The goal of this long “nutshell” thread on the New Testament is to introduce each of the twenty-seven books and summarize its major themes and emphases; to discuss what we can know about who wrote it, when, and why; to provide suggestions for further reading for anyone who is interested; and to give an additional post or two on some specific interesting feature of it.

We are now up to book # 10 (!), the Letter to the Ephesians; it is the fifth letter in the “Pauline corpus” (that is, the collection of NT writings attributed to the apostle Paul) and is the first that is widely considered among scholars to be pseudonymous – that is, even though it clearly claims to be written by Paul, it appears to have been written instead by one of his later followers.  Today we would call that a forgery (few of us use the term “pseudonymous” these days), even though lots of people are reluctant to use that term for a book of Scripture.  Fair enough.  In the next post I’ll be dealing with why the book was probably not written by Paul, and you can at that point see for yourself!

For now, I want to talk about the major themes and emphases of the book, and I begin with a fifty-word single-sentence summary of the book.  If you know the book reasonably well, try doing it yourself before reading mine.  Here’s my first-ever stab at it:

The Letter to the Ephesians is a circular letter sent to unnamed churches made up of gentiles, reminding them they were saved by Christ, not by their good deeds, urging them to seek unity with Jewish believers, and stressing the importance of exemplary ethical behavior for all followers of Christ.

I will now try to unpack the teachings of this six-chapter book.[i]

Unlike the other letters of the Pauline Corpus, the occasion for Ephesians is notoriously difficult to determine. We do learn that “Paul” was writing from prison to gentile Christians (3:1). There is some question, though, concerning where the epistle was sent, and for what reason.

That is in part because of how it begins.  Many English translations of the letter open with the words: “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, to the saints who are in Ephesus, faithful in Christ Jesus” (1:1).  But the words “who are in Ephesus” are not found in the earliest and best Greek manuscripts of this letter. Most textual experts think that the words were not in the letter originally but were added by a scribe after it had already been in circulation for a time – so that it originally said: “Paul an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, to the saints who are faithful in Christ Jesus” (1:1).

If so, then Ephesians was written as a kind of “circular letter,” designed to make the circuit of a number of Pauline churches, sent to “the saints who are faithful” but not to the saints of any particular location. Such a letter would have been copied in several of the places that it was received, including the city of Ephesus. It appears that the copyist in Ephesus decided to personalize the letter by adding the words “in Ephesus” to the addressees so that when the Ephesian Christians read it, they would think that it was written particularly to them. Then both this scribe’s copy of the letter and other copies that lacked the words “in Ephesus” were used by later copyists who reproduced the letter. This would explain why some of our surviving manuscripts have the words “in Ephesus” and others don’t.

Originally, then, the letter may not have been sent to a particular congregation but to a number of congregations, for example, throughout Asia Minor. The overarching purpose of Ephesians is to remind its Gentile readers that even though they were formerly alienated from God and his people Israel, they have now been made one through the work of Jesus—one with the Jews through Jesus’ work of reconciliation and one with God through his work of redemption (Ephesians 2:1–22).

More specifically, Jesus’ death has torn down the barrier that previously divided Jew and Gentile, that is, the Jewish Law, so that both groups are now absolutely equal; Jews and Gentiles can live in harmony with one another without the divisiveness of the Law (Ephesians 2:11–18). Moreover, Christ has united both Jew and Gentile with God (Ephesians 2:18–22). Not only have believers died with Christ, but they have also been raised up with him to enjoy the benefits of a heavenly existence (Ephesians 2:1–10). Thus Jew and Gentile are unified with one another and with God. This is the “mystery” of the gospel that was concealed from earlier generations but has now been revealed to “Paul” and through him to the world (Ephesians 3:1–13).

The second half of the letter (Ephesians chaps. 4–6) consists of exhortations to live in ways that manifest this unity. It is to be evident in the life of the church (Ephesians 4:1–16); in the distinctiveness of the believers from the rest of society (Ephesians 4:17–5:20); and in the social relations of fellow Christians, that is, in their roles as wives and husbands, children and fathers, slaves and masters (Ephesians 5:21–6:9). The letter closes with an exhortation to continue to fight against the forces of the Devil that are trying to disrupt the life of the congregation (Ephesians 6:10–20) and then “Paul’s” final closing statement and benediction (Ephesians 6:21–24).

One of the most interesting features of Ephesians is that in broad outline, it certainly seems to be the kind of thing Paul would write.  But when you dig deeply into what it actually says, you begin to see that in case after case, it is very different from Paul, sometimes in seemingly contradictory ways.  We’ll be looking at some of these specific details and trying to assess them in the next post.