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Ephesians
📖 Ephesians
Πρὸς Ἐφεσίους (Pros Ephesious) — 'To the Ephesians' — ⚠ and the title may be wrong. The words 'in Ephesus' at 1:1 are ABSENT from the earliest manuscripts (P46, and the original hands of both Vaticanus and Sinaiticus), leaving a blank where an address should be; Marcion, in the second century, knew this letter as the one to LAODICEA. The likeliest explanation is a circular letter carried round a group of congregations with the destination left open for the courier to fill in.
The calmest and most cosmic thing in the Pauline collection — no crisis, no opponents, not one personal greeting; a letter that begins before the founding of the world and ends with a soldier's armour, and whose subject is the single new humanity God is making out of two.
Chapters
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Chapter by chapter
About the book
Where it sits
The TENTH book of the New Testament and one of the four 'prison letters' (with Philippians, Colossians and Philemon). Its influence is enormous and quiet: 'by grace you have been saved through faith' (2:8), 'one Lord, one faith, one baptism' (4:5), the household code of chapter 5, and the armour of God (6:10-18).
Genre
A LETTER in form, but closer to a MEDITATION or a circular homily — the only Pauline letter with no local problem behind it. Its Greek is unusually liturgical: long piled-up sentences (1:3-14 is a single two-hundred-word sentence, the longest in the New Testament), heaped synonyms, and the cadences of prayer and blessing rather than argument.
Author
⚠ DISPUTED — the sharpest authorship question among the letters traditionally ascribed to Paul. It names Paul twice (1:1; 3:1) and the ancient church never doubted it. Against that, a substantial body of modern scholarship notes: its Greek style (long periodic sentences, unusual vocabulary) differs from the undisputed letters; roughly a third of it runs closely parallel to COLOSSIANS, sometimes phrase for phrase, but with words shifted in sense; 'the church' means the universal body rather than a local assembly; and the apostles are spoken of as a foundation already laid (2:20), which reads like a later vantage. Others answer that a circular written at leisure in prison would naturally differ in style from a crisis letter dictated at speed. The library reports both and does not vote.
Date written
c. AD 60–62 if Paul wrote it, from the Roman imprisonment ('an ambassador in chains', 6:20), carried with Colossians and Philemon by Tychicus (6:21). If a disciple wrote it, somewhere in the 80s or 90s.
Place
Rome, on the traditional view; some prefer an earlier imprisonment at Caesarea or Ephesus.
Audience
⚠ Uncertain, and deliberately so on the circular-letter theory: congregations in the Roman province of Asia, of which Ephesus was the chief city. The letter's own evidence points away from a congregation Paul knew personally — he twice says he has only HEARD of their faith (1:15; 3:2), and there are no greetings by name, which is extraordinary in a letter to a city where he had spent three years.
How it's laid out
1:1–2:22What God has done — the great blessing (one sentence), the prayer to SEE it, the dead made alive, and the two made one with the dividing wall broken down.
3:1–21The mystery now disclosed: Gentiles are fellow heirs, in the same body — and a prayer to know the love that surpasses knowledge.
4:1–5:20Therefore walk worthily — one body and one Spirit, the gifts that build it, the old self put off and the new put on, and 'be imitators of God'.
5:21–6:9The household code — wives and husbands (with marriage read as an image of Christ and the congregation), children and parents, slaves and masters.
6:10–24The armour of God, and a closing that names only Tychicus.
What it's about
- The COSMIC PLAN — to 'gather up all things under one head in Christ' (1:10), the letter's own summary of what God is doing with the universe.
- ONE NEW HUMANITY out of two — Jew and Gentile, the dividing wall broken down (2:14-16); the letter's practical heart and the content of its 'mystery'.
- The CHURCH as Christ's BODY and his fullness — here the whole and not a local assembly, with Christ as the head.
- GRACE, and the impossibility of boasting — 'by grace you have been saved through faith, and this not from yourselves' (2:8-9).
- The HEAVENLY PLACES (en tois epouraniois) — a phrase found only in this letter, five times: where the blessings are, where Christ is enthroned, and where the powers we struggle against also are.
- WALKING — the letter's word for ordinary life, used seven times; the second half is entirely about how the cosmic plan changes a Tuesday.
Key words & people
Words this book turns on — each links to its dictionary entry:
People & places — each links to the encyclopedia:
The source text
Translated from the Greek of the SBL GREEK NEW TESTAMENT (SBLGNT), edited by Michael W. Holmes. ⚠ The letter's most significant textual question is in its first verse: 'in Ephesus' is missing from P46 (c. AD 200) and from the original hands of Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, where later correctors supplied it. This translation prints it in BRACKETS rather than silently choosing. Chapter 1 also carries the New Testament's longest sentence (vv3-14), which every English version breaks up, including this one — the note records what is lost by doing so.
Looking forward
Ephesians has the highest and widest view of Christ in the collection. He is the one in whom we were chosen 'before the founding of the world' (1:4); the one in whom God's plan is 'to gather up all things under one head' (1:10); raised, seated at the right hand 'far above every rule and authority and power and lordship' (1:21); the head of the body, and its fullness (1:23); the peace who 'made both one and broke down the dividing wall' (2:14); the husband whose love for the congregation is the pattern for a marriage (5:25). Chapter 1 is almost entirely about what God did IN him — the preposition 'in Christ' or its equivalent occurs about a dozen times in eleven verses.
Where the debates are
AUTHORSHIP, above all, and its relation to COLOSSIANS (which letter used which, or whether one author wrote both). The ADDRESS — Ephesus, Laodicea, or a blank. Whether 'predestined' in 1:5 and 1:11 concerns individuals or the corporate purpose. Whether the congregation as Christ's 'fullness' (1:23) means he fills it or it completes him. And the HOUSEHOLD CODE of 5:21-6:9, especially 'wives, submit' read against 'submit to one another' in 5:21, and the letter's failure to condemn slavery outright — questions the library states plainly rather than smoothing over. No votes cast.