Having stated his qualifications and achievements, Paul now reassesses his spiritual life after his conversion. With the conjunction but he marks the dramatic change of perspective.

I might count as profit is literally “were gains to me.” This clause can also be taken in the sense of “were once gains to me” (New American Bible “I used to consider gain”). The tense of the verb rendered reckon is significant. It is the perfect tense (“have counted”), denoting an action in past time which continues to be effective in the present. The full force of the meaning would be something like “I counted those things as a loss, and I still reckon them as such.” Since the focus is on the present effect, Good News Translation renders the verb in the present tense (cf. 3.8, where Paul uses the same verb again, this time in the present tense). Good News Translation supplies now to strengthen the force of contrast.

Paul here uses the figure of a balance sheet, showing assets and liabilities, profit and loss. All his advantages of birth and upbringing and his personal achievements as a zealous Pharisee, he had formerly set down in the “profit” column; now he has transferred them to the “loss” column. For Christ’s sake supplies the motive for this dramatic revaluation and drastic change.

All those things can best be rendered in some languages as “all that I was and all that I did,” or “… all that I did in obeying the Law.”

It may be necessary in some languages to shift the figurative expressions of “profit and loss” and to speak of “advantage and disadvantage,” for example, “all that I used to do which I might have counted as an advantage to myself I now realize is a disadvantage,” “… has no value,” or “… is of not advantage.”

It is not easy to indicate clearly the relation of the phrase for Christ’s sake to what has preceded. In some instances one may interpret this in the sense of “because of what Christ has done for me.” Or one may render for Christ’s sake as “because of what I want to do for Christ.”

Quoted with permission from Luo, I-Jin. and Nida, Eugene A. A Handbook on Paul’s Letter to the Philippians. (UBS Handbook Series). New York: UBS, 1977. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .