Epistle to the Ephesians

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The Epistle to the Ephesians is a short New Testament letter, counted among the writings of Paul, that turns on a small absence at its very first line. Where the other letters in the Pauline collection plant a place-name in the opening greeting — to the church at Corinth, to the saints at Philippi, to all that be in Rome — this one, in the oldest copies, names no city at all. The earliest and best witnesses to the text, the papyrus codex cataloged as P46 from around the year 200 and the great fourth-century parchment Bibles Vaticanus and Sinaiticus in their original hands, read simply “to the saints which are, and to the faithful in Christ Jesus,” with the words “in Ephesus” not present in the body of the greeting. Those two words enter the manuscripts later, supplied by correctors and copyists, and the heading “to the Ephesians” rides above a letter whose first sentence does not say so. The digitized leaves of Codex Sinaiticus preserve the opening of the letter in its fourth-century hand, where the absence and its later correction can still be read. Origen, working in the third century, and Basil of Caesarea in the fourth both remark on the gap, noting that the manuscripts available to them lacked the place-name. The letter reinforces the silence from within: it raises no local quarrel, settles no dispute peculiar to one congregation, names no one in the body but Paul himself and, at the close, the messenger Tychicus. It reads less as correspondence with a single church than as a sustained meditation, addressed to no one in particular and so to everyone, on the whole scope of what its author takes Christ to have done.

Saint Paul Writing His Epistles, attributed to Valentin de Boulogne (c. 1618-1620); the letter to the Ephesians is traditionally counted among Paul’s writings. — Valentin de Boulogne, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

A letter without an address

The blank where a destination should stand has shaped how the letter is read. The widely-held solution treats it as a circular — an encyclical meant to travel a route of churches in the Roman province of Asia, the place-name left open in the master copy to be filled, or read aloud, at each stop, with Ephesus, the provincial capital and the largest of those churches, eventually attaching its name to the surviving text and to the title. The hypothesis is old. In the mid-second century Marcion, the first figure known to have assembled a fixed collection of Pauline letters, carried this one in his canon under a different heading altogether — as the letter “to the Laodiceans.” Tertullian, writing against him around the turn of the third century in the fifth book of his Against Marcion, insists that the true tradition of the church sent the letter to the Ephesians and accuses Marcion of meddling with the title, while conceding — the detail is telling — that nothing doctrinal hung on the change. A letter that already floated free of its address could be docked at more than one port. Whatever the resolution, the place itself stays out of reach for any reader of the text: there is no separate entry for the ancient city to which the surviving name points, and the great sanctuary that gave Ephesus its fame, the temple of Artemis, belongs to a different religious world than this letter’s and is not its destination.

The Library of Celsus at ancient Ephesus, the Roman provincial capital of Asia whose name became attached to the letter. — via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The Apostle John and Marcion of Sinope, from an 11th-century Italian manuscript; Marcion carried this letter in his canon as the epistle “to the Laodiceans.” — J. Pierpont Morgan Library MS 748, fol. 150v, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The contested authorship

Authorship is the standing scholarly question, and it has been genuinely open since the early nineteenth century. The text presents itself as written by Paul, a prisoner, “an ambassador in bonds,” and for most of Christian history the claim was read at face value; the letter stood among the secure Pauline writings without challenge from the second century onward, and its first-century date and early standing as scripture are not in dispute. What is disputed is whose hand composed it. A large body of modern scholarship judges Ephesians to be deutero-Pauline — written after Paul’s death by someone working in his name and under his authority, a practice common in the ancient world and not necessarily understood as forgery, since to write in a master’s voice could extend his teaching into situations he had not lived to meet. The case is built from internal evidence of three kinds. First, the style: the Greek of Ephesians runs to long, accumulating, almost liturgical sentences, periods that pile clause on clause and relative on relative, heavier and slower than the swift, argumentative thrust of the undisputed letters such as those to the Romans and the Corinthians. Second, the vocabulary: an unusual density of words found nowhere else in the certain Pauline corpus, and familiar Pauline terms used with shifted sense. Third, and most distinctive to this case, the close literary relation to the Epistle to the Colossians, with which Ephesians shares whole blocks of language, sometimes nearly verbatim — Ephesians reading, on most accounts of the relationship, as an expansion and generalization of the shorter, more occasional Colossians, a following letter that lifts the earlier one’s cosmic Christology and reworks it into a broad meditation rather than a reply to a local crisis.

Against this stands a tradition of defense. Markus Barth, in his two-volume Anchor Bible commentary of 1974 — son of the theologian Karl Barth, and holder of a New Testament chair at Basel — worked line by line through the vocabulary, the difficult style, the affinities with the Qumran scrolls and with Gnostic language, and the parallels with and departures from the undisputed letters, and concluded that Paul was almost certainly the author, the letter directed to gentile converts of the churches of Asia. Andrew Lincoln, whose 1990 volume in the Word Biblical Commentary series became the standard English-language reference on the letter, weighed the same evidence the other way and read Ephesians as the work of a disciple of Paul, a member of his school writing in the generation after him. Many take neither pole and leave the matter undecided, holding that the data underdetermine the verdict. The dating tracks the judgment without ever leaving the first century: if Paul’s, the letter belongs to one of his imprisonments around the early 60s; if not, it falls a generation later, in the 70s or 80s, when his name had become a banner under which the churches he founded went on thinking — the same window in which the letters to a Timothy and to Titus are widely placed, marking the passage of the Pauline mission into a settling institution.

The cosmic picture

Whoever wrote it, the letter’s most far-reaching content lies in its picture of the cosmos, and it is here that esoteric and mystical readers have most often been drawn. The world of Ephesians is a layered one, the heavens stocked with unseen authorities. 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 ranked spiritual beings ranged through the upper air, against which, in the letter’s most famous martial image, the believer is said to wrestle, not against flesh and blood but against these. Set over the whole array is Christ, whom God has raised and seated “far above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named” — the same roll-call of cosmic ranks that recurs in Colossians, named in Ephesians only to be subordinated. The risen Christ is placed above the hierarchy; and then, in the move that gives the letter its peculiar altitude, the believing community is described as lifted up after him, raised together and made to sit “in heavenly places in Christ Jesus,” already, in the present tense — a realized exaltation that goes beyond the future hope of resurrection held out in the earliest correspondence — the catching-up of the living and the dead awaited in the letter to the Thessalonians has, in Ephesians, already in some sense occurred. The phrase recurs like a refrain: the heavenly places are where the powers reside, where Christ is enthroned, and where the church is somehow already seated with him.

This vocabulary of a graded heaven, hidden authorities, ascent, and exaltation is what has made Ephesians a magnet for readers outside the mainstream of doctrine. Its language sits close enough to the cosmologies of Gnosis and the Gnostic schools — with their layered heavens, their ranks of intermediary powers, their souls ascending through the spheres — that the second-century Gnostic teacher Valentinus and his followers read the letter as one of their own treasuries, mining its talk of aeons, of fullness, and of a hidden plan for their own systems of emanation. The same resonances reach toward the Hermetic literature and the mystery religions, whose initiates passed through stages toward a guarded knowledge. The letter has accordingly been treated, in later centuries, as a warrant for elaborate angelologies and for schemes of spiritual combat that it nowhere spells out. Yet the logic of the text cuts against the use. In the cosmologies it resembles, the powers are stations on a ladder, and the work of salvation is the soul’s own climb back up through them, rung by rung, knowledge by knowledge. The letter inverts the picture at its root. Its powers are not stations but adversaries, already placed beneath the feet of a Christ who has been raised above them; and the believer does not ascend to that height by effort, knowledge, or discipline but is described as carried there, raised and seated by an act done from the other side. What the cosmologies make a labor of ascent, the letter makes a gift of position.

The mystery: one body across the oldest division

The hidden plan the letter calls a “mystery” is not, in the end, a secret reserved for the few. Its content, stated openly, is a unity: the bringing together into one body of Jew and gentile, the two halves of the ancient world, divided since the giving of the law. Christ, the letter says, “is our peace, who hath made both one,” breaking down “the middle wall of partition” — the dividing barrier — between them, abolishing in his flesh the enmity, to make of the two “one new man.” The image that follows is architectural: the gentiles, once strangers and foreigners, are built into a single structure with Israel, a temple rising on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ as the chief corner stone, the whole frame “fitly framed together” and growing into a holy habitation. Then the most quoted line widens the same union into the figure that would carry the most weight in later thought: the bond of husband and wife is read as a sign of the bond of Christ and the church, and the writer breaks off to call it “a great mystery.” The phrase has had a long doctrinal afterlife, read by some traditions as scriptural grounding for marriage as a sacrament; but in the letter’s own movement it is one more instance of the single theme — two made one, the gathering of what was split.

The reception has run accordingly along two tracks that rarely meet. For the broad Christian traditions, Ephesians is a charter of the church’s unity and of grace received rather than earned, the source-text for the image of the church as a body with many members under one head and for the classic statement that salvation is “by grace… through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works.” It supplied the patristic and Reformation arguments about the church’s oneness and about the priority of grace, and its language of one Lord, one faith, one baptism became a permanent formula of Christian unity. For readers drawn to the esoteric, the same letter offered its heaven of powers, its talk of fullness and ascent, and its guarded mystery — the furniture, ironically, of the very systems whose central operation the letter denies. Among modern scholars the two volumes that frame the field — Barth’s Anchor Bible commentary, defending Paul and dwelling on the letter’s Jewish and sectarian background, and Lincoln’s Word commentary, reading it as the considered theology of a Pauline disciple — agree on at least this: that whatever its authorship, Ephesians is the most sustained meditation in the New Testament on the church as a cosmic and not merely a social reality, a single body lifted into the heavens.

The text, the editions, and the scholarship

The Greek text of Ephesians is established in the standard critical editions of the New Testament, the Nestle-Aland and the United Bible Societies’ texts, where the principal point of contention remains exactly the one that opens the letter — whether the words “in Ephesus” in the first verse stood in the original, which the editors print in brackets or relegate to the apparatus precisely because the oldest witnesses lack them.

A leaf of Papyrus 46 (P.Mich.inv. 6238), c. 175-225; this Pauline codex, which includes Ephesians, is among the earliest witnesses to the letter’s text. — University of Michigan Library, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The classic full-scale modern handling is Markus Barth’s two-volume Ephesians in the Anchor Bible (volumes 34 and 34A, 1974), covering chapters 1-3 and 4-6 across introduction, translation, and exhaustive commentary, the fullest defense of Pauline authorship in English; against it, Andrew Lincoln’s Ephesians in the Word Biblical Commentary (volume 42, Word Books, Dallas, 1990) is the standard scholarly statement of the deutero-Pauline case and the most-cited reference on the letter’s language and structure. The study of the letter’s relation to Colossians, the cornerstone of the authorship debate, runs back through more than a century of synoptic comparison of the two texts column against column. And the letter’s single most consequential phrase for later theology stands in the first chapter, where the hidden plan is said to be that God would, in the fullness of time, “gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and which are on earth.” The Greek verb behind “gather together in one” — anakephalaiosasthai, to sum up, to bring under one head — gave Irenaeus of Lyons, in the second century, the technical term for his doctrine of recapitulation, set out in the third book of his Against Heresies: Christ as the one in whom the whole history of the world, fractured at its origin in Adam, is summed up, gathered, and restored.

That gathering is the letter’s true subject, the thing toward which its long sentences keep climbing. Where the cosmologies it brushes against scatter the divine across a hierarchy of intermediaries, each to be passed in turn, Ephesians collects everything into a single act and a single head: the powers placed under one set of feet, the two ancient halves of humanity framed into one building, the husband and wife folded into the image of Christ and the church, all things in heaven and on earth drawn up together in one. The mystery the letter guards is not a knowledge withheld but a unity disclosed — and the unity is total, leaving nothing outside the one in whom it is gathered.

→ Related: Epistle To The Romans · Epistle To The Philippians · First Epistle To Timothy · Epistle To The Colossians · New Testament · Paul The Apostle · Jesus Christ · Christianity · First Epistle To The Corinthians · First Epistle To The Thessalonians · Gnosticism · Gnosis · Corpus Hermeticum · Valentinus · Aeon · Mystery Religions