The Letters to the Galatians and Ephesians

William Barclay

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN:
  9780664225599
• eBook ISBN:
  9781611640243
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Commentary

Paul wrote the letter to the Galatians to refute a belief that restricted God's grace alone to those who followed Jewish ritualistic law. In the letter to the Ephesians, Paul was more meditative and poetic in his style as he wrestled with problems of good and evil to present that unity will be achieved ultimately when all things are gathered together in Christ. Here William Barclay offers his own translations of these texts, as well as insightful commentaries.For almost fifty years and for millions of readers, the Daily Study Bible commentaries have been the ideal help for both devotional and serious Bible study. Now, with the release of the New Daily Study Bible, a new generation will appreciate the wisdom of William Barclay. With clarification of less familiar illustrations and inclusion of more contemporary language, the New Daily Study Bible will continue to help individuals and groups discover what the message of the New Testament really means for their lives.

The Letter to the Ephesians

INTRODUCTION TO THE LETTER TO THE EPHESIANS

The Supreme Letter

By common consent, the Letter to the Ephesians ranks very high in the devotional and theological literature of the Christian Church. It has been called ‘the Queen of the Epistles’ – and rightly so. Many would hold that it is indeed the highest reach of New Testament thought. When the great Scottish Protestant reformer John Knox was very near to death, the book that was most often read to him was John Calvin’s Sermons on the Letter to the Ephesians. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge said of Ephesians that it was ‘the divinest composition’. He went on: ‘It embraces first, those doctrines peculiar to Christianity, and, then, those precepts common with it in natural religion.’ Ephesians clearly has a unique place in the Pauline correspondence.

And yet there are certain very real problems connected with it. These problems are not the product of the minds of overcritical scholars, but are plain for all to see. When, however, these problems are solved, Ephesians becomes a greater letter than ever and shines with an even more radiant light.

The Circumstances behind the Writing of Ephesians

Before we turn to the doubtful things, let us set down the certainties. First, it is clear that Ephesians was written when Paul was in prison. He calls himself a prisoner for Christ (3:1); it is as ‘a prisoner for the Lord’ that he begs them (4:1); he is ‘an ambassador in chains’ (6:20). It was in prison, and very near to the end of his life, that Paul wrote Ephesians.

Second, Ephesians clearly has a close connection with Colossians. It would seem that Tychicus was the bearer of both these letters. In Colossians, Paul says that Tychicus will tell them all his news (Colossians 4:7); and in Ephesians he says that Tychicus will tell them everything about what he is doing (Ephesians 6:21). Further, there is a close resemblance between the substance of the two letters, so close that more than fifty-five verses in the two letters are word for word the same. Either, as Coleridge held, Colossians is what might be called ‘the overflow’ of Ephesians, or Ephesians is a greater version of Colossians. We shall in the end come to see that it is this resemblance which gives us the clue to the unique place of Ephesians among the letters of Paul.

The Problem

So, it is certain that Ephesians was written when Paul was in prison for the faith and that it has in some way the closest possible connection with Colossians. The problem emerges when we begin to examine the question of to whom Ephesians was written.

In the ancient world, letters were written on rolls of papyrus. When finished, they were tied with thread, and, if they were especially private or important, the knots in the thread were then sealed. But it was rare for any address to be written on them, for the very simple reason that, for the ordinary individual, there was no postal system. There was a government post, but it was available only for official and imperial correspondence and not for the ordinary person. Letters in those days were delivered by hand, and therefore no address was necessary. So, the titles of the New Testament letters are not part of the original letters at all. They were inserted afterwards when the letters were collected and published for all the Church to read.

When we study Ephesians closely, we find that it is extremely unlikely that it was written to the church at Ephesus. There are internal reasons for arriving at that conclusion.

(1) The letter was written to Gentiles. The recipients were ‘Gentiles by birth, called “the uncircumcision” by those who are called “the circumcision” … at that time without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise’ (2:11–12). Paul urges that they ‘no longer live as the Gentiles live’ (4:17). The fact that they were Gentiles did not of itself mean that the letter could not have been written to Ephesus; but it is something to note.

(2) Ephesians is the most impersonal letter Paul ever wrote. It is entirely without personal greetings and without the intimate personal messages of which the other letters are so full. That is doubly surprising when we remember that Paul spent longer in Ephesus than in any other city – no less than three years (Acts 20:31). Further, there is no more intimate and affectionate passage in the whole New Testament than Acts 20:17–35, where we have Paul’s farewell talk to the elders of Ephesus, before he left Miletus on his last journey. It is very difficult to believe in the light of all this that Paul would have sent a letter to Ephesus which was so impersonal.

(3) The indication of the letter is that Paul and the recipients did not know each other personally and that their knowledge of each other came by hearsay. In 1:15, Paul writes: ‘I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus.’ The loyalty of the people to whom he was writing was not something he had experienced but something about which he had been told. In 3:2, he writes to them: ‘For surely you have already heard of the commission of God’s grace that was given to me for you.’ That is to say: ‘Surely you have heard that God gave me the special task and office of being the apostle to Gentiles such as you.’ The Church’s knowledge of Paul as the apostle to the Gentiles was something of which they had heard, but not something which they knew by personal contact with him. So, within itself, the letter bears signs that it does not fit the close and personal relationship which Paul had with the church at Ephesus.

These facts might be explained; but there is one external fact which settles the matter. In 1:1, none of the great early manuscripts of the Greek New Testament contains the words in Ephesus. They all read: ‘Paul … to the saints who are also faithful in Christ Jesus.’ And we know, from the way in which they comment on it, that that was the form in which the early Greek fathers knew the text.

Was Paul the Author?

Some scholars have gone on to find still another difficulty in Ephesians. They have doubted whether Paul was the author of the letter at all. On what grounds do they base their doubts?

They say that the vocabulary is different from the vocabulary of Paul; and it is true that there are some seventy words in Ephesians which are not found in any other letter written by Paul. That need not trouble us, for the fact is that in Ephesians Paul was saying things which he had never said before. He was travelling a road of thought along which he had not travelled before; and naturally he needed new words to express new thoughts. It would be ridiculous to demand that someone with a mind like Paul’s should never add to his vocabulary and should always express himself in the same way.

They say that the style is not the style of Paul. It is true – we can see it even in the English, let alone in the Greek – that the style of Ephesians is different from that of the other letters. The other letters are all written to meet a definite situation. But, as the New Testament scholar A. H. McNeile has said, Ephesians is ‘a theological tract, or rather a religious meditation’. Even the use of language is different. Another scholar, James Moffatt, puts it this way: generally speaking, Paul’s language pours out like a torrent; but in Ephesians we have ‘a slow, bright stream, flowing steadily along, which brims its high banks’. The length of the sentences in Ephesians is astonishing. In the Greek, Ephesians 1:3–14, 1:15–23, 2:1–9 and 3:1–7 are each one long, meandering sentence. McNeile very beautifully and rightly calls Ephesians ‘a poem in prose’. All this is very unlike Paul’s normal style.

What is to be said in response to this? There is first the general fact that no great writer always writes in the same style. Shakespeare can produce the very different styles of Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Taming of the Shrew and the sonnets. Any great stylist – and Paul was a great stylist – writes in a style to fit the aim and the circumstances at the time of writing. It is bad criticism to say that Paul did not write Ephesians simply because he has developed a new vocabulary and a new style.

But there is more. Let us remember how Paul wrote most of his letters. He wrote them in the middle of a busy ministry, when, for the most part, he was on the road. He wrote them to meet a pressing problem which had to be dealt with at that precise moment. That is to say, in most of his letters Paul was writing against time. Now, let us remember that, if Paul wrote Ephesians, he wrote it when he was in prison and therefore had all the time in the world to consider what he wrote. Is it any wonder that the style of Ephesians is not the style of the earlier letters?

Moreover, this difference in style, this meditative, poetical quality, is most apparent in the first three chapters, and they are one long prayer, culminating in a great hymn of praise to God. There is, in fact, nothing like this in all Paul’s letters. This is the language of lyrical prayer, not the language of argument or controversy or rebuke.

The differences are a long way from proving that Ephesians is not by Paul.

The Thought of the Epistle

Certain scholars want to go on to say that the thought of Ephesians is beyond the thought of any of the other letters of Paul. Let us see what that thought is. We have seen that Ephesians is intimately connected with Colossians, whose central thought is the all-sufficiency of Jesus Christ. In Jesus Christ were hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge (Colossians 2:3); all the fullness of God dwelt in him (Colossians 1:19); in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily (Colossians 2:9); he alone is necessary and sufficient for our salvation (Colossians 1:14). The whole thought of Colossians is based on the complete sufficiency of Jesus Christ.

The thought of Ephesians is a development of that idea. It is summarized in two verses of the first chapter, in which Paul speaks of God as having ‘with all wisdom and insight … made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth’ (Ephesians 1:9–10).

The key thought of Ephesians is the gathering together of all things in Jesus Christ. In nature as it is, without Christ there is nothing but disunity and disharmony; it is, as Tennyson described it, ‘red in tooth and claw’. The dominion that human beings hold has broken the social union which should exist between them and the natural world; we are divided from one another, class from class, nation from nation, ideology from ideology, Gentile from Jew. What is true of the world of outer nature is true of human nature. In every individual there is a tension; each one of us is a walking civil war, torn between the desire for good and the desire for evil; we hate our sins and love them at one and the same time. According to both Greek and Jewish thought in the time of Paul, this disharmony extends even to the heavenly places. A cosmic battle is raging between the powers of evil and the powers of good, between God and the demons. Worst of all, there is disharmony between God and human beings. Men and women, who were meant to be in fellowship with God, are estranged from him.

So, in this world without Christ, there is nothing but disunity. That disunity is not God’s purpose, but it can become a unity only when all things are united in Christ. As E. F. Scott has it in his commentary: ‘The innumerable broken strands were to be brought together in Christ, knotted again into one, as they had been in the beginning.’ The central thought of Ephesians is the realization of the disunity in the universe and the conviction that it can become unity only when everything is united in Christ.

The Origin of Paul’s Thought

How did Paul arrive at this great conception of the unity of all things in Jesus Christ? Most probably, he came to it in two ways. It is surely the inevitable outcome of his conviction, stated so vividly in Colossians, that Christ is all-sufficient. But it may well be that there was something else which moved Paul’s mind in this direction. He was a Roman citizen and proud of it. In his journeys, Paul had seen a great deal of the Roman Empire, and now he was in Rome, the imperial city. In the Roman Empire, a new unity had come to the world. The pax Romana, the Roman peace, was a very real thing. Kingdoms and states and countries, which had struggled and been at war with each other, were gathered into a new unity in the empire which was Rome. It may well be that, in his imprisonment, Paul saw with new eyes how all this unity centred in Rome; and it may well have seemed to him a symbol of how all things must centre in Christ, if a disunited nature and world and humanity were ever to be gathered into a unity. Surely, far from being a conception that was beyond his thinking, all Paul’s thinking and experience would lead him precisely to that.

The Function of the Church

It is in the first three chapters of the letter that Paul deals with this conception of the unity in Christ. In the last three chapters, he has much to say about the place of the Church in God’s plan to bring about that unity. It is here that Paul produces one of his greatest phrases. The Church is the body of Christ. The Church is to be hands to do Christ’s work, feet to run his errands, a mouth to speak for him. So, we have two lines of thought in Ephesians. First, Christ is God’s instrument of reconciliation. Second, the Church is Christ’s instrument of reconciliation. The Church must bring Christ to the world; and it is within the Church that all the middle walls of separation must be broken down. It is through the Church that the unity of all the discordant elements must be achieved. As the New Testament scholar E. F. Scott has it: ‘The Church stands for that purpose of worldwide reconciliation for which Christ appeared, and in all their intercourse with one another Christians must seek to realize this formative idea of the Church.’

Who but Paul?

This is the thought of Ephesians. As we have seen, there are some who, thinking of the vocabulary and the style and the thought of this letter, cannot believe that Paul wrote it. E. J. Goodspeed, the American scholar, has put forward an interesting – but unconvincing – theory. The probability is that it was in Ephesus about the year AD 90 that the letters of Paul were first collected and sent out to the Church at large. It is Goodspeed’s theory that the person responsible for that collection, some disciple of Paul, wrote Ephesians as a kind of introduction to the whole collection. Surely that theory breaks down on one obvious fact. Any imitation is inferior to the original. But, far from being inferior, Ephesians might well be said to be the greatest of all the Pauline letters. If Paul did not write it himself, we have to suggest as its writer someone who was possibly greater than Paul. E. F. Scott very relevantly demands: ‘Can we believe that in the Church of Paul’s day there was an unknown teacher of this supreme excellence? The natural assumption is surely that an epistle so like the work of Paul at his best was written by no other man than b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Foreword (by Ronnie Barclay)
• General Introduction (by William Barclay, 1975)
• General Foreword (by John Drane)
• Editor’s Preface (by Linda Foster)
• A General Introduction to the Letters of Paul
• Galatians
• Ephesians