V. Nature And Purpose Of Ephesians
INTRODUCTION TO EPHESIANS
I. EPHESIANS AND THE PAULINE CORPUS
The letter to the Ephesians has been described, not unjustly, as “the quintessence of Paulinism.”1 It sums up in large measure the leading themes of the Pauline writings, together with the central motif of Paul’s ministry as apostle to the Gentiles. But it does more than that: it carries the thought of the earlier letters forward to a new stage. An even better designation for it than “the quintessence of Paulinism” would be, in C. H. Dodd’s words, “the crown of Paulinism.”2
Ephesians is not an easy document for the NT student to come to terms with. “It is really a tract dressed up in epistolary form,” says R. H. Fuller.3 Markus Barth calls it “a stranger at the door” of the Pauline corpus.4 E. J. Goodspeed spoke of it, ominously, as “the Waterloo of commentators.”5 More promisingly, he described it as “a great rhapsody of the Christian salvation.”6 It reads, he said further, “like a commentary on the Pauline letters”7—a rather strange way of referring to a document which, a few lines previously, was compared to “a mosaic of Pauline materials.”8 A mosaic made up of fragments of an author’s writings is not best calculated to provide a commentary on them. But, if not a commentary, it is indeed an exposition of the Pauline mission and message.
Ephesians has a structural unity not unlike that of its own “building fitly framed together.”9 This structural unity is matched by an inner unity of conception and execution; the loftiness of the thought thus conceived and executed moved Coleridge to characterize the document as “the divinest composition of man.”10
“In form,” said Goodspeed, “it is an encyclical.”11 This is a widely held view, to which some support is given by the textual evidence of the prescript, which throws doubt on the mention of Ephesus as the place to which the letter was to be sent.12 It might be called a general letter to Gentile Christians, more particularly in the province of Asia—Gentile Christians who (like the readers of 1 Peter) needed to be shown what was involved in their recent commitment to the way of Christ. But these Gentile Christians are not personally known to Paul: he has heard of their faith and love, and it is evidently by hearsay that they know of him and his commission to preach the gospel to the Gentiles. If, then, they live in the province of Asia, we shall not look for them in Ephesus or its neighborhood, but in some region of the province which Paul himself had not visited. The special affinities between Ephesians and Colossians might suggest that Ephesians, like Colossians, was destined for Christians in the Lycus valley. If so, it is natural to ask whether it could have been the “letter from Laodicea” mentioned in Col. 4:16.13 We know that in Marcion’s apostolikon Ephesians was listed as “the letter to the Laodiceans”;14 we do not know if he had any more substantial ground for so entitling it than an inference from Col. 4:16. It is conceivable that, when a special letter was sent to the church of Colossae, one in more general terms was sent by the same messenger to other churches in the district, including those of Hierapolis and Laodicea, and that this might be our Ephesians. More than this cannot be said.
If in Colossians the role of Christ as Lord over the cosmos has been unfolded, Ephesians carries on the same train of thought by considering the implications of this for the church as the body of Christ. What is the church’s relation to Christ’s cosmic role, to the principalities and powers, to God’s eternal purpose? This change of perspective from Christ to the church may go far to account for the different nuances which have been discerned in the use of such terms as “fullness” and “mystery” in Ephesians as compared with Colossians.15
While the affinities of Ephesians are closest with Colossians among the Pauline letters, its affinities with other letters in the collection are unmistakable. It has manifest affinities with 1 Corinthians: in particular, the teaching about the church which in the earlier epistle is applied to the life of one local congregation is universalized in Ephesians. Nor can its links with the teaching of Romans be overlooked. If Paul in Romans emphasizes that “there is no distinction” between Jew and Gentile, whether “in Adam” or “in Christ” (Rom. 3:22; 10:12), so in Ephesians all the spiritual blessings which are available to human beings “in the heavenly realm in Christ Jesus” are shown to be accessible on an equal footing to both Jews and Gentiles (Eph. 1:3; 2:6-7, 11-22; 3:6). If Paul in Romans magnifies his ministry as apostle to the Gentiles and tells how he has discharged this ministry, winning obedience from Gentiles, “from Jerusalem and as far around as Illyricum” (Rom. 11:13; 15:15-21), Ephesians presents him as “a prisoner of Christ Jesus” in the interests of the Gentiles and sees an astounding token of divine grace in the fact that he, of all people, has been chosen “to bring to the Gentiles the good news of Christ’s unfathomable wealth” (Eph. 3:1, 8). In Rom. 5:11 it is through Christ that “we have now received our reconciliation”; in Ephesians it is made clear that this reconciliation has been effected through the cross so thoroughly for Jews and Gentiles alike that both groups are reconciled not only to God but to each other, “in one body” (Eph. 2:16). In both letters Gentile believers, now incorporated in that one body with their fellow-believers of Jewish origin, have to be reminded that the Jewish believers were there first: in Rom. 11:18 Gentile Christians are told that it is the root that supports them, and not vice versa, while in Eph. 2:19 they are described as fellow-citizens with the (original) saints, with those who were the first to place their hope in Christ (Eph. 1:12). The Jews’ standing in the divine purpose is not imperiled by the ingathering of Gentiles; rather, the grace of God is magnified in his dealings with both Jews and Gentiles. The climax of the argument of Romans is reached in the revelation of God’s purpose as comprising the bringing in of “the full number of the Gentiles” and the salvation of “all Israel” (Rom. 11:25-26); Ephesians celebrates the accomplishment of this purpose and shows how the new, united community thus brought into being is the harbinger and instrument of the cosmic reconciliation yet to be realized (Eph. 1:9-10; 3:9-12).
In the eyes of many NT students, Galatians and Ephesians stand at opposite extremes of the Pauline spectrum. But both letters have in common some of the most distinctively Pauline emphases.16 As in Gal. 1:11-16 Paul insists that he received the gospel which he was commissioned to preach among the Gentiles from no earthly teacher but through the “revelation of Jesus Christ” granted to him by God at his conversion, so in Eph. 3:3-10 he speaks of the “mystery” which was made known to him so that he might communicate it to the Gentiles. The terms “revelation” and “mystery” declare the divine origin of Paul’s gospel and of his call to make that gospel known to the Gentiles in particular. The resultant incorporation of Gentile believers in the new community on an equal basis with Jewish believers was something for which Paul had to contend in Galatians, without much assurance that he would win the day. By the time Ephesians was written, some twelve years later, the presence—indeed, the predominance—of Gentiles within the community was a fait accompli, thanks in very large measure to Paul’s own apostolic activity. The purpose of God to create a new humanity out of Jews and Gentiles (Eph. 2:15) was now being visibly realized. Tensions might remain, but they were not exclusively tensions between former Jews and former Gentiles. There is no good reason to doubt that the situation reflected in Ephesians was one which Paul could welcome within his own lifetime. When he paid his last visit to Jerusalem, the leaders of the mother-church conceded without question the rightful inclusion of Gentiles within the church. The suspicions of the numerous “zealots for the law” within the Jerusalem church had not been allayed, but they were no longer in a position to imperil the status of Gentile believers (Acts 21:20-25).
Above all, one emphasis remains constant from Galatians to Ephesians—the emphasis that God’s salvation is all of grace (to be received through faith) and not at all of works. “It is not by legal works that one is justified, but through faith in Jesus Christ,” says Paul in Gal. 2:16, and so he still says in Eph. 2:8-9. In Galatians he says “one is justified,” because the question of justification was integral to the Galatian crisis; in Ephesians he says, using a more general term, “you have been saved,” perhaps because justification in the more specific sense was not a controversial issue for the readers of this letter.
II. THE PAROUSIA AND THE SPIRIT
One feature that Galatians and Ephesians have in common which sets them apart from the main Pauline letters is their limited reference to the parousia. Where the parousia does feature, however, it is associated in both Galatians and Ephesians with the Holy Spirit. In Gal. 5:5—the sole allusion to the parousia in that letter—”through the Spirit, by faith, we wait for the hope of righteousness.” Twice in Ephesians the parousia is called the time of redemption, and on both occasions it is linked with the Spirit. In Eph. 1:14 the Spirit is “the guarantee of our inheritance, until the redemption of God’s possession”; again in Eph. 4:30 it is by “the Holy Spirit of God” that believers “were sealed against the day of redemption.”
The doctrine of the Spirit plays a prominent part in Ephesians, in keeping with its centrality in Paul’s teaching. In view of this centrality, and especially in view of the close relation between Ephesians and Colossians, it is the more surprising that the doctrine is almost entirely absent from Colossians.17
In the NT in general the presence of the Spirit is a sign that the last days have come, in accordance with the prophecy of Joel 2:28-32 as quoted in Acts 2:16-21: “And in the last days it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh. . . .” The presence of the Spirit, moreover, is the witness that Jesus is indeed the Messiah, the one who (in John the Baptist’s words) would baptize with the Spirit (Mark 1:8; John 1:33). In other words, the new era which Jesus’ passion and triumph have inaugurated is the age of the Spirit to which the prophets pointed forward. This perspective pervades the NT writings, including those of Paul, in whose eyes the age of the Spirit has superseded the age of Torah.
But, in addition to the general Christian perspective on the Spirit which Paul received, he makes at least two distinctive contributions: (1) the Holy Spirit is the present guarantee of coming resurrection and glory; (2) in the Holy Spirit the people of Christ have been baptized into one corporate entity. Both these contributions, expounded in the “capital” letters, are given prominence in Ephesians.
The Spirit is called “the Holy Spirit of promise” in Eph. 1:13— not simply because he is the promised Spirit, but (as the context indicates) because to those whom he indwells he is himself the promise of resurrection life and all the heritage of glory associated with it. The locus classicus of this teaching is Rom. 8:9-28. There “the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead” will “quicken” the mortal bodies of those who believe in Jesus; as “the Spirit of adoption” he enables them to realize their privileges and responsibilities as sons and daughters of God against the day when they will be publicly revealed as such. This “revelation” (for which, says Paul, all creation eagerly waits in order to share “the liberty of the glory of the children of God”) coincides with “the redemption of our bodies”— that is, the resurrection. And of this consummation believers have already received the “first fruits” in the person of the Spirit. To the same effect Paul speaks in 2 Cor. 5:5, with reference to believers’ coming investiture with their “heavenly dwelling”: “He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who has given us the Spirit as a guarantee.”
This is precisely the doctrine of the Spirit in Ephesians. It is the distinctively Pauline doctrine, not merely the more general Christian doctrine. Believers, both Jewish and Gentile, have been “sealed” with the Spirit, who is the “guarantee” of their inheritance, pending God’s redemption of his own possession (Eph. 1:13-14). This collocation of “seal” and “guarantee” has already appeared in 2 Cor. 1:22: “God has sealed us and set the guarantee of the Spirit in our hearts.” The sealing is coincident with their believing; the occasion is that indicated in 1 Cor. 12:13, when “in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and were all watered with one Spirit.”
These words of 1 Cor. 12:13 sum up the other aspect of Paul’s distinctive doctrine of the Spirit. Baptism in the Spirit (the baptizer being Christ himself) is not simply an individual experience; it is the divine act by which believers in Christ are incorporated into his body. Incorporation into Christ is implied by Paul elsewhere, when he speaks of being “baptized into Christ” (Gal. 3:27; Rom. 6:3) or “putting on Christ” (Gal. 3:27; Rom. 13:14), but it is in 1 Cor. 12:13 that the Spirit’s part in this experience finds clearest expression. This is the teaching that underlies the injunction of Eph. 4:3, to “preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace”; this “unity of the Spirit” is the unity of the body of Christ into which the people of Christ are baptized in his Spirit, for (in the words that follow immediately) “there is one body and one Spirit” (Eph. 4:4).
III. IMAGERY OF EPHESIANS
While the thought of the church as the body of Christ, animated by his Spirit, pervades Ephesians, other images are used. In Eph. 2:19-22 the church is portrayed rather as a building than as a body (although, just as architectural language is used of the body in Eph. 4:12-16, so biological language is used of the building in Eph. 2:21); but here too it is “in the Spirit” that the building takes shape, as the individual components are bonded together by Christ the “cornerstone.” Here too it is in the “one Spirit” that Jewish and Gentile believers together have common access to the Father (cf. Rom. 5:2) or, by a change of figure, constitute a holy dwelling-place or temple for God (an idea anticipated in 1 Cor. 3:16-17).
These concepts of the body of Christ and the temple of God are interwoven with the concept of the “new man.” In a mingling of the architectural and biological figures, the full-grown man, “the measure of the stature of Christ’s fullness,” is presented in Eph. 4:13-16 as the climax of the church’s development. The body of Christ is “built up,” growing up to match him who is its head. Christ as the second man, the last Adam, the head and embodiment of the new creation, meets us in Rom. 5:12-19 and 1 Cor. 15:20-28, 42-50. When believers’ putting on Christ is mentioned in Rom. 13:14 and Gal. 3:27, this (as has been said) involves incorporation into Christ as well as the personal imitation of Christ. So, when the “new man” is said in Eph. 4:24 to be “created according to God in righteousness and true holiness” (cf. Col. 3:10, “renewed after his Creator’s image so as to attain true knowledge”), the new man or new humanity is Christ himself—not Christ in isolation from his people but Christ in his people, the same Christ as Paul had in mind when he told his Galatian converts how he endured birth pangs over them until “Christ should be formed” in them (Gal. 4:19).
Even the analogy drawn between Christ’s relation to the church and a husband’s relation to his wife (Eph. 5:22-33) is adumbrated in 2 Cor. 11:2, where Paul speaks of himself as the paranymphios betrothing the Corinthian church to Christ “as a pure virgin to her one husband.” (The same analogy was developed in a completely non-Pauline stream of primitive Christianity, as may be seen from the vision in Rev. 21:2, where the beloved community is seen “coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.”)18
When we consider how the main themes and images of Ephesians are rooted in the earlier Pauline letters, there is little need to seek extraneous sources for them. In a monograph published in 1930, Heinrich Schlier argued that Ephesians was indebted for its dominant motifs only in a minor degree to the common stock of primitive Christianity and in much greater measure to early gnostic sources. To the common stock of primitive Christianity he traced the themes of Christ’s self-devotion on his people’s behalf (Eph. 5:2, 25) and God’s raising him from the dead and putting all things beneath his feet (Eph. 1:20, 22). For the rest, he derived from the world of gnostic thought the motifs of the redeemer’s ascent to heaven, the heavenly wall, the heavenly man, the church as the body of Christ, the body of Christ as a heavenly building, and the heavenly bridal union.19 But when one considers how many of those motifs have their roots in Paul’s thinking, as attested by his earlier letters, and how scanty, or even nonexistent, is the evidence for their presence in gnosticism at anything like a relevant date, Schlier’s arguments lose some of their cogency. Twenty-seven years later, in fact, in his excellent commentary on the epistle, Schlier presented a much more balanced account (in which, among other things, he readily accepted the Pauline authorship).20
Quite a different origin for some of the distinctive features of the epistle was propounded in 1960 by K. G. Kuhn.21 He found affinities between it and the Qumran literature in vocabulary (e.g., in the use of the word “mystery”), in style (e.g., a plerophoric manner of expression), and in paraenesis (including the light-darkness antithesis). The only area in Ephesians where no affinities were found in the Qumran texts was Christology, “which of course in Ephesians also includes ecclesiology” (expounded in the head-body imagery and the bridal union of Christ and the church); one would not expect to find this in the literature of a Jewish community. As for the affinities to which Kuhn drew attention, the explanation has been offered that “either Paul or a disciple, who was entrusted under his direction with the final redaction of the epistle, had a first-hand knowledge of the writings of Qumran,” and that Ephesus was a place where such knowledge could have been acquired.22
IV. INCIPIENT CATHOLICISM
It has been urged that Ephesians is most plainly seen to be post-Pauline in the incipient or emergent catholicism of its teaching about the church.23 Chief among the elements of incipient catholicism, so far as Ephesians is concerned, is the conception of the church throughout the world as a unity.
We have seen that Ephesians universalizes the church doctrine of 1 Corinthians, but the universal principle which finds clear expression in Ephesians is latent in 1 Corinthians, which is addressed not only to “the church of God that is in Corinth” but also to “all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 1:1). It is emphasized in 1 Cor. 12:4-6 that the unity of the church follows from the fact that “the same Spirit, ... the same Lord . . . and the same God” control all the diversities of ministry within it. But by the same token, wherever the church exists, it comprises one people of Christ, indwelt by the one Spirit, confessing the one Lord, and through him worshipping the one God. Thus the same argument as is presented in 1 Cor. 12:4-6 for the unity of the local church is applied in Eph. 4:4-6 to the unity of the universal church. And the church in which, according to 1 Cor. 12:28, God has appointed apostles, prophets, and other ministers cannot be restricted to the Christian community in Corinth.
We might a priori have expected Paul to think of the Christians throughout his mission field as forming a unity; indeed, he went farther and promoted a sense of practical unity between them and other churches, especially the church of Jerusalem. He knew that “Israel after the flesh” did not exist only in local synagogues; it was an ecumenical reality. The synagogue in any city was the local manifestation of the whole “congregation of Israel.”24 It was natural that Paul should think in the same way of the new community, embracing Jews and Gentiles indiscriminately.
Moreover, all Christians had been “baptized into Christ,”25 not merely into a local fellowship. They therefore formed part of one spiritual entity, which Paul calls the body of Christ. In baptism they had been united with Christ in his death, to rise with him in the likeness of his resurrection and so “walk in newness of life” (Rom. 6:3-5). The Christians in Corinth are reminded that they are Christ’s body, and individually members thereof (1 Cor. 12:27); similarly those in Rome are told that “we” (that is, not the Roman Christians alone but the Roman Christians in fellowship with Paul and others), “though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another” (Rom. 12:5). To Paul’s way of thinking Christ could no more be divided among the several congregations than he could be divided among the factions within the congregation at Corinth.26 The explicit teaching about the church universal in Ephesians is a corollary of Paul’s understanding of the phrase “in Christ” and all that it implies.
Language such as Paul uses to the Corinthian and Roman Christians about membership in the body of Christ could not be locally restricted, even if the occasions that called forth the letters to Corinth and Rome directed its application to the conditions of local fellowship. All believers—in Corinth and Rome, in Ephesus and Jerusalem, and everywhere else—had together died with Christ and been raised with him;27 as participators in his life they could not but constitute one universal fellowship.
When incipient catholicism is discerned in NT documents, it is implied that those features are present which were to characterize the life and theology of the later church, the church itself being viewed as the locus of salvation.28 But the universal church is far from being presented in Ephesians as a cultic institution, with a priesthood mediating the means of grace to the rank and file of the faithful. Not even in the latest NT documents has it come anywhere near that stage of development. The church’s ministry in Ephesians is still mainly charismatic: it is not regulated as it is in the Pastorals. The apostles and the prophets of Eph. 4:11 constitute foundation ministries (as in Eph. 2:20); as for the evangelists, pastors, and teachers, they do not reserve the ministry to themselves but are given to the church by the ascended Lord that they may enable all its members to discharge their respective ministries, each member functioning for the health and growth of the whole body.29
In Paul’s capital letters the one instance of interchurch organization is provided by the relief fund for the “saints” at Jerusalem. To promote the collection and conveyance of the money for this purpose he invited the contributing churches (all Gentile churches of his own planting) to appoint one or two delegates each.30 In Ephesians there is naturally no reference to the relief fund (it was a thing of the past by the time this letter was written), but it contains no hint of any other interchurch organization. In Ephesians the universal church is an organism, not an organization, just as the local church is in 1 Corinthians. Even so, despite hints of a wider unity in 1 Corinthians, it remains true that the organism in view in that letter is predominantly the local church, as certainly as that the organism in view in Ephesians is the church universal.
Could this development from a local to a catholic ecclesiology, seen especially in the transition from 1 Corinthians to Ephesians, have taken place not merely in Paul’s lifetime but in his own thinking? The confidence with which the answers “Yes” and “No” have been given to this question suggests that the issue is not to be decided on strictly objective criteria. On the one hand, W. G. Kümmel may be cited as representative of those who answer “No.” The fact that “in Ephesians ekklēsia is used exclusively of the universal church (1:22; 3:10, 21; 5:23-25, 27, 29, 32), whereas in all the Pauline epistles, even in Colossians, ekklēsia indicates the individual congregations as well as the total church” is one among several arguments which lead him to the conclusion that “the theology of Ephesians makes the Pauline composition of the Epistle completely impossible.”31 On the other hand, Henry Chadwick reviews the main arguments propounded against the Pauline authenticity of the document, and finds them inconclusive. There is, in his judgment, “no sufficient ground” for regarding Paul as incapable of producing Ephesians, and in his short commentary on the letter “the author is called Paul without either apology or question-begging.”32 The present commentary takes leave to follow his example.
If those who reject the Pauline authorship are more emphatic in their rejection than those who affirm it are in their affirmation, the reason may be that those who reject it are consciously going against tradition, whereas those who affirm it know that they have tradition behind them.33
No useful purpose would be served here by listing the champions on either side of the debate, but special mention may be made of one scholar whose studies led him to abandon one side for the other. This was the late Heinrich Schlier, a member of the Bultmann school who shared the general perspective of that school which rendered the Pauline authorship of Ephesians out of the question—both as regards the incipient catholicism of the document and also because of the gnostic derivation of its dominant imagery (the theme of his above-mentioned monograph, Christus und die Kirche im Epheserbrief).34 His continuing study of the subject led him to the conviction that incipient catholicism and other features which he and his colleagues had identified as postapostolic accretions on the original message were in fact part and parcel of authentic primitive Christianity. His consequent publication of a commentary on Ephesians which accepted the Pauline authorship without question dismayed some of his friends almost as much as another consequence of his change of perspective—his moving over from Lutheranism into the Roman Catholic Church.35
V. NATURE AND PURPOSE OF EPHESIANS
Apart from the prescript (Eph. 1:1-2) and the personal notes and greeting at the end (Eph. 6:21-24), which give the document the form of a letter, Ephesians falls into two parts:
(1) an extended benediction and prayer, constituting the framework for a celebration of God’s accomplishment in Christ of his eternal purpose, which embraces the incorporation into one divine society of Gentiles and Jews on an equal footing, and leading into a final doxology (Eph. 1:3–3:21). The liturgical character of this part is no doubt responsible for the plerophoric style (notably the piling up of genitival phrases)36 which is such a distinctive feature of Ephesians.
(2) a lengthy paraenesis (Eph. 4:1–6:20) of a kind which must have been current in the Gentile churches. It is interrupted by a psalm quotation and interpretation in which the OT is found to foretell the ascended Christ’s bestowal of gifts on his church (Eph. 4:7-16, citing Ps. 68:18), and it includes a household code in which the temporal relationship between husband and wife is set forth as an analogy to the unending relationship between Christ and the church (Eph. 5:21-33).
Whatever be the literary relation between Ephesians and Colossians,37 Ephesians provides the logical sequel to Colossians, expounding the cosmic role of the church, the body of Christ, as Colossians expounds the cosmic role of Christ, who is head of his body, the church, and at the same time “head of every principality and power” (Col. 1:18; 2:10).
The purpose of this exposition, and the constituency for which it was designed, have been matters of wide and deep speculation.
One of the best-known hypotheses is that first propounded by E. J. Goodspeed and elaborated in particular by John Knox and C. L. Mitton. Goodspeed faced a critical consensus which rejected the tradition of Pauline authorship but could find no adequate raison d’être for the composition of such a pseudepigraph. Of the supposed author Adolf Jülicher had written: “it is impossible to see what purpose he could have served or why he made such a particularly thorough use of Colossians, when he himself did not lack independent ideas and was also acquainted with other Pauline Epistles.”38 Goodspeed undertook to show the purpose which Jülicher was unable to see. He first stated his hypothesis briefly: “Ephesians was written in the latter part of the first century, not to any single church but as a general letter. It shows the influence of Colossians and must have been written in connection with the movement to collect Paul’s letters, probably as an introduction to them.”39 In a succession of later works he elaborated this suggestion.40 Late in the first century a Christian, resident probably in the Lycus valley, who had read and reread the letter to the Colossians until he knew it practically by heart, acquired a copy of Luke-Acts. The study of this work kindled in him a keen interest in Paul, which moved him to collect as many of the letters of the apostle as he could. He decided to make the collection of Paul’s letters available to the church at large, and composed Ephesians as an introduction to the collection, setting forth the main emphases of Paul’s teaching in a form relevant to the needs of that later day.
John Knox took over this hypothesis and argued that the collector was Paul’s convert Onesimus; he identified him with that Onesimus who, as we know from Ignatius, was bishop of Ephesus at the beginning of the second century.41 Goodspeed was persuaded that this refinement of his own hypothesis represented the truth.42 Knox further explained how Ephesians came to lose its original place at the head of the collected letters of Paul: when Marcion promulgated his canon around A.D. 144, he put Galatians in the first place for reasons of dogmatic preference and put Ephesians in the place formerly occupied by Galatians.43
C. L. Mitton presented a detailed comparative study of the text of Ephesians with Colossians and the earlier letters of Paul, with the effect of placing the main elements of Goodspeed’s hypothesis on a firmer basis than Goodspeed himself had laid.44 He does not think that the reading of Luke-Acts necessarily stimulated the collector’s interest in Paul, but finds it probable that the publication of Acts created a widespread interest in the apostle which provided the collector with a unique opportunity of publishing the collection of letters with his own introduction. Perhaps, Mitton suggests, when the collector read Paul’s Miletus speech to the elders of the Ephesian church in Acts 20:18-35, he paid it special attention and allowed it to influence his composition of Ephesians.45 The collector (whether he was Onesimus or not) may have submitted his work to the aged Tychicus, one of Paul’s former co-workers, who agreed that it was “a worthy presentation of Paul’s message” and whose encouragment was acknowledged by the inclusion of his name in Eph. 6:21-22.46
Mitton went on in a later monograph to present an account of the formation of the Pauline corpus, built on the foundation of his major work on Ephesians.47
If Goodspeed’s hypothesis, despite the skill and learning with which it has been stated by himself and others, has failed to win wide acceptance, it is not because another hypothesis has proved more persuasive, but simply because it falls well short of demonstration.
N. A. Dahl has argued that Ephesians was written (by Paul himself) to give members of newly planted Gentile churches instruction on the meaning of their baptism. The benediction beginning in Eph. 1:3 may be regarded as based on the blessing uttered before the baptismal act, a blessing which is in turn a Christian adaptation of the blessing said before a Jewish ritual bath. Gentile converts are reminded of the status which is now theirs through their incorporation into the community of the people of God, created by him as a new humanity; they are reminded at the same time of the obligation which henceforth lies on them to lead lives worthy of this high status to which God has called them. What more appropriate occasion than their baptism could be envisaged for such a reminder as this?48 (A similar case has been made out for regarding 1 Peter, or at least the greater part of it, as a baptismal address in written form; the evidence in 1 Peter is more explicit than in Ephesians.)49
J. C. Kirby also recognizes the baptismal reference in Ephesians; however, he disagrees with Dahl in that he considers the readers’ baptism to have taken place some indefinite time before the letter was sent to them. The readers are being recalled to an awareness of the meaning of their baptism: as at their baptism they had “put off the old man” and “put on the new man,” so they must continue to put off the one and put on the other.50 What is envisaged, in fact, is something like the covenant renewal ceremony attested for the Qumran community.51 This letter would have provided suitable reading for such a ceremony which, if indeed it existed, “was probably held on the Feast of Pentecost.”52 There are other features in the letter which could have a pentecostal reference: Ps. 68, for example, which is quoted and given a Christian interpretation in Eph. 4:8-10, figures as a proper psalm for Pentecost in Jewish liturgical tradition.53 While Kirby does not push the evidence beyond due limits, he justly claims “a high degree of probability” for his thesis “that Ephesians has close connections with Jewish liturgical forms and also with Jewish and Christian traditions of Pentecost.”54 He dates the letter “probably sometime in the seventies,” and ascribes it to a leader of the Ephesian church who aimed at providing his readers with “a distillation of the thought of the apostle,” which had been preserved in that church’s memory and worship;55 but his central thesis would be equally applicable if the letter were composed around A.D. 60, and by Paul, possibly with the collaboration of fellow-workers who were available to him at the time.
Henry Chadwick supposes that many people in Paul’s environment were somewhat embarrassed by the idea that the true revelation of God, which the gospel claimed to disclose, should have been given so late in time. “In the ancient world it is a generally acknowledged truth that nothing new can be true.”56 In Ephesians, therefore, the continuity of the new community with the people of God in earlier times is stressed; not only so, but the new community is viewed sub specie aeternitatis. It was divinely chosen in Christ before the world’s foundation (Eph. 1:4), it is the means by which God will accomplish his eternal purpose “in the fullness of the times” (Eph. 1:9-10), and at present it provides an object-lesson of “God’s manifold wisdom” to “the principalities and powers in the heavenly realm” (Eph. 3:10).
If Gentile Christians could be brought to understand the place which they have, alongside Jewish Christians, in God’s plan of the ages, and to recognize the way of life which befits those who have been given such a place, their embarrassment would be dissipated. Their ingathering was no saving afterthought on God’s part, no device for filling up the vacancies in his community which had been left through the failure of so many Jews to confess Jesus as Lord and Christ. Their salvation was due to divine grace, true: but so was the salvation of their fellow-believers of Jewish stock.57
There is at least firm internal evidence that the letter was written to encourage Gentile Christians to appreciate the dignity of their calling, with its implication not only for their heavenly origin and destiny but also for their present conduct on earth, as those who were heirs of God, sealed with his Spirit. Let them learn afresh the practical commitment they made when they first called on the name of Jesus as their one Lord, confessed their one faith, and sealed their new allegiance in their one baptism. Thus they would fulfil God’s purpose, leading lives worthy of the calling to which he had called them.
Tychicus, on his way to the Lycus valley (and possibly other parts of proconsular Asia) with copies of this letter for the various churches to which it was addressed, would probably have passed through Ephesus. If he showed the Ephesian Christians a copy of this letter, which was a general letter with no private message, some of them might well have wished to make a copy for themselves (although they, unlike the intended recipients, were well known to the apostle). This copy would have omitted any indication of addressee.58 If, further, this was the copy eventually used in the compilation of the corpus Paulinum, the fact that it belonged to the archives of the Ephesian church would be a reason for inserting the words “at Ephesus” in the prescript or labeling it “To the Ephesians,” to keep it in line with the other documents in the collection. But this can be nothing better than a guess.
Be that as it may. In 1 Cor. 2:6-10 Paul tells the Corinthian Christians that, for all their claims to wisdom, he has to feed them with milk and not with solid food, because they are still spiritually immature. Their immaturity was due to deficiency not in gnosis (of which they had plenty of a kind) but in agapē. “Nevertheless,” he assures them, “to those who are mature we do impart wisdom—not the wisdom of this age . . . but God’s wisdom in a mystery, the hidden wisdom ordained before the ages for our glory, ... as it is written:
What eye never saw, what ear never heard,
What never entered the human heart,
What God prepared for those who love him—
this is what God has revealed to us through the Spirit.” Should it be asked if this divine “wisdom in a mystery” is imparted to the “mature” anywhere in the Pauline corpus, Heinrich Schlier gives an affirmative answer: it is imparted in the letter to the Ephesians.59 He is right.