Chapter 01. Introductory
Chapter 1.
Introductory
"Farewell Pembroke Hall, of late myne owne Colledge, my cure and my charge. In thy Orchard (the wals, buts, and trees, if they could speake, would beare me witnes) I learned without booke almost all Paules epistles, yea, and I weene all the Canonicall epistles, saue only the Apocalyps. Of which study, although in time a great part did depart from me, yet the sweete smell thereof I trust I shall cary with me into heauen: for the profite thereof I thinke I haue felt in all my lyfe tyme euer after.’ —Nicholas Ridley, Bishop and Martyr, 1555 ON a spring day of mingled shower and sunshine, March 5th, 1897, I stepped for the first time on the shore of Asia. Landing at Smyrna, we travelled by rail, a large company, from the port through a fine and fertile country, to a roadside station bearing the name Aya Salouk. At this place we left the train, and for some hours traversed the neighbouring hills and fields, making our way from fragment to fragment of a vast scene of ruins. Here was a Byzantine church, there a track, scarcely to be called a road, bordered with Greek sarcophagi. On the western side of a commanding hill in the midst of the region was the grass-grown hollow of a Greek theatre, the steps of the seats still traceable under the vegetation, the structures of the stage a confused mass of ruin. Sitting there a little while alone, I looked over the landscape at my feet as it stretched towards the Gulf of Smyrna and the westering sun. A small river shone with its broken silver reaches along the middle of the scene, and noble hills bounded the broad vista, right and left; those on the right, northward, lying at a considerable distance. Not very far off upon the plain in that direction was visible, as I moved a little from the nook where I sat, a wide hollow in the general level, a sort of small sunken field, overgrown with thorn-bushes, and heaped with the confused of wreckage walls, columns, and steps. A few birds were singing near me; "the breezy whispers of the hill" were heard in tune with them; now and then a fellow-traveller’s voice at a little distance was audible; otherwise the scene was one of beautiful’ but pathetic silence and repose, the quiet of a vast cemetery of the ancient days.
It was all that remains of Ephesus. Aya Salouk is Hagios Theologos, the Holy Divine, St John. The place where I sat was once the Theatre where for two long hours that dense throng stood shouting, "Great is Artemis of the Ephesians." And yonder hollow field, with its thorns and its stones, what is it? It is the site, determined at last, of the great Temple of Artemis herself, "the Ephesian Miracle," the world’s wonder, where stood the adored image, grotesque and barbaric, of the prolific Nature-Power, and along with it the Diopetes, "the Thing fallen from Zeus," from Jupiter; whatever it was, meteoric stone or not. There "all Asia and the world" were wont to worship.
Many and heart-moving were the memories which arose during that walk, during that quiet session in the cavea of the Theatre. But the one commanding and inspiring memory was St Paul. Here was his well-known Ephesus. Here for the space of three complete years—a unique length of stationary work for him—he had lived and laboured, not as the apostolic missionary only but as the apostolic pastor. Here he had taken that critical and momentous step, the "separation" of the disciples from the Synagogue to a distinct place of teaching and no doubt of worship, "the school of one Tyrannus," the lecture-hall, we may suppose, of a friendly professor in what we may call the Ephesian University. Here he had laboured, watched, and wept, for both the community and individuals. Here he had met and influenced visitors from every part of the Asian Province, till his power for Christ was felt in every district, yes, even in the remote valley of the river Lycus, from which Laodicean, Hieropolitan, and Colossian citizens, finding their way to the capital, had been found by Paul’s Lord and won to Him. Here he had built up the Church till its presbyters were a large group, men of the Holy Spirit, and devotedly attached to himself as father and leader (Acts 20). Yonder, where the sea shines under the declining sun, he had, on a memorable occasion, summoned them to meet him at Miletus, and they had obeyed, travelling probably down the great ship-canal which then connected the spacious inland haven of the city with the distant coast. And in later years it was to this Ephesus that the Missionary addressed, from Rome, the wonderful Letter which we are about to study.
There I sat in 1897, with the Epistle to the Ephesians in my hand. That Epistle was written not improbably in 63, eighteen hundred and thirty-four years before. Yet it was new that day; a "fallen leaf that kept its green," its immortal green; aye, and not fallen either; for its true Author is not dead, though His servant who wrote the Letter for Him sleepeth. He, and therefore His Word, "liveth and abideth for ever."
Solemn and inspiring is the contrast, in a case like that of Ephesus, between the total decay of the place and the everlasting youth and newness of the Scripture. It has an indescribable pathos, and a heart-searching warning, from one point of view; but it is full from another of "everlasting comfort, and good hope through grace." So we approach the Epistle to the Ephesians, for a series of spiritual "Studies." The word "Studies" I half deprecate while I use it; it may so easily seem to mean something quite other than what is offered here. It may suggest original research, critical discussion, minute enquiry. As a fact I pretend only to provide the reader with a careful paraphrase or running rendering of the Epistle, accompanied with a simple development of its main spiritual and practical lessons. But after all I will not apologize for the word "Studies" in such a connexion. The purely spiritual use of the Holy Scriptures, if it is what it should be, calls as truly as any critical handling does for care, for reverent attention, for the watchful while devout use of reason; we may use the word "Study" for an attempt to read the Bible thus. As we take up this wonderful writing, let us pause for a few moments to reflect upon the fact that it is an Epistle, a Letter. Has the reader ever appreciated the significance, the value, of the fact that so large a mass of the New Testament is in Letter form? I cannot forbear quoting on this subject. Its importance is well presented in that masterly book, Canon T. D. Bernard’s Bampton Lectures, The Progress of Doctrine in the New Testament; a full extract will prove none too long. The passage is introduced by an enquiry into the place and function of the apostolic Epistles ("the Apostle," as the Fathers often call them collectively) in the plan of Revelation. Attention is drawn to the evidence given by our Lord’s words, and by the nature of the case, to the divine intention that the Apostles should develope and complete the personal teaching of their Master; were it otherwise we should (provably) have to face the riddle of a delivery of doctrine by Christ which assumed, which promised, a sequel and completion, but never received it. Accordingly we are right to read the Epistles with the same reverent confidence which we bring to the Gospels and their Discourses; they are equally, and with a profound purpose, the message of the King.
Canon Bernard now proceeds[1]:
"The Lord recognized this necessity. He met it by the living voice of His Apostles; and their Epistles remain as the permanent record of this part of their work. They are the voice of the Spirit, speaking within the Church to those who are themselves within it, certifying to them the true interpretations and applications of the principles of thought and life which as believers in Jesus they have received.... The form in which this teaching is given to us is very significant. ’The epistolary form,’ says Bengel, ’is a pre-eminence of the Scriptures of the New Testament as compared with those of the Old.’ It is a suggestive remark, reminding us of that open communication and equal participation of revealed truth which is the prerogative of the later above the former dispensation; indicating too that the teacher and the taught are placed on one common level in the fellowship of truth. The Prophets delivered oracles to the people, but the Apostles wrote letters to the brethren, letters characterised by all that fulness of unreserved explanation, and that play of various feeling, which are proper to that form of intercourse. It is in its nature a more familiar communication between those who are, or should be, equals. That character may less obviously force upon us the sense, that the light which is thrown on all subjects is that of a divine inspiration; but this is only the natural effect of the greater fulness of that light; for so the moonbeams fix the eye upon themselves, as they burst through the rifts of rolling clouds, catching the edges of objects, and falling on patches of the landscape; while under the settled brightness of the genial and universal day, it is not so much the light that we think of as the varied scene which it shews.
"But the fact that the teaching of the Apostles is represented by their letters, is a peculiarity, not only in comparison with the teaching of the Prophets, but with ancient teaching in general, which is perpetuated either in regular treatises or conversations preserved in writing. The form adopted in the New Testament combines the advantages of the treatise and the conversation. The letter may treat important subjects with accuracy and fulness, but it will do so in immediate connection with actual life. It is written to meet an occasion. It is addressed to particular states of mind. It breathes the heart of the writer. In these respects it suits well with a period of instruction in which the Word of God is to be given to men, not so much in the way of information as in the way of education; or in other words, in which the truth is to be delivered, not abstractedly, but with a close relation to the condition of mind of its recipients. "Thus it is delivered in the Epistles. Christ has been received; Christian life has been commenced; Christian communities have been formed; and men’s minds have been at work on the great principles which they have embraced. Some of these principles in one place, and others of them in another, have been imperfectly grasped, or positively perverted, or practically misapplied, so as to call for explanation or correction; or else they have been both apprehended and applied so worthily, that the teacher... feels able to open out the mysteries of God.... These conditions of mind were not individual accidents. Rome, Corinth, Galatia, Ephesus, supplied examples of different tendencies of the human mind in connection with the principles of the Gospel—tendencies which would ever recur, and on which it was requisite for the future guidance of the Church that the Word of God should pronounce. It did pronounce in the most effectual way, by those letters which are addressed by the commissioners of Christ, not to possible but to actual cases, with that largeness of view which belongs to spectators at a certain distance from the scene, and with that closeness of application which personal acquaintance dictates and personal affection inspires." A little below, Canon Bernard speaks of the method of apostolic teaching, as in perfect harmony with this its form. "It is a method of companionship rather than of dictation. The writer does not announce a series of revelations, or arrest the enquiries which he encounters in men’s hearts by the unanswerable formula, ’Thus saith the Lord.’ He... utters his own convictions, he pours forth his own experience, he appeals to others to ’judge what he says,’ and commends his words ’to their conscience in the sight of God.’ He confutes by argument rather than by authority.... Such a method necessarily creates a multitude of occasions for hesitation or objection; and it has been proposed to meet these difficulties by the principle that we are bound to accept the conclusions as matters of revelation, but not to assent to the validity of the arguments or the applicability of the quotations. The more we enter into the spirit of the particular passages which have been thought to require that qualification, the more we feel that it can only have seemed necessary, from a want of real and deep harmony with the mind of Scripture." The extract is long; my temptation was to make it longer, so valuable is the whole context. What has been quoted will be felt, I think, to be altogether to the point as we address ourselves to the study not only of an Epistle but of this Epistle; so rich in revelations of the very arcana of the Gospel, yet conveying them in a form so entirely full of the personality and sympathies of the writer, and with such close and tender application to the realities of human life. But let us actually take up the Epistle.
It is not my business here to conduct the reader at length through the question of its genuineness and authenticity. It will be enough to remind ourselves of a few outstanding facts in this connexion. We note that the early external evidence to the Pauline authorship is abundant and absolutely unanimous. Irenaeus, the learned and careful theologian of the second century, expressly and repeatedly cites the Epistle, and as St Paul’s. In the patristic literature as a whole, perhaps no book of the New Testament is more largely quoted. If the external evidence is inadequate, then we certainly have no adequate evidence that Virgil wrote the Georgics, or Horace the Odes, or Augustine the Confessions. And to this let us confidently add the internal evidence. "Ephesians," says the late Dr Hort, a severely critical student of such a problem, "bears the impress of St Paul’s wonderful mind" "No one but St Paul could have been the writer," says the late Dean Howson, a man who, if any man of our time, had made himself personally acquainted with St Paul. His words will bear inspection, bold as they are. For what is the problem to be solved, supposing St Paul not to be author? It is, how to find room within the required limits for another personality strong and illuminated enough to produce the Epistle, and at the same time low enough in moral perception to be willing to pass it off as St Paul’s. It was written, it was reverenced as Scripture, long before Irenaeus wrote; this leaves no broad margin for the supposed date of the "great Unknown." And it sounds the depths and climbs without an effort the heights of Christian idea; the "Unknown" was "great" indeed, great in thought, great in spiritual insight. And it not only bears the name Paul in its first sentence; it elaborately interweaves his life and his affections with its whole texture; it means, beyond a doubt, to pass for his. The human heart protests against the theory that fabrication, personation, in such a context, is credible for a moment.
Renan may presume to call the Epistle une épître banale, a third-rate composition.[2] The criticism, read in the light first of the Epistle itself, then of the verdict of all Christendom, can only convict the subtle literary critic of a spiritual paralysis which fatally affects even literary insight where the theme is spiritual. A greater than Renan, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, subtlest of critics, and at the same time both philosopher and Christian, in a single brief sentence pronounces the Epistle to be "one of the divinest compositions of man."[3] A true testimony, yet after all how inadequate! "A divine composition of man" is a phrase perfectly justifiable in theory, as used of a book of Scripture. Yet it rings somewhat out of tune; for the words might be used to describe a work of sanctified genius which yet made no pretence to be an oracle of God; and if there is a writing which implicitly claims to be that or nothing, it is the Epistle to the Ephesians. But Coleridge meant the phrase soundly, and we may take it so, as one witness among many to that supreme quality in the Epistle which is an evidence to its origin weightier than even all the quotations of the Fathers. We have in it the ipsissima verba of the Chosen Vessel. We receive it, delivered at our doors, as a Letter about Christ’s glory from the man whom He expressly moulded, conquered and commissioned, to tell us of Himself and His salvation.
Another question, altogether lower in its importance, but of peculiar interest, attaches to the Epistle. Is it, after all, an Epistle to the Ephesians? The reader of only the Authorized Version will be surprised by the question. Is not the Epistle entitled, To the Ephesians? Does not the first sentence direct it to the saints which are at Ephesus? It is so; but the margin of the Revised Version informs us that in that first sentence "some very ancient authorities omit at Ephesus!" The "authorities" referred to are, among manuscripts, three important copies, the Vatican, the Sinaitic, and another.[4] But these "authorities," considerable as they are, take us up no further, at furthest, than early in the fourth century, and their weight could not possibly of itself counteract that of the whole catalogue of other ancient transcripts. What gives it an importance not its own is that certain of the Fathers, and among them Tertullian, whose activity began in the second century, give clear indications that they were aware of a problem attaching to these words. It is certain that Origen in the third century, and Basil in the fourth, and Epiphanius and Jerome in the fourth and fifth, knew of many copies of the Epistle, (Basil calls them "the older copies,") in which the first verse ran, "to the saints which are, and to the faithful in Christ Jesus." Origen, characteristically, sees a mystery in the phrase, and thinks that the Apostle is intimating the vital connexion of believers with the I am; joined to Him, they become "those that are."
Archbishop Ussher in the seventeenth century, and Bishop Lightfoot in our own, have offered a solution of this phenomenon which appears to combine all the facts, or almost all. Ussher[5] suggested that the Epistle was indeed "to the Ephesians," but that it was not intended for them alone. "In some ancient copies," he writes, "this Epistle was addressed in general terms,... ’To the saints who are... and to the faithful in Christ Jesus.’ As if the letter had been sent first to Ephesus, as the chief metropolis of Asia; to be transmitted thence to the other Churches of the same province, the name of each being inserted in its instance."[6]
Lightfoot[7] adopts this conjecture of Ussher’s, only emphasizing the probability that many copies would carry in their address the words "at Ephesus,"[8] and that in copies made from specimens where a blank was left after the word "are," that blank would easily disappear.
If I may quote words of my own,[9] in which a summing up of the case has been attempted: "Something more than I find in Bishop Lightfoot’s remarks seems to be needed to account for the practically universal tradition of the Ephesian destination of the Epistle. May not this be somewhat as follows? St Paul did indeed mean the Epistle for Asia ultimately. But the very close connexion[10] between Ephesus and the Province led him to address it in the first instance to Ephesus. But it was to Ephesus not as the mission station but as the provincial capital; the trustee for the outlying missions. For them transcripts would of course be made, at Ephesus; and in many of these, if not all, the
It is obvious to remark, in support of Ussher’s theory, that the Epistle is singularly devoid of allusions to persons and circumstances in the place to which it is addressed; and this although Ephesus had been, as we have already remembered, the scene of a work, more perhaps than any other in St Paul’s life, pastoral and particular.
If we may return for a moment to our point of view on the ruined steps of the Ephesian Theatre, and open the Epistle there once more, we must not only scan the Ephesian plain to call up memories of the first readers of the Epistle; we must climb behind the cavea to the top of Mount Prion, and survey the vast horizon, even to the snowy top of the Phrygian Olympus, and think of the copies which were sped by faithful hands to Smyrna, to Sardis, to Philadelphia, to Pergamus, to Thyatira, and, not least, to Laodicea, the queen of the valley of the Lycus, thence to be sent on to Hierapolis and to old Colossæ in its glen.[11] But now, it comes even unto us. That blank space shall be filled in by us with the name nearest to ourselves; the land, the church, the town, the home, which to us makes life to be what it is. And the message sent, from the Roman prison immediately, from the heaven of heavens ultimately, shall be read as by those who know that what it says of Christ, of the Church, of grace, of holiness, of glory, is addressed to us by Paul, and countersigned to us by our Lord Jesus Christ.
[1]Lect. vi., p. 135, ed. 1873.
[2]Saint Paul,p. xviii.
[3]Table Talk,p. 82, ed. 1852.
[4]The "cursive" copy known as "67 of St Paul,"
[5]Annales N. Testamenti,under the year of the world 4068.
[6]I may be permitted to refer to my edition of Ephesians (Cambridge Bible), and to myGrace and Truth,pp. 26-33.
[7]See hisBiblical Essays,§ x.
[8]May we not think it very likely that the original document itself, dictated by St Paul, would do so? We may add that copies for the public use of the Church would be more likely to be taken from themetropolitanspecimens than from others.
[9]Grace and Truth,p. 32.
[10]It was as a fact singularly close.
[11]SeeColossians 4:16. It is more than probable that "the letter from Laodicea" means, the copy of "Ephesians" sent there, to be passed on to the minor stations of the district.