Ephesians

Canon Martin Kitchen, Martin Kitchen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134867400
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

This study approaches the Epistle to the Ephesians in a radically different way from traditional commentaries. Rather than analysing each individual verse, Martin Kitchen examines the complete text within the framework of contemporary biblical criticism. He acknowledges the debt which biblical studies owes to historical method, while at the same time recognizing the need to view the Epistle against the background of recent literary approaches to New Testament texts. Ephesians also takes into account the important questions of whether the Epistle was written by St Paul and, if not, why it was written at all.
This book will be valuable reading for all theologians, students of theology and ministers of religion.

Chapter 1 An introduction to a reading of Ephesians

DOI: 10.4324/9780203130919-1

‘The Epistle of St Paul the Apostle to the Ephesians’ arouses a variety of responses in its readers. It was described by Coleridge (1835) as ‘the divinest composition of man’, and by one commentator as ‘the quintessence of Paulinism’ (Peake 1917: 285). However, the majority of scholarly opinion now casts doubt upon its supposed Pauline authorship; it is a notorious fact of early church history that many of Paul's contemporaries doubted his claim to apostleship; there are those who question whether Ephesians can properly be called an ‘epistle’ at all; and the earliest texts lack the words ‘in Ephesus’ in Ephesians 1.1.

These responses indicate both the historical and the literary questions which confront any reader of this sometimes baffling document, and of which the reader needs to be aware before coming to the text itself. The purpose of this chapter will therefore be to discuss Ephesians as history and as literature, by way of an introduction to a reading of the epistle.

Ephesians as History

The assumption that scholars hitherto have made is that, in order to read the Bible properly, it is essential to understand how it had been read in the past, and, in particular, how its author intended it to be understood. This is not altogether surprising; Christianity has long maintained that it is an ‘historical’ religion, in that it has taught that God, ‘beyond history’, has intervened and made a difference to it. A certain set of assumptions and beliefs at the philosophical level made that view possible, and, indeed, inevitable. However, this set of philosophical assumptions is subject to questioning today, so much so that Christianity is now being called to understand itself in rather different terms.

Why is this so? There is not much room here to discuss this in detail, but an outline of the shift in consciousness may be briefly traced. There are still those who take the view that the New Testament scholar is primarily an historian, because the New Testament itself is primarily an historical document. For Marshall (1977) this is due to a conviction that the events narrated, in the gospels in particular, are the basis of the faith of believers today. Kaufmann also states the primacy of historical study of the Bible:

We are not concerned to recover simply ‘What the Bible says’; We are seeking to find out ‘What actually happened’ in Israel and the early Christian Church, so that we will be in a position to assess the claim that God himself was active there, making himself known to all mankind through that particular historical development.

(1971: 140)

The historian Leopold von Ranke (1874) first highlighted the aim to write history ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen ist’ — ‘as it really happened’ — and Strauss's Life of Jesus, Critically Examined’ (1846) applied this principle to the story of Jesus. So began the process of erosion of the ‘historical’ foundations of Christian belief. His influence continued into this century, with Bultmann becoming, perhaps, the most famous for historical scepticism. Bultmann's claim to fame rests also on his joining such scepticism with an existentialist hermeneutic, which concentrated on ‘the meaning of the text for today’. Historical scepticism is even further advanced now, and the very proliferation of recent attempts (Edwards 1992; Wilson 1992; Wright 1992; Thiering 1993) to start yet another ‘quest of the historical Jesus’, such as was undertaken in the nineteenth century and brilliantly documented by Schweitzer (1910), is an indication of the near impossibility of this approach, and illustrates the truth of Schama's confession, concerning historians generally, ‘We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot’ (1991: 320).

In part, the problem with the exclusively historical approach is that the text has been exploded by the success of the method, and a greater hermeneutical problem has thereby been created. The critical study of history began at more or less the same time as the critical study of the Bible, and as the dogmatic assertions of theologians concerning the nature of the Bible came to be subjected, one by one, to critical enquiry, the edifice of biblicaltheology, in so far as it was conceived as a unified structure, was gradually dismantled. The gospels were discovered to have been written by authors who were neither apostles nor eye-witnesses; as theology was seen to determine narrative, so the teachings of the apostle Paul were inevitably relativized. Indeed, the whole study of history developed away from the attempt to trace overall movement or design and became instead the minute amassment of the smallest of data, in the attempt to recover, in the case of any incident, wie es eigentlich gewesen ist.

Nineham (1978) represents perhaps the most acute understanding amongst theologians of this state of affairs when he observes that historical events are ‘encapsulated in their own time and are thus essentially irrecoverable by any future generation’. Nineham's starting point is the inevitability of cultural change and cultural pluralism. As societies, and the people who comprise them, undergo change, so also do the ‘doctrines felt as facts’ (to use Hulme's expression), or the ‘constellation(s) of absolute presuppositions’ (to use that of Collingwood). The Bible suffers in the same way, for it, too, emanates from a world vastly different from that of our day, and yet there is the added temptation for Christians to believe that ways of relating to it may continue unquestioned. Nineham rejects the ‘solutions’ both of claiming that the text ‘really’ means something different from what it purports to say, and of asserting that the revelation of God was in the historical events recorded in the Bible, but not in the biblical record of them.

Neither does Nineham consider satisfactory the approach of ‘biblical theology’ to this problem, because it created a special class of ‘historical’ event, of the validity of which Nineham is by no means certain; it seemed to require special pleading on behalf of biblical events, in order to assign them greater historical probability. The events related in the Bible cannot be excluded from the general characteristics of all historical events. Nineham sees the ‘nub of the matter’ as the early Christians’ experience of a new relationship with God, which is not so much ‘documented’, but rather ‘legitimated’, by the biblical records.

Some would consider Nineham as unduly conservative. Can ‘encapsulated’ events of history be said to exist? If they are not accessible, are they not as good as non-existent? The ‘problem of history’ now confronts the reader of any text in a particularly acute form. For the text emerges from history, it has a history, and it constructs history. It might be tempting to say therefore that the text conveys history, but it very soon becomes clear, rather, that the text simply conveys itself; whatever texts say, they say on their own authority. ‘There is nothing outside the text,’ we are now told.

Alongside the rise of historical study, there grew the suspicion of supernaturalism which was begun by the work of Reimarus. His Fragments of an Unknown Author were published by the writer and critic, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, in Wolfenbüttel between 1774 and 1778. His influence continues through the Enlightenment to the present day. However, the fact that faith has not altogether been eroded by historical criticism is an indication, not of irrationalism in the persistence of religion, but of the fact that the primary concern of religious people is not what happened in the past, but what may sustain, nourish or challenge their faith. In other words, people go to church to worship, not to learn history; their business is with God as with a living concern. The recital of events — and their re-enactment in liturgy — is something other than a history lesson.

The question of authorship

The question of history as it affects the Epistle to the Ephesians is closely bound up with that of authorship. Ephesians was known to the ‘Apostolic Fathers’ — Ignatius of Antioch, Polycarp of Smyrna and Hermas — who lived and wrote a generation after most of the New Testament documents themselves were produced (Lake 1976). Later it was the subject of homiletical treatment by Jerome (PL 26: 439–554), John Chrysostom (PG 62: 9–176) and Theodore of Mopsuestia (Swete 1880: 253). As is common in the patristic period, the Fathers’ approach to the epistle reflects the preaching and teaching needs of the church of their respective days and circumstances, and their treatment of it is largely concerned with the refutation of error in the church (as the writers saw it), and with the edification of Christian congregations. They tend to regard the epistle as teaching the true doctrine of the church, and so undergirding their own theological position. The assumption that Paul wrote it was not questioned until modern times (except that Theodore of Mopsuestia expressed surprise at the epistle's omission of any sign that the author had personal knowledge of the church at Ephesus, although Paul is said in Acts 19 to have spent some time there).

Modern, critical study of the Epistle to the Ephesians may be said to have begun with Erasmus of Rotterdam (1519), who first observed, ‘It can be regarded as [the work] of another.’ The English Unitarian scholar Evanson (1792) subsequently argued that the differences between the address of the epistle and its contents pointed to authorship by someone other than Paul. The case against Pauline authorship of Ephesians was first set out in detail by de Wette (1847), and his arguments have dominated the discussion ever since:

1. the literary dependence of Ephesians upon Colossians;
2. the distinctive style of the epistle, and in particular the use of relative clauses, participles, prepositional phrases and genitival constructions;
3. the presence of certain expressions which indicate a post-apostolic date, such as ‘on the foundation of the apostles and prophets’ (2.20) and ‘the holy apostles and prophets’ (3.5).

Subsequent scholarship saw opinion upon the authenticity of Ephesians divided, but the tendency was in favour of pseudonymity. Baur (1845) and Schwegler (1846), of the University of Tübingen, denied Ephesians to Paul, and saw it as the result of the process, worked out in the early history of the church, of a Hegelian dialectic between ‘Petrine’ and ‘Pauline’ Christianity, traceable respectively to the apostles Peter and Paul. This dialectic reached its synthesis in ‘primitive catholicism’, which developed in the later second century, and Ephesians is to be dated around this time. (Such application of the philosophy of Hegel to the early history of the church became the hallmark of the so-called ‘Tübingen School’ of New Testament interpretation.) Holtzmann (1872) was of the same opinion and argued that the redactor of Ephesians made use of an earlier version of Colossians when writing Ephesians. Abbott (1897), on the other hand, took very seriously the patristic testimony to Ephesians, rejected the arguments from the language and the ‘line of thought’ of the epistle, and was persuaded that its personal references could only be from the pen of the apostle himself. Jülicher (1904) and Cadbury (1959) found it almost impossible to make up their minds, and Robinson's commentary (1904), for a long time the major commentary on the epistle in the English language, did not even raise the question. Goodspeed (1933, 1956) and Knox (1942, 1959) developed a significant theory about the epistle's origin, and a number of other scholars writing in the 1950s and 1960s – including Maurer (1951), Dibelius (1953), Nineham (1956), Käsemann (1958), Bornkamm (1948) and Conzelmann (1962) — also found strong reasons for denying Ephesians to Paul himself.

The most comprehensive discussion of the arguments against Pauline authorship in recent years remains the work of Mitton (1951), which he endorsed in his subsequent commentary (1976). He states first the linguistic arguments, noting the number of words and phrases in Ephesians which are not found elsewhere in the Pauline corpus. For example, where Ephesians has the word ‘devil’ (4.27; 6.11), Paul would be more likely to use the word ‘Satan’, and phrases such as ‘in the heavenlies’ (1.3,20; 2.6; 3.10; 6.12), ‘the father of glory’ (1.17), ‘before the foundation of the world’ (1.4) and ‘be knowing’ (5.5) are also untypical of Paul himself. Mitton also refers to the epistle's ‘unparalleled number of genitival formulations’, such as ‘praise of his glory’ (1.6,12,14), ‘joint of provision’ (4.16) and ‘desires of deceitfulness’ (4.22), as uncharacteristic of Paul's style.

Second, Mitton deals with stylistic arguments, repeating the observation of Sanday and Headlam (1914) that Paul's own style is ‘rapid, terse and incisive’, whereas the sentences of Ephesians are long and ponderous, their average length being 1.4 lines in Romans, and 3.0 in Ephesians.

Third, Mitton speaks of literary arguments, and in particular the dependence of Ephesians upon Colossians. One third of the content of Colossians is to be found in Ephesians, he notes, and what is more, words such as ‘mystery’ (1.9; 3.3; 5.32; 6.19), ‘economy’ (1.10; 3.2,9) and ‘fulness’ (1.10,23; 3.19) are used in different senses. Such personal references as there are seem artificial, unlike the genuine letters of Paul.

Fourth, turning to historical arguments, Mitton notes that the community's life indicates a set of circumstances later than those appertaining in the time of Paul. In particular, the question of the place of the Gentiles within the church, which had constituted a major — if not the major — theological problem for Paul, is replaced in Ephesians with the problem of how a largely Gentile church is to regard and treat the Jews.

Finally, there are what Mitton calls ‘doctrinal’ arguments:

1. the fact that the universal church (1.22; 3.10,21; 5.23,24,27) has replaced the local congregation as the object of theological reflection, that it is regarded as the ‘bride’ of Christ, and that thequestion of circumcision is now resolved, to be replaced by the problem of the church's unity;
2. the fact that ‘apostles and prophets’ (3.5) are now regarded as the foundation of the church, whereas for Paul (in 1 Corinthians 3.11) this foundation could be none other than Christ himself. These same apostles and prophets are referred to as ‘holy’, and it is unlikely that Paul would have regarded himself thus;
3. the fact that the parousia is now no longer regarded as an imminent event; rather, a long future in history is envisaged for the church in 2.7; 4.13; 3.21. This affects what is said about marriage: in 1 Corinthians Paul had discouraged it, whereas here it is given special honour as the image of Christ's relationship with the church. The delay of the parousia also has implications for the upbringing of children — they are to be brought up ‘in the discipline and instruction of the Lord’.

The reader is faced with two options. Either Paul allowed his style, language and thought to develop to such an extent in all these respects, or another writer so breathed the atmosphere of Paul's thought, perceived in Paul's writing the essence of the gospel as he understood it, and used his knowledge of Pauline tradition to inspire an ‘epistle’ of his own in conscious continuity with the voice of an apostle, with its own particular language, style and theological emphases. The latter position has increasingly been that adopted by scholars, and this is the view adopted in this Reading; Ephesians is a pseudepigraph by a Pauline disciple.

The question of purpose

With the growing consensus that Ephesians was not written by Paul himself, scholars turned to the question, In what circumstances was the epistle written, and for what purpose?

We have already noted the view of Baur and Schwegler, of the ‘Tübingen School’. Goodspeed (1933, 1956) and Knox (1942, 1959) thought that the original collector of the Pauline corpus of letters was inspired to that task by his reading of two documents, St Luke's Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles (known together as Luke–Acts and most probably written by the same person). This collector sent for copies of Paul's letters to the churches mentioned in Acts, immersed himself in their theology and ethics, and then proceeded to write an introduction to the collected corpus. This collector was the same Onesimus referred to in Paul's letter to Philemon, who, according to Goodspeed, subsequently became bishop of Ephesus. Mitton (1951) also adopted a version of this theory.

Chadwick (1960), though uncertain of the epistle's authorship, thought that Ephesians was written in response...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Series editor’s preface
• Preface
• Note on the text
• 1 An introduction to a reading of Ephesians
• 2 The legacy of Paul
• 3 Summing up
• 4 Thanksgiving
• 5 The worthy walk
• 6 Walk differently, in love and in light
• 7 Walk wisely
• 8 The armour of God
• Postscript: ‘To sum up’
• Bibliography
• Index