⚠ “[in Ephesus]” — and the brackets are not decoration. The words en Ephesō are missing from the earliest and best manuscripts: they are absent from P46 (c. AD 200), and from the original hands of both Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus, where a later corrector added them. Without them the Greek reads awkwardly — “to the holy ones who are… and faithful” — which is exactly what you would expect of a circular letter with a blank left for the courier to fill in. Two other facts point the same way: Paul spent three years in Ephesus, longer than anywhere else, yet this letter contains not one personal greeting and twice says he has only heard of his readers’ faith (1:15; 3:2); and Marcion, in the second century, knew this letter as addressed to Laodicea. This translation keeps the brackets rather than quietly printing either version. KJV, Douay, Geneva and NWT all print “at Ephesus” without comment; ASV and NIV print it but footnote the omission. It is a rare case where the address of a book is genuinely uncertain.

The tone is the opposite of Galatians. No crisis, no opponents named, no argument being won — a letter that reads like a circular sent to congregations Paul had not personally founded, or had not seen in years. It is the calmest thing in the Pauline collection and the one most often described as its summit.

⚠ Verses 3–14 are a SINGLE SENTENCE in Greek — about two hundred words without a full stop, the longest sentence in the New Testament and possibly in the Bible. Clause piles on clause (“in whom… in whom… according to… to the praise of…”) until the grammar nearly buckles. Every English version breaks it up, and so does this one, because English cannot sustain it; but the reader should know that what looks like a series of statements is in the original one long, breathless, accumulating doxology — a man who set out to say “blessed be God” and could not find a place to stop. The TLB reduces it to a dozen short sentences and loses the effect entirely.

It is a berakah, not a thanksgiving. “Blessed be the God and Father…” — the Jewish blessing-form this library met at the head of 2 Corinthians. Note the wordplay Greek can make and English cannot: eulogētos (blessed be) — eulogēsas (who has blessed) — eulogia (blessing), three forms of one root in a single line.

⚠ “In the heavenly places.” En tois epouraniois is peculiar to this letter, where it occurs five times and nowhere else in the New Testament. It is not simply “heaven” as a destination: the blessings are there now, Christ is enthroned there (v20), and by 6:12 the spiritual powers we struggle against are there too. It is the unseen dimension of the present, not a place we go later.

⚠ “Having marked us out beforehand for adoption.” Proorisas — pro (before) + horizō (to mark a boundary, the verb this library met at Romans 1:4). The Latin praedestinare gave English “predestine,” a word that now arrives carrying five centuries of argument it did not originally have. This translation reads marked out beforehand to let the reader hear the boundary-drawing image before the systems get to it. ⚠ And it is worth noticing what is being predestined here: not who is damned, but that those in Christ are destined for adoption and to be holy. The chapter states a purpose, not a roster. KJV and ASV “having predestinated us”; NWT “he foreordained us.” The debate is real and old — Augustine against Pelagius, Calvin against Arminius — and this library reports it rather than settling it in a participle.

“He GRACED us in the Beloved.” Echaritōsen — the verb of charis, and a word so rare that its only other New Testament appearance is Gabriel’s greeting to Mary, kecharitōmenē (Luke 1:28), which this library noted there. What was said of her is here said of everyone in Christ.

“The redemption through his blood.” Apolytrōsis — the ransom-word this library met at 1 Corinthians 1:30, the price paid to free a slave or a prisoner of war. Paired here with aphesis, “release” — a word used of cancelling a debt and of setting a prisoner loose — and both are commercial and legal, not cultic.

⚠ “The mystery of his will.” Mystērion does not mean a puzzle or something inherently unknowable. In this letter it means an open secret: something long hidden in God that has now been announced, and whose content Paul states plainly at 3:6 — that Gentiles are fellow heirs, in the same body. English “mystery” suggests the undisclosed; the Greek here means the disclosed. The mystery-religions of the age used the word for what initiates must never reveal, which is precisely the opposite of Paul’s usage.

⚠ “To gather up all things under one head.” Anakephalaiōsasthai is a magnificent, difficult word, and English has no equivalent. It is built on kephalaion — the sum at the foot of a column of figures, the main point of an argument, the heading of a paragraph — and behind that stands kephalē, head. So it means at once to sum up (as a total gathers its figures), to bring under one head, and to recapitulate (which is the Latin calque, recapitulare, and gave Irenaeus his whole theology of Christ redoing Adam’s story rightly). We read gather up all things under one head to keep both the summing and the headship, since the letter goes on to call Christ the head in verse 22. KJV “that he might gather together in one all things in Christ”; ASV “to sum up all things in Christ”; Douay keeps the Latin, “to re-establish all things in Christ”; NWT “to gather all things together again in the Christ.” Every version picks one strand of a word that holds three.

⚠ Watch the pronouns; they are doing quiet work. Verses 11–12 say we — “we who had hoped beforehand in Christ” — and verse 13 turns to you: “in whom you also, having heard…” On the usual reading the “we” is Jewish believers, who had the promises first, and the “you” is the Gentile readers who came in later. If that is right, then the whole shape of the letter — two peoples made one, the dividing wall broken down in chapter 2 — is already encoded in a change of pronoun. Not every reader accepts it; some take the shift as merely rhetorical.

“Sealed with the promised Holy Spirit… the down payment of our inheritance.” Both images arrive together, exactly as in 2 Corinthians 1:22 — the sphragis, the signet stamped in wax to mark ownership and prove a thing untampered with, and the arrabōn, the commercial down payment that is itself part of the sum and legally binds the payer to complete it. Here the second image gains a partner: the deposit is on an inheritance (klēronomia), which turns the whole picture into a will not yet executed. ⚠ “Until the redemption of the possession” is genuinely ambiguous in Greek — God redeeming his own purchased people, or the people receiving their promised possession — and the versions split. We keep the ambiguity.

⚠ What Paul actually prays for. Not that anything be added — but that they might see what they already have. “A spirit of wisdom and revelation… the eyes of your heart having been enlightened, so that you may know…” The whole prayer is for perception. Everything in verses 3–14 is already theirs; the deficiency is in the eyesight.

“The eyes of your heart.” A striking phrase, and Hebrew rather than Greek in its anatomy: in the Bible the heart is the seat of thought and will, not primarily of feeling, so “the eyes of the heart” means something closer to the mind’s eye than to sentiment. ⚠ Some manuscripts read “eyes of your understanding,” which is what KJV prints; the earliest read “heart.” ASV and NIV read “heart.”

“His inheritance among the holy ones.” The Greek can be read two ways and both are theologically loaded: the inheritance God gives to his people, or the inheritance God has in them — his people as his own treasure. Given verse 14’s “redemption of the possession,” the second sense is at least in play, and it is the more startling: the letter has just called us God’s inheritance.

⚠ Paul piles up four synonyms for power in one clause — dynamis (capacity), energeia (working, operative energy), kratos (dominion, might in exercise), ischys (strength, sheer force) — and English simply does not have four distinct words at this pitch. The redundancy is the point: he is trying to say something that outruns the vocabulary, and the measure he finally reaches for is not a metaphor but an event. How great is this power? It is the power that raised Jesus from the dead. That is the yardstick.

“Every rule and authority and power and lordship.” The four terms are the language of the invisible hierarchy — angelic or demonic ranks, in the vocabulary of Jewish apocalyptic and of this letter’s own chapter 6. ⚠ For readers in a city famous for Artemis, magic and the amulet-trade (Acts 19 has the Ephesians burning their spell-books), a list of spiritual powers with Christ seated far above all of them is not abstraction; it is the reassurance they most needed. “Every name that is named” includes, deliberately, the names in the magical papyri.

“Head over all things to the congregation, which is his body.” The head/body pair is this letter’s governing image, and here it does something the other letters do not: in 1 Corinthians 12 the body is the congregation with Christ’s members distributed through it; here Christ is the head and the congregation is the body — a more cosmic and more hierarchical picture, and one of the reasons some scholars think Ephesians is by a disciple of Paul rather than Paul himself. Note also that ekklēsia here is not a local assembly but the whole; this translation reads congregation throughout, on the grounds set out at 1 Corinthians 1:2.

⚠ The last phrase is one of the hardest in Paul. To plērōma tou ta panta en pasin plēroumenou — “the fullness of the one who fills all things in all.” Two problems at once. First, plērōma, “fullness,” is grammatically in apposition to the body: the congregation is somehow Christ’s fullness — which can mean that he fills it, or, far more startlingly, that it completes him, as a body completes a head. Second, the participle can be middle or passive: the one who fills, or the one who is being filled. Chrysostom took the bold reading; most moderns take the milder. KJV “the fulness of him that filleth all in all”; NWT “the fullness of him who fills up all things in all.” We render the majority sense and flag the other, which is what this library does with a genuine crux.