02. Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Date of the Epistle--It was written at Rome--And probably late in St Paul’s first imprisonment there--In what sense was it addressed ’to Ephesus’?--Ussher’s and Lightfoot’s treatments of the problem--’The Epistle from Laodicea’ was our Ephesians. From the authenticity of the Epistle we turn to the question of the narrower limits of its date. Where was it written, and when in the Apostle’s life? I answer, well remembering the other conclusions that have been drawn, at Rome, and at a time late in St Paul’s Roman imprisonment recorded in the Acts. As to the place, it was undoubtedly a place where the writer was a prisoner; ’I therefore the prisoner of the Lord’; ’an ambassador in bonds.’ This alone does not necessarily hold us to Rome; for Caesarea by the Sea (Acts 24:27) was also the scene of a two years’ imprisonment. Meyer, and more recently Weiss, have argued elaborately for Caesarea as the place of writing of Ephesians, and of course of Colossians also. The question is complicated somewhat as to date by the connexion of Colossians with Ephesians. For the great earthquake of Colossal is placed by Tacitus (Ann. xiv. 27) in our year 60. And St Paul did not reach Rome till 61. And he says nothing to the Colossians about earthquakes. But could he write to Colossae in 61, or later, and be thus silent? And if so, could he have written Ephesians so late as 61? And if not, then he could not have written it from Rome. But the premisses of this argument are at best precarious. It is at least very likely, as Lightfoot (Colossians, Introd. § i.) has carefully reasoned, that Tacitus dates the convulsion some years too early, and that it fell on the unhappy valley of the Lycus after St Paul had left his Roman lodging. Putting this aside, I would venture only to say that no one argument for Caesarea seems to me to approach conclusiveness. If so, is it unreasonable to say that the Roman captivity is à priori the more likely time for the writing of these Epistles? Not only was the Apostle, at Rome, placed in a position highly stimulating to thought, and where the news of the missions he had founded would reach him with great freedom. But also, when the two years at Caesarea were over, he was separated by so much more time from the days when he was moved to write the great group of Epistles to which Romans and Corinthians belong. Ephesians and Colossians are self-evidently, as compared with those Epistles, new in contents, new in the aspect of the Gospel which has moved into view before the Apostle’s soul. Never does he lose hold of what he has taught before. But he mounts with it now to another point of view. He carries the treasures of Propitiation, Justification, Righteousness by faith, forward now, to place them in living connexion with the treasures of the truth of the glorious Head of the living members; with Christ and His Body, Christ and His Bride. He clasps still, and for ever, to his heart the wonder and glory of our acceptance in the merits of the Crucified. But now he looks also, even more intently and adoringly than ever, upon the personal majesty of the Bearer of those merits; upon His riches unsearchable, His love that passeth knowledge, His preeminence in all things, and His indwelling in the heart by faith. Now is it not more likely than not that the inspiring Lord led His servant to this new and wonderful stage of insight and teaching after the longer rather than after the shorter interval? The imprisonment at Caesarea followed almost continuously, we may say, upon that sojourn at Corinth which saw the writing of Romans. The imprisonment at Rome came after just such an interval, so long, and spent in such retirement, as would seem likely to herald and prepare the new period of illumination.

It would certainly be a mistake to treat the question as one for demonstration. Dr Hort has warned us not to do so; ’the evidence,’ he says (in the ms. memoranda referred to previously), ’is curiously scanty.’ And happily the inquiry carries with it no direct spiritual importance. But I may repeat without presumptuous assertion my persuasion, upon the whole review, that the Roman ’hired house’ of Acts 28:30 saw the writing of the Epistle to the Ephesians.

Further, I cannot but think that the Epistle went to Asia late, not early, in the two years spent at Rome. My main ground for this belief is the reasoning of Bishop Lightfoot (Philippians, Introd. § ii.) in favour of his belief that St Paul wrote to Philippi not at an advanced stage of his Roman sojourn, but somewhat soon after his arrival. Hort, I am aware, has said that ’Lightfoot’s view has found few friends’; and he does not seem to be one of them. But Lightfoot surely has two most powerful supports in the phenomena of the Philippian Epistle. First, we have the great dogmatic passage of Php 3:1-21., the Apostle’s confession of his rest and refuge in the ’righteousness which is of God by faith.’ This type of thought and diction is like an echo in Philippians of Romans and Galatians, far rather than of Ephesians or Colossians. True, it would be idle to say that the Apostle would never, after a certain date, freely express himself in his own heaven-taught phraseology of justification; to assume this would be precisely to forget the humanity of this writer of Scripture, an oblivion against which I protested in the last chapter. But then I do reverently believe that St Paul’s Inspirer led him, in his utterances to the Church, along an ordered course of truth. And in this view it seems to me more likely that the great epistolary message of Philippians was given him in sequel to that of Romans and Galatians, rather than in sequel to that of Ephesians.

Then further, the Philippian Epistle indicates a state of things in the mission-church at Rome which, to say the least, agrees perfectly with the hypothesis that St Paul was a recent arrival in the city. He speaks of the converts as being powerfully animated to a bolder work and witness--not, observe, by any special appeals or reasonings of his, but simply ’by his bonds’ (Ephesians 1:13-14). ’The whole Praetorian guard’ (ὅλον τὸ πραιτώριον), and οἱ λοιποὶ πάντες ’people in general,’ were getting to know that ’his bonds’ were ’in Christ’; in other words, that he was a prisoner, not because of personal and political crime, but because of the faith of the predicted Messiah. Is it likely that such things would have been said, would have been experienced in the Roman mission, far on in the two years? By that time the mere fact of St Paul’s presence as a prisoner, apart from striking events connected with it, would have lost much of its interest and power. But at first it would be otherwise. At first the fact of his being at Rome in prison was everything. Here I find forcible evidence for an early date (in the first Roman captivity) of Philippians. But if so, Ephesians and Colossians, assuming them to be written at Rome at all, come later; I should venture to say (looking at their difference from Philippians), as much later as we can put them, say in the early days of 63.

There remains to be noticed only one of the literary points which I can hope to touch. It is the familiar question whether or no the Epistle was addressed distinctively to the Ephesian Church at all, and was not rather a missive to the Asian communities in general, or at least to a circle of them.

We are aware of the phenomena which occasion the question. There is a general phenomenon and a particular one. There is first the large and obvious fact that our Epistle, though Ephesus was the scene of St Paul’s longest continuous residence, and of a work full of personal incident, is remarkably devoid of allusions to place, and person, and special circumstance. It is in fact more of a discourse than a letter; pregnant indeed with the individuality and experience of the writer, but dealing with the readers only on common grounds of hope, duty and difficulty. Under this heading we may note the detail that, in Ephesians 3:2, he actually uses the phrase, ’If so be that ye have heard of the dispensation of the grace of God given unto me’; as if the fact of his apostleship to the Gentiles were to them only a matter of report. Here however we have a difficulty which proves, if anything, too much. For if it is incredible that the Ephesians should only have ’heard’ of his great commission, it is only a little less, if at all less, incredible that the other Asian Missions should only have ’heard’ of it. In fact, this difficulty is best met by remembering that there is such a thing as a gracious irony, which can introduce a conspicuous fact, and make it all the more conspicuous, by treating it as a novelty where it is familiar, as a rumour where it is an experience. Still, the Epistle beyond question contrasts strongly with, for instance, Philippians, and with Colossians, in the complete, or almost complete, absence of reference to the individual and local at its destination.

Then there is the particular phenomenon, the problem of the text of Ephesians 1:1. Do the words ’at Ephesus’ rightly stand there or not? Are we to read τοῖς ἁγίοις τοῖς οὖσιν ἐν Ἐφέσῳ, κ.τ.λ. or are we to read τοῖς ἁγίοις τοῖς οὖσι, καί, κ.τ.λ.? The ms. evidence for the omission of ’at Ephesus,’ ἐν Εφέσῳ, is very scanty, though certainly important. The words are wanting in the Vatican and Sinaitic uncials; and they are corrected out in the cursive copy called ’67 of St Paul,’ in which the corrections are important. Further, St Basil the Great (i. 1254 e) says that ’the older copies,’ τὰ παλαῖα τῶν ἀντιγράφων, consulted by him omitted the words. All existing mss., so far as we know, except the three named, and all ancient versions, exhibit the words ’at Ephesus.’ And every known ms. reads ’To the Ephesians’ (or words to that effect) as the title of the Epistle. If this were all the evidence to be adduced on either side we could not doubt the right of the words ’at Ephesus’ to stand undisturbed, though the phenomenon of omission, even in those few known copies, and in the others indicated by St Basil’s reference, might be perplexing. But here comes in the fact that quite a catena of early writers--Tertullian, Origen, Epiphanius, Basil the Great and Jerome--indicate in one way or another that the theory of a non-Ephesian destination was known to them, whatever they thought about it. Tertullian complains that Marcion ’interpolated’ for our Epistle (’which, by the Church’s verity, we possess as sent to the Ephesians’) the title ’To the Laodiceans’ (c. Marc, v. 17); a fact which suggests at least the possibility that in the second century copies were in circulation which did not read ’at Ephesus’ in Ephesians 1:1. For Tertullian’s account of Marcion’s action does not suggest that he touched the text, but only the title; and he surely would not have altered the title and left ’at Ephesus’ in the text, within the next few lines of the ms., to contradict his new title. Again Origen, quoted in a Catena, and speaking of our Epistle as that to the Ephesians, expressly comments on the unique fact (so he calls it) that St Paul there writes τοῖς ἁγίοις τοῖς οῦσι ’to the saints that are,’ not that are in this place or that, but absolutely, ’that are’: and characteristically he finds a mystery in it, an allusion to the Christian’s part and lot in the Eternal Being, so that in the ’I am’ they are those who can truly say ’we are.’ The same thing is said by St Basil in the next century, with only the difference that he, unlike Origen, recognizes the existence of both readings, while he appears to prefer the shorter as the older. Lastly, St Jerome, commenting on the verse, recites this mystical interpretation, and dismisses it as curiosius quam necesse est, ’needlessly far-fetched.’ And then he says that ’some think the words to be written quite simply, not to those who are, but to those who are at Ephesus’; a sentence which leaves us in tantalizing perplexity whether these ’some’ actually read ’at Ephesus’ in their text, or whether they interpreted it into their text, and whether Jerome personally regarded ’at Ephesus’ as the true reading. The impression left is that the question must have been an open one to him when he wrote his comment.

Twelve hundred years after Jerome, James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, the most learned man of a learned age, following out the apostolic story in his Annales Novi Testamenti (A.M. 4068), comes to the sending of Tychicus to Asia, and writes thus: ’By Tychicus Paul wrote [sent] the Epistle to the Ephesians, which Epistle Tertullian, as also Epiphanius, under the 42d [i.e., the Marcionite] heresy, tells us was put about (venditata) by Marcion the heretic, under the name of the Epistle to the Laodiceans. This, Grotius thinks, Marcion may have done on the warrant of the Laodicean Church, for Marcion could have had no motive (so Grotius says) for fraud in the matter. Hence, on the same line, Grotius gathers that the letter was written at once both to the Ephesians and to the Laodiceans. Here we must note that in some ancient copies (as it is plain from Basil against Eunomius, and from Jerome’s commentary here) this Epistle was addressed in general terms, τοῖς ἁγίοις τοῖς οὖσι και πιστοῖς ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ, or (as is usual in the address of letters encyclical), "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. To some of these latter, which Paul had never seen, he may have had chief regard in such words as these: "Having heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus," etc.; and, "If ye have heard of the dispensation of the grace of God which is given me," etc. Perhaps Marcion thought that such words suited the Laodiceans, who had never seen the Apostle in bodily presence, better than the Ephesians, with whom he had so long held intercourse.’ I give Ussher’s paragraph in full, as a luminous statement and comment, as presenting a sagacious conjecture, and also as being characteristic of the wide and thorough reading of the Archbishop.

Surely the solution of the curious problem lies before us here in its essentials. So Lightfoot felt. In the Lectures (1862) which were the basis of his edition of Colossians, he reviewed the data with his usual care and clearness, and arrived at what he calls (in the ms. notes before me^[2]) ’a modified form of the view first set forth by Archbishop Ussher.’ All the modification he would make is to emphasize, more than Ussher has done, the probability that many copies would carry the words ἐν Ἐφέσῳ as their filling up of the address; that many would leave the address unfilled; and that in transcripts from these the blank would soon come to be obliterated. So would arise the reading, τοῖς οὖσι καὶ πιστοῖς, written continuously.

^[2]See also Lightfoot’s Biblical Essays, § x.

If, with reverence to my dear college tutor Lightfoot, I may add a word to his solution, it shall be this. Something more than I find in his remarks seems to be needed to account for the practically universal tradition of the Ephesian destination of the Epistle. May not this something have been as follows? St Paul did indeed mean the Epistle for Asia ultimately. But the very close connexion 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 all the outlying missions. For them transcripts would of course be made, at Ephesus; and in many of these, if not in all, the ἐν Ἐφέσῳ would be omitted, perhaps without any substitute; the blank might be supplied at each place tacitly. In such a view, if I am right, we have both sides of the problem fairly accounted for; the non-local character of the Epistle, and the fact that it somehow attached itself so peculiarly to the city.^[3]

^[3] Prof. Godet, in his recent Introduction to the Epistles of St Paul, discusses the destination of this Epistle with his usual care and skill (pp. 365, etc., Eng. Trans.), and reaches somewhat different results. But I think the conclusions advocated here are unshaken. That in the Ephesian Epistle we have ’the Epistle from Laodicea’ of Colossians 4:16, I feel sure. So Grotius and Ussher thought, and so Lightfoot (Colossians, pp. 347, etc., ed. 1875) has, we may fairly say, demonstrated. It will be observed that the Apostle does not speak of an ’Epistle to,’ but of an ’Epistle from, Laodicea’; a Letter which was to reach the converts of Colossae by way of the important city which was the capital of their district, and whose mission would be responsible for the distribution. Colossae had indeed its own inestimable Epistle. And that Epistle had been, in all probability, the splendid sketch from which the great picture of Ephesians was in some sense developed. But the wonderful Encyclical would not therefore be superfluous at Colossae. Great elements of truth had appeared in it which had not been unfolded in the shorter and more local Letter; above all, the truths which gather round the revelation of the Eternal Spirit. For these they must reverently search the larger scroll which would be brought to them up the vale of the Lycus from Laodicea. These truths they must place in their connexion with the truth which their own Epistle had so powerfully emphasized--the glory of the Lord Christ, the Son of God, as Cause and Head of the whole creation. Of Him indeed, of Christ as He is seen in His unspeakable exaltation, when ’the Spirit shines upon the Word,’ and the soul by the same power is conscious of its vast need of Him, both these Asian Epistles are full, and now for us especially the Ephesian Epistle. We have been attempting to collect and review some exterior phenomena of the document. But as we began so let us end, with a deliberate remembrance of what it is when seen from within. It is, if with reverence we may transfer to a divine writing what its own pages say about the blessed company of believing men, and about the secret place of the believing soul,--it is ’an habitation of God in the Spirit.’ It is a temple where Christ dwells, and where ’every whit of it doth speak His glory.’ As in the companion Epistle so indeed in this, ’in all things He hath the preeminence.’ Eternal, Historical; Divine, Human; dying, but behold He is alive for evermore; Inmate and Householder of the heart, Head over all things to the Church, which is His body, and His fulness; Lord of all the bright orders of the angelic world, infinitely tender Answerer to the disciple’s love; King of all developments of the eternal future, unseen but living Centre of the Christian home; first and last, all in all; such is Jesus Christ for Ephesus, for Asia; such, blessed be His most sacred Name, is He for us. In our next chapter we will consider more fully the occasion, and the probable immediate circumstances, of the writing of the Epistle.