Ephesians: The Wall Torn Down

At a Glance

Who wrote it: It says Paul, writing from prison. Most critical scholars think a follower of Paul wrote it after his death, leaning heavily on the letter to the Colossians. Others defend it as Paul’s own.

When: If Paul wrote it, about 60 to 62. If not, probably between 80 and 100.

Written for: Gentile believers, perhaps in several churches and not only in Ephesus. It tells them they now belong with Jewish believers as one people, and how to live as one.

What it remembers of me: Nothing from my life on earth. It speaks of me raised from the dead and seated at his right hand in the heavenly places (1:20).

How close it stays to me: Close on the stranger, on giving and on forgiving. Far on slaves.

If you only read three chapters: Ephesians 2, Ephesians 4 and Ephesians 5.

Words to Know

Circular letter — a letter meant to be passed from church to church.

Pseudonymous — written under someone else’s name. It was common in the ancient world.

Household code — a list of duties for the members of a household: wives and husbands, children and fathers, slaves and masters.

Principalities and powers — Paul’s words for the unseen forces behind the rulers and systems of the world.

The Book in Brief

The letter opens in the name of Paul, and is written to God’s people with a long blessing. God chose us before the world began, adopted us, and means to gather everything in heaven and on earth together under Christ. The writer prays that his readers will know the hope and the power God has given them, the same power that raised Christ from the dead.

Chapter 2 tells the readers that they were dead in their sins and have been saved by grace, through faith, as a gift, and that they were made for good works. They were Gentiles, strangers to the promises. Now Christ has made Jews and Gentiles one, broken down the wall between them, and made them fellow citizens in God’s household.

Chapter 3 says that the secret now made known is that the Gentiles share the promise. The writer, a prisoner for their sake, was given the task of announcing it. He prays that they will know the love of Christ.

Chapter 4 begins the advice. Live in a way worthy of your calling, and keep the unity of the Spirit, for there is one body, one Lord, one faith. Christ gave different gifts to build up the church. Put off the old way of life and put on the new. Speak the truth. Do not let the sun go down on your anger. Stop stealing, and work so that you have something to share. Be kind and forgiving.

Chapter 5 calls for imitating God, living in love and in light, and being filled with the Spirit. Everyone is to be subject to one another. The letter then speaks to wives and to husbands, and tells the husband to love his wife as Christ loved the church.

Chapter 6 speaks to children and parents, and to slaves and masters. It ends with a call to be strong in the Lord and to put on the armor of God, since the struggle is against spiritual powers. Tychicus is bringing news, and the letter closes with a blessing.

Your Bible opens it, Paul … to the saints who are at Ephesus (Ephesians 1:1). But the words at Ephesus are missing from the three oldest manuscripts of the letter.¹ Around the year 140, a teacher named Marcion knew it as the letter to the Laodiceans.

The letter itself suggests why. According to Acts, Paul spent more than two years in Ephesus. He knew the church there as well as any church in the world. Yet this letter has no personal greetings at all, no names, no memories of time together. And it says, having heard of the faith in the Lord Jesus which is among you (Ephesians 1:15), as though the writer had only heard about them.

That is not how you write to people you lived with for two years. Many scholars think it was a general letter, meant to travel from church to church, and that the name Ephesus was added later.

Did Paul write it?

This is one of the letters where scholars divide, and I will give you the arguments plainly.

The sentences. Paul’s letters are full of quick questions, outbursts and short jabs. Ephesians flows in long, solemn waves. The passage from 1:3 to 1:14 is a single sentence in Greek, more than two hundred words long.²

Colossians. A large part of Ephesians closely follows Colossians, often in the same words and the same order. The note about the messenger Tychicus at the end is almost word for word the same in both letters (Ephesians 6:21–22; Colossians 4:7–8). It looks as if one letter was written with the other open on the table.

The church. In the letters everyone agrees Paul wrote, the church almost always means a local congregation that meets in someone’s house. In Ephesians it means the worldwide church, one body across the earth.

The past tense. Paul usually says that believers will be saved, at the end. Ephesians says, by grace you have been saved (Ephesians 2:5), as something already finished.

Looking back. Ephesians speaks of the church being built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets (Ephesians 2:20), and of the mystery now … revealed to his holy apostles and prophets (Ephesians 3:5). That sounds like someone looking back at the apostles as a founding generation, already in the past.

None of these alone proves anything. Together, they persuade most critical scholars that Ephesians was written by a gifted disciple of Paul’s, perhaps a generation after his death, gathering up his teaching for a new time. Others answer that Paul could have changed his style, used a different secretary, or written to a different audience.³

If a disciple wrote it, he knew Paul’s mind well. Much of what is best in it is Paul’s thought, made calmer.

Go deeperLetters in a teacher’s name

Writing in a famous teacher’s name was common in the ancient world. Followers of Pythagoras went on writing books and letters under his name for centuries after he died. Letters circulated under the names of Greek philosophers who never wrote them.⁴

Was that forgery or tribute? Scholars disagree. Some think a disciple who wrote as Paul was honoring a master and carrying on his work, and that readers of the day would have seen it that way. Others answer that ancient readers who found such a letter often treated it as a lie.⁴

There is evidence for the second view. About the year 200, the Christian writer Tertullian told of a church leader in Asia who wrote a book, the Acts of Paul, in Paul’s honor. Its best-known part is the story of Thecla. When it was found out, the man was removed from his post, though he said he had done it out of love for Paul. At about the same time, Serapion, the bishop of Antioch, rejected a gospel written in Peter’s name, saying that writings falsely put under the apostles’ names were not to be received.⁵ And a letter in the New Testament already warns against a letter as if from us (2 Thessalonians 2:2).

So the question about Ephesians is not whether such letters existed. It is whether this one was written to deceive or to honor. Whichever is true, the churches took it in early. It is in the oldest collection of Paul’s letters that survives, a papyrus usually dated to about the year 200.

The dividing wall

The heart of Ephesians is chapter 2, and it is about a wall.

For he is our peace, who made both one, and broke down the middle wall of separation, having abolished in his flesh the hostility … that he might create in himself one new man of the two, making peace (Ephesians 2:14–15).

The both are Jews and Gentiles. And there really was a wall.

In the Temple in Jerusalem, where I taught, a low stone barrier separated the outer court, open to everyone, from the inner courts, open only to Jews. Signs were posted along it in Greek and Latin, warning foreigners not to go further, on pain of death. Two of those warning stones have been found. One, complete, is in a museum in Istanbul.⁶ Its message is that anyone who passes the barrier will have only himself to blame for the death that follows.

By the time Ephesians was written, that wall had probably been pulled down with the rest of the Temple by Roman soldiers. Ephesians says I had already torn it down another way. So then you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and of the household of God (Ephesians 2:19).

Go deeperThe wall, and why Paul was in chains

The wall in chapter 2 is more than a picture. In Acts, it is the reason Paul ended up in prison.

When Paul came to Jerusalem, some Jews from Asia saw him in the Temple. They shouted that he taught against the Law and the Temple, and that he had brought Greeks into the holy place. Acts explains why they said it: they had seen Trophimus the Ephesian with Paul in the city, and supposed that Paul had brought him into the temple (Acts 21:27–29). Paul was dragged out and nearly killed. Then the Romans arrested him, and he spent the next years as a prisoner.

The letter has Paul say, I, Paul, am the prisoner of Christ Jesus on behalf of you Gentiles (Ephesians 3:1). In Acts, that is how his imprisonment began: with a rumor that a Gentile from Ephesus had crossed the barrier.

The warning on the barrier was no bluff. In the siege of Jerusalem in AD 70, the Roman general Titus reminded the defenders, according to Josephus, that Rome had allowed them to put to death anyone who crossed it, even a Roman.⁷

Saved, and made for something

You may know these verses by heart: for by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, that no one would boast (Ephesians 2:8–9).

Now read the next verse, which is very often left off the poster: For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared before that we would walk in them (Ephesians 2:10).

Not saved by good works. Saved for good works. The two verses belong together, and separating them has done harm. A faith that stops at verse 9 can sit still forever. Verse 10 tells it to get up and walk.

One body

Chapter 4 begins with the great call to unity: There is one body and one Spirit … one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all (Ephesians 4:4–6).

Then come the practical lines, some of the best in all the letters.

Be angry, and don’t sin. Don’t let the sun go down on your wrath (Ephesians 4:26).

Let him who stole steal no more; but rather let him labor, producing with his hands something that is good, that he may have something to give to him who has need (Ephesians 4:28).

Look at that one again. A thief should stop stealing and start working, which you would expect. But the reason given is not so that he can support himself, or become respectable. It is so that he will have something to give to the needy. In this letter, the purpose of honest work is generosity.

And be kind to one another, tender hearted, forgiving each other (Ephesians 4:32).

The household code

Chapter 5 brings the passage that has shaped Christian marriages, and Christian arguments about marriage, for centuries.

It begins with a sentence meant for everyone: subjecting yourselves to one another in the fear of Christ (Ephesians 5:21). To one another. Every member of the household to every other.

Then: Wives, be subject to your own husbands, as to the Lord (Ephesians 5:22). In two of the oldest copies of the letter, that verse has no verb of its own. It reads, literally, wives, to your own husbands, as to the Lord. It borrows its verb from the sentence before, the one about everyone being subject to one another.⁸ Later copyists added the verb to make the command stand on its own, and that is the form your World English Bible prints.

The husband is called the head, and then he is given a command that no Roman husband had ever been given by law: Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the assembly, and gave himself up for it (Ephesians 5:25). He is to give himself up, the way I did on the cross.

Then children and parents. Then slaves: Servants, be obedient to those who according to the flesh are your masters, with fear and trembling (Ephesians 6:5). And masters: You masters, do the same things to them, and give up threatening, knowing that he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and there is no partiality with him (Ephesians 6:9).

This list did not start with Ephesians. It is copied and enlarged from Colossians, and lists like it were a standard feature of Greek writing on how to run a household. What is new is what Ephesians puts around it: mutual submission at the start, a husband told to die for his wife, and masters reminded that they have a master too.

That was more than the world around it said. It was less than neither slave nor free … neither male nor female. It accepted slavery as a fact of household life and told the slave to obey with fear and trembling. For centuries afterward, that verse was read aloud to enslaved people by men who owned them, and the line about masters giving up threats was read much more quietly.

Go deeperWhere the household code came from

The list of duties in chapters 5 and 6 did not begin in the church. Greek writers had long described a household in three pairs: husband and wife, father and children, master and slave. Aristotle set out those three relationships around 330 BC, and later writers turned them into lists of duties. Jewish writers in the Greek world, such as Philo, gave similar advice.⁹

Versions of the same code appear in other New Testament letters, in Colossians 3:18–4:1 and in 1 Peter 2:18–3:7.

Why did Christians take it up? One reason may be that Romans were suspicious of new religions that seemed to unsettle the household. A faith whose members turned away from the family gods could look like a danger to good order. The Greek writer Plutarch, about the year 100, told brides that a wife should worship only the gods her husband worshiped.⁹

In 1981 the scholar David Balch argued that early Christian writers took over the code partly to show outsiders that the church was no threat to the household. Not everyone accepts that explanation, and the code in Ephesians has a shape of its own.⁹ But it helps to know that when the letter tells wives to be subject and children and slaves to obey, it is repeating what every neighbor of the church expected to hear. What the neighbors did not expect were the words around it: that everyone should be subject to one another, and that a master has a master in heaven.

The armor of God

The letter ends with its most famous picture. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil (Ephesians 6:11).

The writer may have been looking at a Roman soldier, perhaps the one guarding him. He goes piece by piece: belt, breastplate, boots, shield, helmet. Notice that every piece is for defense except one, and that one is the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God (Ephesians 6:17). The only weapon is a word.

And notice who the enemy is. For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world’s rulers of the darkness of this age (Ephesians 6:12).

Not against flesh and blood. Not against people. That verse has been used to call Christians to a private war with invisible demons. It has also been read, by many in the last century, as a recognition that evil works through systems, empires and institutions, not only through individuals, and that a follower of mine should fight the system without hating the people inside it.¹⁰ Either way, it rules out one thing: making a human being your enemy.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Ephesians 2:8–10, all three verses.

You will find: that the verse after not of works says you were created … for good works.

Then read Ephesians 5:21 and 5:22 together, as one sentence.

The Short Version

• The oldest copies do not say “in Ephesus.” It was probably a circular letter for many churches.
• Most critical scholars think a follower of Paul wrote it after his death, closely following Colossians.
• Its center is the dividing wall between Jew and Gentile, torn down in me. A real wall like it stood in the Temple.
• By grace you have been saved is followed at once by created for good works.
• Its household code begins with mutual submission and tells husbands to give themselves up, but it still tells slaves to obey with fear and trembling.