Placing Ephesians (8.1)

Sure trying to finish up the second Paul book.  Building the ediface of the last few chapters... will go back and fill in the blanks.
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Ephesians is difficult to place, like most of the letters we treat in the rest of this book. For example, even though we traditionally call it “Ephesians,” it does not at all seem likely it was written to Ephesus if it was written within Paul’s lifetime. Ephesians 3:2 tells the audience, “Surely you have heard about the administration of God’s grace that was given to me for you.” But Paul spent three years at Ephesus and its immediate vicinity, so they not only had heard of Paul’s ministry. They had experienced it on the most intimate of terms. They had witnessed a massive riot at its end, and perhaps even observed a rather serious imprisonment of Paul at the end of his visit (cf. 2 Cor. 1:8).

Traditionally, it was thought that Paul wrote Ephesians while imprisoned at Rome some four or five years after leaving the city. The words of Ephesians 3:2 thus do not fit an Ephesian destination. Indeed, the words “at Ephesus” in its address (1:1) are missing from the earliest surviving copies of this letter, [1] leading some to suggest it was originally a “circular letter” sent to the whole region of Asia rather than to one specific city. [2] In keeping with this theory, the letter of Ephesians is the least concrete of any of the letters in the Pauline collection. It has the least details relating to either Paul’s situation or that of the audience. The only other individual named in the whole letter is a man named Tychicus. Paul mentions no other cowriter and gives no specific greetings at the end, unlike all the letters we have looked at so far.

Some have suggested Ephesians was a cover letter meant to summarize Paul’s teaching, written some time after Paul’s death, when his letters were being collected together and put into one document. [3] But this is speculation no one could ever prove. It does seem that Ephesians is the best candidate of all Paul’s letters for a fairly common type of writing in the ancient world, where someone re-presents the thinking of a famous authority from the past to a new generation or context. [4] In this scenario, Ephesians would present Paul’s message in summary form to a context some time after Paul’s death. Paul would not be the literal author, but no deception would need be involved any more than a parable or a novel involves deception. The original audience would know that Ephesians conveyed Paul’s voice rather than being written directly by Paul.

As we go through the message of Ephesians, we will leave it to you to fill in these details. You can think of Ephesians as a circular letter sent to Asia as a whole, with the audience filling in the “TO” line when it came to their location. [5] Or you can think of Ephesians as a literary device that summarizes Paul’s teaching for the generation after his death. In either case, we will read it as Christian Scripture, as God’s word both for our time and the time it was written. Indeed, the fact that Ephesians does not involve the specifics of a particular location makes it read more easily as timeless Scripture than some other biblical texts. It was clearly written in very general terms that not only were applicable throughout the world of its day but that float across history with great ease.

[1] Including not only some of the earliest church “fathers” like Origen (ca. AD200) but the earliest collection of Paul’s letters (p46, dating to about AD200) and the two most complete collections of the New Testament from the early 300s (so called Sinaiticus and Vaticanus).
 
[2] The second century “heretic” Marcion apparently referred to it as a letter to the Laodiceans, thinking it to be the letter mentioned in Colossians 4:16.  Others have also taken this point of view in modern times.  Colossae and Laodicea were only about ten miles apart in the Lycus Valley.  Since Colossians and Ephesians share a good deal of content, it has been tempting to see them as twin letters sent at about the same time.  Colossians is, however, much more concrete than Ephesians.  Ephesians has nothing about it that would lend itself to a specific destination like the church at Laodicea.
 
[3] E.g., Edgar Goodspeed ***
 
[4] Called a pseudonymous writing.  It is true that such writings were not typically in letter form.  Most evangelical scholars have been hesitant to accept the presence of any pseudonymous writings in the New Testament because they have found it difficult to imagine that such writings would not involve deception.
 
[5] The earliest manuscripts simply read at 1:1, “to those who are,” and do not specify a location thereafter.