Epistle to the Ephesians

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The Epistle to the Ephesians is a short New Testament letter, traditionally counted among the writings of Paul, that reads less like correspondence with a particular congregation than like a meditation on the whole scope of what its author takes Christ to have accomplished. The earliest and best manuscripts lack the words “in Ephesus” in the opening address, and the letter mentions no local quarrels or names — which has long suggested it was meant to circulate among several churches rather than answer one.

Its authorship is one of the genuinely open questions of the field. The text presents itself as written by Paul from prison, and for most of Christian history that claim was taken at face value. Since the nineteenth century a large body of scholarship has held the letter to be deutero-Pauline — composed after Paul’s death by someone working in his name and his idiom. The arguments are internal: a long, accumulating sentence-style unlike the undisputed letters, a vocabulary with many words Paul uses nowhere else, and an unusually close, often verbatim relationship to the Epistle to the Colossians. Other scholars defend Pauline authorship or leave the matter undecided. What is not in dispute is the letter’s date within the first century and its early standing as scripture.

The content that has drawn esoteric and mystical readers lies in its picture of the cosmos. The letter speaks of “principalities and powers,” of “the rulers of the darkness of this world” and “spiritual wickedness in high places” — an order of unseen authorities ranged through the heavens. Against them it sets Christ, raised and seated “far above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion,” with all things gathered up under him. The believing community is described as itself lifted into heavenly places, made one body across the old division of Jew and Gentile, and the union of Christ and the church is called a “great mystery.” This is the language of a layered cosmos and of hidden powers, and it has been read, in later centuries, as license for angelologies and spiritual-warfare schemes the letter itself does not spell out.

How the text is held varies sharply by reader. For most Christian traditions it is a charter of the church’s unity and of grace received rather than earned. For interpreters drawn to the esoteric, its talk of cosmic hierarchies, ascent, and a guarded mystery has resonated with Gnostic and Hermetic maps of the heavens — a resemblance worth noting and easy to overstate, since the letter’s powers are defeated enemies, not rungs of a ladder the soul must climb. What the letter asserts throughout is that the distance between the human and the divine has already been crossed from the other side.

→ Related: Epistle To The Romans · Epistle To The Philippians · First Epistle To Timothy