ignatius’ letter To the Tarsians, Gregory of Nazianzus Funeral Oration on His Father, and the Testamentum Domini.^[15]


Margaret Butterfield concludes the following:


The epistle warns against a number of disorders in the church and against apostasy, and encourages the Christians to persevere in good works. It also acted as a covering letter for a collection of writings by Ignatius of Antioch, whose works were being collected by the church at Philippi after Ignatius' visit there.^[6][16]


Here is one quotation from the epistle:


One of the epistle's more important features is its use and citation of other early Christian writings, many of which later came to be part of the New Testament.^[16] The epistle has even been described as "pastiche-like"^[1]: 61 due to its heavy use of allusions and citations to other writings, which make up a large portion of the text.


In Chapter 7, Polycarp exhorts the Philippians to reject various heretical doctrines, but never mentions any particular heretics by name. For example, he attacks docetism, the belief that Jesus did not appear on Earth in the flesh, by citing the First Epistle of John: ("For whosoever does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh, is an antichrist").^[17] He also attacks unnamed individuals who claim that "there is neither a resurrection nor a judgment," calling them "the first-born of Satan" (Pol. Phil. 7.1). Importantly, the Christian apologist Irenaeus of Lyon claimed in his book Against Heresies that Polycarp had called the unorthodox Christian thinker Marcion of Sinope "the first-born of Satan."^[4]: 199 This led P. N. Harrison to conclude that Polycarp was in fact referring to Marcion in this epistle, albeit at an early stage in Marcion's ideological development. Many other scholars, however, have found Harrison's argument to be unconvincing.^[1]: 35ff