The Epistle to the Ephesians — The Letter That Lost Its Address and Kept Its Place

Part of the series: The New Testament Canon—How 27 Books Survived the Ancient Gauntlet

Every book in this series has a peculiarity that shaped its road into the canon. Second Peter’s was doubt, Hebrews’ was anonymity, Revelation’s was controversy. The Epistle to the Ephesians has the strangest peculiarity of all: it may not have been written to Ephesus. The letter that every ancient church received without hesitation, that appears in every canon list and every great codex, that no father ever questioned—this letter’s opening address is a textual ghost. The words “in Ephesus” are absent from the oldest and best manuscripts we possess. The first man ever to publish the epistle in a fixed collection called it by another city’s name. And the modern academy, which never doubted the letter’s antiquity, has come to doubt something the ancients never did: that Paul wrote it at all.⁠¹

So the story of Ephesians in the canon is a story told backwards. Its canonicity was settled almost before anyone thought to ask the question; the arguments came later, and they came about everything else—the address, the title, the author. I think that inversion is instructive. It shows, more clearly than any disputed book can, what the early church actually treasured when it treasured a text: not a postmark, and not a stylometric profile, but an apostolic voice speaking to the whole Church. Ephesians is the epistle of the whole Church. It turned out, fittingly, to be addressed to her.

The Letter Without an Address

Open a modern Bible and the letter begins plainly enough: “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, to the holy ones who are [in Ephesus] faithful in Christ Jesus.”⁠² The brackets are doing heavy work. The New American Bible’s own note states the problem candidly: the phrase “in Ephesus” is “lacking in important early witnesses such as P46 (3rd cent.), and Sinaiticus and Vaticanus (4th cent.), appearing in the latter two as a fifth-century addition,” and “Basil and Origen mention its absence from manuscripts.”⁠³ That is a remarkable set of witnesses to line up against two words. Papyrus 46, our earliest substantial copy of Paul’s letters, does not have them. The original scribes of the two greatest fourth-century codices did not write them; later correctors supplied them.

The fathers noticed. Origen, commenting on the letter in the third century, puzzled over the text in front of him—which read simply “to the saints who are”—and, finding the expression odd, spun a characteristically Origenian meditation on the saints who partake of Him Who Is.⁠⁴ Whatever one makes of the exegesis, it is decisive as evidence: Origen could not have written it if his copy said “the saints who are in Ephesus.” A century later Basil of Caesarea made the point expressly, reporting that the older copies he had examined lacked the words, and that earlier writers had handed down the same reading.⁠⁵ These are not marginal figures. They are two of the most learned textual minds of the ancient church, and they agree with our oldest surviving manuscripts against our printed Bibles.

What, then, was the letter? The hypothesis that has commanded the field since Archbishop Ussher proposed it in the seventeenth century is that Ephesians was a circular letter—an encyclical, sent to a cluster of churches in the Roman province of Asia, with a space in the address for each destination. J. B. Lightfoot, who examined the evidence as carefully as anyone ever has, judged Ussher’s theory the only one that accounts for all the facts: the blank address in the oldest copies, the letter’s complete absence of personal greetings, and the strange circumstance that Paul—who had lived and worked in Ephesus for the better part of three years—writes as though he knew his readers only by report.⁠⁶ “Hearing of your faith,” he tells them—an odd thing to say to a church whose elders would later weep on his neck at Miletus.⁠⁷

There is even a candidate for one of the other addresses. In the Epistle to the Colossians, Paul instructs that his letter be read also in the church of the Laodiceans, “and you yourselves read the one from Laodicea.”⁠⁸ A letter associated with Laodicea, circulating in the Lycus valley alongside Colossians, that has otherwise vanished without a trace—unless it has not vanished at all. Lightfoot thought the “letter from Laodicea” was very likely our Ephesians, one copy of the circular caught in the act of circulating. The suggestion cannot be proven. It has, however, a piece of second-century evidence in its favor that is too good to pass over.

Marcion’s “Laodiceans”

Around the year 144, Marcion of Sinope published the first fixed canon of Christian scripture—a mutilated Luke and ten letters of Paul. I have told the story of that collection, and of the church’s response to it, in the companion essay on Galatians, the letter Marcion placed first. For present purposes the salient fact is this: Marcion’s collection included our epistle, but not under our title. Tertullian, working through Marcion’s Paul letter by letter, pauses mid-course to flag it: “I here pass over discussion about another epistle, which we hold to have been written to the Ephesians, but the heretics to the Laodiceans.”⁠⁹

When Tertullian returns to the point, his argument is worth quoting at length, because it is one of the most revealing sentences in the whole ancient literature on the canon:

We have it on the true tradition of the Church, that this epistle was sent to the Ephesians, not to the Laodiceans. Marcion, however, was very desirous of giving it the new title (of Laodicean), as if he were extremely accurate in investigating such a point. But of what consequence are the titles, since in writing to a certain church the apostle did in fact write to all?⁠¹⁰

Notice what Tertullian does and does not do. He does not produce a manuscript with “in Ephesus” in the text—an omission that suggests, as Lightfoot observed, that his own copies lacked the words too. He appeals instead to the church’s tradition of the letter’s destination. And then, in the same breath, he concedes the deeper truth with a shrug that has aged remarkably well: the titles are of no consequence, because in writing to one church the apostle wrote to all. Tertullian accuses Marcion of tampering with the title, and the accusation was doubtless sincere; Lightfoot, however, judged it unworthy of credit, since Marcion of all people had no doctrinal motive to relabel this letter, and may simply have inherited a copy that had circulated—as the circular-letter theory would predict—under the Laodicean address.⁠¹¹ If so, the heretic’s “error” is actually a fossil: independent second-century evidence that the letter once traveled under more than one city’s name.

The title fight had a long afterlife. The Muratorian Fragment, the earliest orthodox canon list we possess, warns its readers against an epistle “to the Laodiceans” and another “to the Alexandrians,” both “forged in Paul’s name to [further] the heresy of Marcion,” adding tartly that “it is not fitting that gall be mixed with honey.”⁠¹² The fragmentist’s “Laodiceans” is most plausibly Marcion’s retitled Ephesians itself, viewed from the orthodox side of the quarrel. Centuries later a quite different document—a short Latin forgery stitched together from Pauline phrases—would circulate under the Laodicean name and haunt the margins of the Latin Bible for the better part of a millennium. But that ghost story belongs to the Colossians essay, since it was Colossians 4:16 that conjured the ghost. What matters here is the irony: the one letter of Paul whose address is textually uncertain became the one letter with too many addresses. The church resolved the confusion the way Tertullian did—Ephesus by tradition, everyone by intent—and never once doubted the letter itself.

The Paper Trail

The external evidence for Ephesians is early, broad, and essentially unanimous. It begins, appropriately, in Ephesus. Around the year 107, Ignatius of Antioch, traveling under guard to his martyrdom in Rome, wrote to the Ephesian church a letter saturated with the language of our epistle, and addressed them as fellow initiates of Paul: “You are initiated into the mysteries of the Gospel with Paul, the holy, the martyred, the deservedly most happy, at whose feet may I be found, when I shall attain to God; who in all his Epistles makes mention of you in Christ Jesus.”⁠¹³ The compliment is hyperbolic—Paul does not mention Ephesus in every letter—but hyperbole has its uses as evidence: within a decade or so of the first century’s close, the bishop of Antioch knew a collection of Paul’s letters and associated our epistle’s recipients with the apostle in the most emphatic terms. Ignatius’s letter also happens to name the bishop of Ephesus at the time: a man called Onesimus.⁠¹⁴ Remember him; he returns below in one of modern scholarship’s most ingenious guesses.

A few years later, Polycarp of Smyrna—whose letter to the Philippians is a load-bearing witness for two other books in this series—did something that went a step beyond even 2 Peter’s ranking of Paul’s letters among “the scriptures.” Urging the Philippians against anger, he wrote: “It is declared then in these Scriptures, ‘Be angry, and sin not,’ and, ‘Let not the sun go down upon your wrath.’”⁠¹⁵ The first clause is Psalm 4; the second exists nowhere in the Old Testament. It is Ephesians 4:26, where Paul quotes the psalm and extends it.⁠¹⁶ Honesty requires the caveats: the chapter survives only in a Latin translation, and it is possible Polycarp’s “Scriptures” was aimed principally at the psalm. But read plainly, this is quite possibly the earliest surviving instance of a New Testament epistle being cited as Scripture—and the epistle so honored is Ephesians. The letter’s fingerprints are on the other apostolic fathers too, though more faintly: the plea of Clement of Rome, “Have we not one God and one Christ? Is there not one Spirit of grace poured out upon us?”, is widely heard as an echo of Ephesians 4’s “one body and one Spirit”; and the Shepherd of Hermas’s warnings against grieving the indwelling Holy Spirit read like meditations on Ephesians 4:30.⁠¹⁷ These are allusions, not citations, and I weigh them accordingly.

By the end of the second century the attestation becomes explicit. Irenaeus of Lyons quotes the letter by name—“even as the blessed Paul declares in his Epistle to the Ephesians, that we are members of His body, of His flesh, and of His bones”—making him the earliest surviving writer we can name and date who attaches the Ephesian title in so many words.⁠¹⁸ The Muratorian Fragment counts it among Paul’s letters to the seven churches, in a passage whose theology of the sevenfold address could have been lifted from Tertullian’s shrug: the blessed apostle, “following the example of his predecessor John, writes by name to only seven churches,” and in that sevenfold particularity “it is clearly recognizable that there is one Church spread throughout the whole extent of the earth”—the list running “to the Corinthians first, to the Ephesians second, to the Philippians third, to the Colossians fourth, to the Galatians fifth, to the Thessalonians sixth, to the Romans seventh.”⁠¹⁹ Papyrus 46, copied around the year 200, contains the letter among Paul’s collected epistles.⁠²⁰ Eusebius, cataloguing the church’s books in the early fourth century, filed Paul’s epistles collectively among the homologoumena—the acknowledged writings—and counted them elsewhere as “fourteen epistles” that are “well known and undisputed,” pausing only over Hebrews, never over Ephesians.⁠²¹

The formal lists tell the same story without a wrinkle. Athanasius’s Festal Letter of 367, the first document to name our exact twenty-seven books, lists “fourteen Epistles of Paul… next, to the Ephesians; then to the Philippians; then to the Colossians,” and calls the whole collection “fountains of salvation.”⁠²² The canon appended to the fourth-century Council of Laodicea includes Ephesians among the fourteen; so did the North African councils of Hippo and Carthage that closed out the century.⁠²³ No father proposes its removal; no regional tradition hesitates. On the ancient evidence, Ephesians is as secure as Romans. Which makes what happened next genuinely curious.

The Most Disputed “Undisputed” Letter

For roughly seventeen centuries, no one on record doubted that Paul wrote Ephesians. The first tremor was gentle and came from a friend. Erasmus, annotating the letter in 1519, noticed that its style differs markedly from Paul’s other letters—and concluded that the letter was Paul’s anyway, since the Pauline mind asserts its claim in every line.⁠²⁴ The first outright denial waited until 1792, when the English rationalist Edward Evanson—no friend of most of the New Testament—rejected the letter on historical rather than stylistic grounds: Paul knew the Ephesians intimately, and this author writes as if he had merely “heard” of his readers’ faith.⁠²⁵ The observation is shrewd; readers who have followed the circular-letter evidence above will notice that it cuts equally well in the other direction. In the nineteenth century the doubt became a school. De Wette judged the letter a verbose expansion of Colossians, and F. C. Baur, who reduced the authentic Paul to four letters, swept Ephesians into the second century with the rest.⁠²⁶

The modern case against Pauline authorship stands on three legs. The first is style. Ephesians moves in enormous, cascading sentences—the blessing of 1:3–14 is, by the usual punctuation, a single Greek sentence of roughly two hundred words—piled with genitives and near-synonyms, a liturgical idiom quite unlike the cut-and-thrust of Galatians or Romans.⁠²⁷ The second is the letter’s relationship to Colossians, which is unlike that between any other two letters in the corpus. On C. Leslie Mitton’s classic count, about a third of the words of Colossians reappear in Ephesians; and in the commendation of Tychicus the two letters run verbatim—thirty-two words in exact correspondence, twenty-nine of them consecutive on the Ephesians side, the longest stretch of verbatim agreement between the two letters and a phenomenon most naturally explained by one author copying with the other text open before him.⁠²⁸ The third is the theology’s altitude. In the undisputed letters “church” usually names a local assembly—the church of God that is at Corinth. In Ephesians, all nine occurrences of the word name the universal Church, the body of which Christ is head, the bride for whom he gave himself.⁠²⁹ Add the letter’s serene view of Jew and Gentile reconciled—the battle of Galatians remembered as if from a mountaintop—and the critics conclude that a disciple of Paul, writing a generation later, composed a summa of his master’s thought.

The most charming version of that conclusion deserves its own paragraph. Edgar Goodspeed proposed in 1933 that Ephesians was written as the introduction to the first collected edition of Paul’s letters—a cover letter for the corpus, woven from the collector’s memory of the whole, with Colossians lying closest to hand. His student John Knox then supplied the collector with a name: Onesimus, the runaway slave of the letter to Philemon, who on this theory returned to the apostle’s legacy in freedom, gathered the letters, and prefaced them with the most Pauline non-Pauline document ever written—the same Onesimus, Knox suggested, whom Ignatius greets as bishop of Ephesus a generation later, which would explain rather elegantly how the circular letter acquired its Ephesian address.⁠³⁰ It is a beautiful theory. I do not believe it, but I have never forgotten it, and its very ingenuity is a measure of how much explaining the letter invites.

The case for the defense is not embarrassed either. Harold Hoehner’s exhaustive survey of the literature—279 authors and 390 works since Evanson—found that in the twentieth century only the 1970s and 1980s produced a majority of published opinion for pseudonymity, and that by the 1990s the field had split roughly even; the defection is real, but it is neither so old nor so total as the textbook summaries imply.⁠³¹ Substantial commentators—Markus Barth in the Anchor Bible, Hoehner himself, Frank Thielman, Clinton Arnold—have defended authenticity at full scholarly length.⁠³² The style argument must reckon with the fact that Ephesians’s stock of unusual words is about the same size as that of Galatians, which no one doubts; the dependence argument must reckon with the possibility that an author repeating himself to a neighboring audience within weeks would sound exactly like this; and both arguments soften considerably if Paul used a secretary with a freer hand—a practice the letters themselves attest, and a hypothesis even John Paul II was content to entertain in passing.⁠³³ Raymond Brown, no traditionalist, put the state of play at 70 to 80 percent of critical scholarship against Pauline composition; the honest summary is that the question is genuinely contested and likely to remain so.⁠³⁴

What does the dispute mean for the letter’s place in the Bible? Less than the anxious reader might fear. The Church received Ephesians as apostolic Scripture; its canonicity was fixed by that reception, ratified at Trent, and does not hang on the outcome of a stylometric argument.⁠³⁵ Canonicity and direct authorship are distinct questions—a distinction the church has lived with comfortably since Origen mused about who penned Hebrews, as I recounted in the Hebrews essay. If Paul wrote Ephesians, it is inspired Scripture. If a disciple wrote it in his master’s name and the Church received it as the apostle’s authentic voice, it is inspired Scripture still. The interesting arguments are about history, not authority.

One Body, One Faith, One Baptism

What the ancient church heard in Ephesians—and what the modern critics’ “un-Pauline altitude” actually registers—is the letter’s vision of the Church. Nowhere else in the New Testament is ecclesiology so concentrated. God has put all things beneath Christ’s feet and given him “as head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of the one who fills all things in every way.”⁠³⁶ The household of God is “built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the capstone.”⁠³⁷ And in the letter’s fourth chapter Paul compresses the whole into a sevenfold confession that reads like a creed before the creeds: “one body and one Spirit… one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all.”⁠³⁸ A Catholic does not have to strain to hear the four marks of the Church gestating in those lines. The Second Vatican Council did not strain either: Lumen Gentium’s opening meditation on the images of the Church—body, bride, temple—is threaded through with citations of Ephesians, the spotless spouse whom Christ “loved and for whom He delivered Himself up that He might sanctify her.”⁠³⁹

The letter’s second chapter carries the verse every Protestant reader knows by heart: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not from you; it is the gift of God; it is not from works, so no one may boast.”⁠⁴⁰ It may surprise some readers to learn how unreservedly the Catholic Church says amen. When the Second Council of Orange condemned semi-Pelagianism in 529, it reached for precisely this verse: even the beginning of faith, even the desire for it, the council taught, comes not from our nature but from grace—“for blessed Paul says… ‘For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God.’”⁠⁴¹ Justification’s source in sheer unmerited grace is not a Reformation discovery; it is a canon of a sixth-century Catholic council. What the Catholic reader will not do is stop at verse 9, because Paul did not stop there: “For we are his handiwork, created in Christ Jesus for the good works that God has prepared in advance, that we should live in them.”⁠⁴² Grace excludes boasting; it does not exclude works. It creates them.

The Great Mystery

The passage that has done the most doctrinal work in the letter’s history, however, comes in chapter five, and it begins with a verse modern lectors approach with visible caution: “Be subordinate to one another out of reverence for Christ.”⁠⁴³ The household code that follows—wives and husbands, children and parents, slaves and masters—has been quarreled over for two centuries, and the quarrel usually skips the grammar. The subordination Paul enjoins is mutual before it is marital; the note in the New American Bible observes that the code’s “initial principle of subordination to one another under Christ” effectively undermines “exclusive claims to domination by one party.”⁠⁴⁴ And the weight of the passage’s commands falls, by any honest count of its clauses, on the husband: “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ loved the church and handed himself over for her.”⁠⁴⁵ The standard of comparison is a crucifixion.

Then Paul quotes Genesis—“the two shall become one flesh”—and says the thing that launched a thousand years of sacramental theology: “This is a great mystery, but I speak in reference to Christ and the church.”⁠⁴⁶ The Greek is mystērion; the Latin Bible rendered it sacramentum—“sacramentum hoc magnum est.” It is tempting, and it has occasionally been too tempting, to treat that translation as a proof-text: Paul calls marriage a sacrament, full stop. The Council of Trent was more careful than its popularizers. Defining that matrimony is truly a sacrament of the New Law, the council said the grace that perfects natural love and sanctifies the spouses is something Christ merited for us by his passion—“as the Apostle Paul intimates” in this passage.⁠⁴⁷ Intimates—the Latin is innuit, hints at, suggests. Trent claimed from Ephesians 5 exactly what the text bears: not a technical definition of the sevenfold sacramental system, but the revelation that marriage signifies the union of Christ and the Church, and that a sign instituted in creation and taken up into that union carries grace.⁠⁴⁸ The Catechism builds its whole theology of marriage on the passage—the spousal love of Christ, the “nuptial bath” of baptism, marriage as “an efficacious sign, the sacrament of the covenant of Christ and the Church.”⁠⁴⁹ Anyone who has attended a Catholic wedding lately has probably heard the passage read—though the lectionary, in a concession to modern nerves, offers a short form that begins at “Husbands, love your wives” and lets the subordination clauses rest.⁠⁵⁰

Into the Canon

The letter’s later career is a study in devotion rather than dispute. John Chrysostom, preaching through it at the end of the fourth century in twenty-four homilies, introduced it with a superlative he rarely used: the epistle is “full of sublime thoughts and doctrines… It abounds with sentiments of overwhelming loftiness and grandeur. Thoughts which he scarcely so much as utters any where else, he here plainly declares.”⁠⁵¹ Origen wrote three books on the letter, now surviving only in fragments—and in Jerome, whose own commentary leaned on Origen’s so heavily that when Rufinus later wanted to convict Jerome of secret Origenism, he prosecuted the case out of the Ephesians commentary. Jerome’s defense, that he had said openly in his preface that he was following Origen in part, is one of the small comedies of patristic literature; the serious point underneath it is that the greatest exegetes of the ancient church spent their best labor on this letter.⁠⁵² Marius Victorinus, the converted Roman rhetorician, had already given it one of the first Latin commentaries on any Pauline epistle; Aquinas lectured through it in the thirteenth century.⁠⁵³

The Reformers loved it no less, which is its own kind of testimony to the letter’s breadth. Luther counted Ephesians among the books “that show you Christ,” in the select company of John’s Gospel and Romans and Galatians.⁠⁵⁴ Calvin published a commentary on it in 1548 and then, a decade later, preached forty-eight sermons through it at Geneva. When John Knox lay dying in Edinburgh in November 1572, he asked daily for three texts: John 17, Isaiah 53, and a chapter of Ephesians; and on his last afternoon he said to his wife, “Go, read where I cast my first anchor”—John 17—after which she read to him from Calvin’s sermons on the Ephesians until the end.⁠⁵⁵ A letter that dies with Knox, anchors Calvin, defines Catholic marriage, and furnishes half the imagery of Lumen Gentium has demonstrably escaped every party’s custody.

Which returns us, at the last, to the blank in the first verse. The letter without an address became the letter with every address; the epistle whose destination the manuscripts cannot fix is the one epistle whose subject is the Church of every destination. Tertullian, of all people, said it best, and said it while arguing about the title with a heretic: in writing to a certain church, the apostle did in fact write to all. The early church did not canonize a postmark. It canonized a voice it knew—speaking, as the letter itself puts it, of the mystery hidden from the ages and now made known through the Church. On that point, at least, the manuscripts have no variants.

Frequently Asked Questions

Was the Epistle to the Ephesians ever doubted in the early church? No. Ephesians appears in every ancient canon list, every major codex, and Eusebius’s category of “acknowledged” books. Marcion included it in his canon around 144 (under the title “To the Laodiceans”), Irenaeus quoted it by name around 180, and no church father ever questioned it. The doubts about Ephesians are entirely modern, and they concern authorship, not canonicity.

Why is “in Ephesus” missing from the oldest manuscripts? The phrase is absent from Papyrus 46 and from the original hands of Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, and both Origen and Basil testify that ancient copies lacked it. The most widely held explanation, proposed by Archbishop Ussher, is that Ephesians was a circular letter sent to several churches in Asia Minor, with the destination left blank or filled in per copy. The Ephesian address likely stuck because Ephesus was the province’s chief church and a natural hub for the letter’s circulation.

Did Paul write Ephesians? The ancient church was unanimous that he did; a majority of modern critical scholars—Raymond Brown estimated 70 to 80 percent—believe a disciple of Paul composed it in his name, pointing to its unusual style, its close dependence on Colossians, and its exalted view of the universal Church. Substantial scholars continue to defend Pauline authorship, and mediating positions (such as a secretary given a free hand) remain live. Catholic teaching does not stake the letter’s inspiration or canonicity on the outcome: the Church received Ephesians as apostolic Scripture, and that reception, not a modern attribution debate, fixed its place in the Bible.

Is Ephesians the lost “letter to the Laodiceans” mentioned in Colossians? Possibly. Colossians 4:16 tells the Colossians to read “the one from Laodicea,” a letter that has otherwise vanished. If Ephesians was a circular letter, a copy addressed to Laodicea would explain both Colossians 4:16 and the fact that Marcion’s second-century canon carried our epistle under the title “To the Laodiceans.” The identification is attractive and old—Lightfoot argued it forcefully—but it cannot be proven. The later Latin “Epistle to the Laodiceans” found in medieval Bibles is a different document entirely: a short forgery stitched from Pauline phrases.

What does “one Lord, one faith, one baptism” mean? Ephesians 4:4–6 piles up seven unities—one body, one Spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all—as the ground of the Church’s unity. Paul’s point is that the Church’s oneness is not an organizational achievement but a given of God’s own oneness. Catholic theology has always read the verse ecclesially: there is one Church because there is one Lord who has one bride, confessed in one faith and entered through one baptism.

Why does the Catholic Church base the sacrament of marriage on Ephesians 5? Ephesians 5:21–33 presents marriage as a sign of the union between Christ and the Church—“this is a great mystery”—where the Greek mystērion became the Latin sacramentum. The Council of Trent, defining matrimony as a sacrament, said carefully that Paul “intimates” (innuit) the sacramental grace of marriage in this passage: the text does not deliver a technical definition, but it does reveal that Christian marriage signifies and shares in Christ’s spousal love for the Church. The Catechism’s entire treatment of marriage is built on the passage.

Footnotes

1. 1. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.25.1–2 (NPNF, 2nd ser., 1, trans. Arthur Cushman McGiffert), places "the epistles of Paul" among the acknowledged books (homologoumena); newadvent.org. Scripture quotations in this essay follow the New American Bible, Revised Edition (NABRE) unless otherwise noted; bible.usccb.org/bible/ephesians.

2. 2. Ephesians 1:1 (NABRE), brackets original to the translation.

3. 3. NABRE note on Ephesians 1:1. The manuscripts in question are Papyrus 46 (the Chester Beatty codex of Paul's letters), Codex Sinaiticus (א*), and Codex Vaticanus (B*), where the phrase was later supplied by correctors; the corrector of the minuscule 67 likewise marked the words as spurious. See J. B. Lightfoot, "The Destination of the Epistle to the Ephesians," in Biblical Essays (London: Macmillan, 1893), 377–384.

4. 4. Origen's comment survives in the Greek catena tradition of his Ephesians commentary: finding the text "to the saints who are," he glossed the participle by way of Exodus 3:14, the saints partaking of the One Who Is. Text and translation in Lightfoot, Biblical Essays, 377–378. Lightfoot's judgment: Origen "could not possibly have said that this statement is made of the Ephesians alone, if he had read the words as they stand in the common texts."

5. 5. Basil of Caesarea, Against Eunomius 2.19, reports the reading "to the saints who are" as what "we ourselves have found in those copies which are ancient" and as handed down by earlier writers; translation and Greek in Lightfoot, Biblical Essays, 379–380.

6. 6. Lightfoot, Biblical Essays, 392–394, endorsing Archbishop James Ussher's hypothesis of an encyclical with a space left in the address: "that of Archbishop Ussher alone satisfies these requirements."

7. 7. Ephesians 1:15 (NABRE): "hearing of your faith in the Lord Jesus and of your love for all the holy ones"; cf. 3:2 ("if, as I suppose, you have heard of the stewardship..."). For Paul's Ephesian ministry, Acts 19:1–20:1; the Miletus farewell, Acts 20:17–38—see the companion essay on the Book of Acts.

8. 8. Colossians 4:16 (NABRE).

9. 9. Tertullian, Against Marcion 5.11, in ANF 3, trans. Peter Holmes; newadvent.org. On Marcion's collection and its order—Galatians first; our epistle as "Laodiceans" in seventh place—see the companion essay on Galatians, with Adolf von Harnack, Marcion: Das Evangelium vom fremden Gott, 2nd ed. (Leipzig, 1924), and Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 91–92.

10. 10. Tertullian, Against Marcion 5.17, ANF 3, trans. Holmes; newadvent.org.

11. 11. Lightfoot, Biblical Essays, 380–383: Tertullian appeals "not to the ancient copies, but to the authority of the Church," and his charge that Marcion falsified the title is "unworthy of credit, though no doubt uttered in good faith," since Marcion had no doctrinal stake in the change.

12. 12. The Muratorian Fragment, lines 63–67, trans. Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), Appendix IV; text at earlychristianwritings.com. On the fragment's usual second-century dating and the minority fourth-century redating, see the Galatians essay, n. 16.

13. 13. Ignatius, To the Ephesians 12.2, in ANF 1, trans. Roberts and Donaldson (shorter recension); newadvent.org. Michael W. Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), renders the crux "who in every letter remembers you in Christ Jesus." Ignatius's letters are conventionally dated c. 107–110.

14. 14. Ignatius, To the Ephesians 1 (with chs. 2 and 6), ANF 1: "I received, therefore, your whole multitude in the name of God, through Onesimus, a man of inexpressible love, and your bishop in the flesh."

15. 15. Polycarp, To the Philippians 12.1, in ANF 1, trans. Roberts and Donaldson; newadvent.org. Chapters 10–12 of Polycarp's letter survive only in a Latin translation ("ut his scripturis dictum est"); the scholarly standard text is Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers, 3rd ed.

16. 16. Ephesians 4:26 (NABRE): "Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun set on your anger." The first clause quotes Psalm 4:5 (so the LXX and NABRE; 4:4 in versions that do not number the superscription); the sun clause is Paul's own extension, found nowhere in the Old Testament—so its presence in Polycarp can only come from Ephesians. 2 Peter 3:15–16 already ranks Paul's letters among "the scriptures" as a collection; Polycarp is the earliest surviving writer to quote a specific sentence of a New Testament epistle under a scriptural citation formula—see the companion essay on 2 Peter. Some scholars caution that Polycarp's "Scriptures" may have been intended principally of the psalm; the claim above is deliberately framed as "possibly the earliest."

17. 17. 1 Clement 46.6, in ANF 9, trans. John Keith ("Have we not [all] one God and one Christ? Is there not one Spirit of grace poured out upon us? And have we not one calling in Christ?"); newadvent.org; cf. Ephesians 4:4–6. Shepherd of Hermas, Mandate 10.2–3, in ANF 2, trans. F. Crombie ("grief crushes out the Holy Spirit... he grieves the Holy Spirit"); newadvent.org; cf. Ephesians 4:30. Both are echoes rather than citations; the Oxford Society's classic 1905 survey, The New Testament in the Apostolic Fathers, placed the Clement parallel in its lowest class of probability—possible use, but dependence impossible to establish.

18. 18. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 5.2.3, ANF 1, trans. Roberts and Rambaut, quoting Ephesians 5:30; newadvent.org; cf. 5.8.1, quoting Ephesians 1:13–14 by name. Writing c. 180, Irenaeus is the earliest extant author to cite the letter under its Ephesian title.

19. 19. The Muratorian Fragment, lines 47–57, trans. Metzger, Canon, Appendix IV; earlychristianwritings.com.

20. 20. Papyrus 46 (P. Chester Beatty II; P. Mich. inv. 6238), palaeographically dated c. 175–225 (commonly "c. 200"), contains the letters in the order Romans, Hebrews, 1–2 Corinthians, Ephesians, Galatians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 Thessalonians. Whether the codex originally included the Pastorals remains an open question: F. G. Kenyon calculated the missing final leaves could not hold them; Jeremy Duff, "P46 and the Pastorals: A Misleading Consensus?," New Testament Studies 44 (1998): 578–590, and Brent Nongbri have reopened the matter.

21. 21. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.25.1–2 (the homologoumena) and 3.3.5 ("Paul's fourteen epistles are well known and undisputed," with the caveat on Hebrews), NPNF, 2nd ser., 1, trans. McGiffert; newadvent.org.

22. 22. Athanasius, Festal Letter 39.5–6 (AD 367), NPNF, 2nd ser., 4; newadvent.org.

23. 23. Council of Laodicea, canon 60 (NPNF, 2nd ser., 14, trans. Henry Percival, who prints the editorial caveat that the canon "is of most questionable genuineness"—it is widely regarded as a later appendix to canon 59; the council itself met at some point between 343 and 381); newadvent.org. Councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397), whose canon of "the Epistles of Paul" passed into the African Code; Council of Trent, Session IV (8 April 1546), Decree Concerning the Canonical Scriptures.

24. 24. Erasmus, Annotationes on Ephesians (2nd ed., 1519): the style "differs so much from the other Epistles of Paul" that the letter could seem another's, "did not the heart and soul of the Pauline mind assert clearly his claim"; cited in Frank Thielman, Ephesians, Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2010), 7.

25. 25. Edward Evanson, The Dissonance of the Four Generally Received Evangelists (Ipswich, 1792), objecting that the letter presupposes readers Paul had never met, against the narrative of Acts 18–20. Harold Hoehner's history of the question begins with Evanson as the first outright denial: Hoehner, Ephesians: An Exegetical Commentary (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2002), 6–20.

26. 26. W. M. L. de Wette treated Ephesians as a wordy expansion (wortreiche Erweiterung) of Colossians; F. C. Baur, Paulus, der Apostel Jesu Christi (Stuttgart, 1845), confined the authentic Paul to Romans, 1–2 Corinthians, and Galatians.

27. 27. Ephesians 1:3–14; the count of roughly 200 words (202 in the standard critical text) and the caveat that "one sentence" partly reflects editorial punctuation are both commonplaces of the commentaries; see Benjamin L. Merkle, "What Is Distinct about the Theology of Ephesians?," Crossway (2016); crossway.org. On vocabulary: Ephesians contains about eighty words absent from the undisputed letters—roughly the same count as Galatians, whose authenticity no one disputes; see Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament, Anchor Bible Reference Library (New York: Doubleday, 1997), 628.

28. 28. C. Leslie Mitton, The Epistle to the Ephesians: Its Authorship, Origin and Purpose (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951): of the 1,570 words of Colossians, 34 percent reappear in Ephesians, and 26.5 percent of Ephesians is paralleled in Colossians (figures as reported in Andrew T. Lincoln, Ephesians, Word Biblical Commentary 42 [Dallas: Word, 1990], xlviii). The Tychicus commendation: Ephesians 6:21–22 // Colossians 4:7–8; thirty-two words in exact correspondence, the run broken only by Ephesians' "how I am doing" and Colossians' "and fellow slave"; see Hoehner, Ephesians, 33.

29. 29. Ephesians 1:22; 3:10, 21; 5:23, 24, 25, 27, 29, 32. The observation that ekklēsia in Ephesians is always the universal Church is standard across the critical literature.

30. 30. Edgar J. Goodspeed, The Meaning of Ephesians (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1933); John Knox, Philemon Among the Letters of Paul (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1935), identifying the collector with Onesimus, whom Ignatius (Eph. 1.3) greets as bishop of Ephesus; Goodspeed embraced the identification in The Key to Ephesians (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956).

31. 31. Hoehner, Ephesians, 9–20: of 279 authors (390 works) surveyed since 1792, only the 1970s (54 percent) and 1980s (58 percent) among the twentieth century's decades produced a majority of published works for pseudonymity, with the 1990s dividing evenly. Summarized in Peter S. Williamson, "Who Wrote Ephesians? An Online Postscript" (Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture, Baker Academic); catholiccommentaryonsacredscripture.com.

32. 32. Markus Barth, Ephesians, 2 vols., Anchor Bible 34–34A (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974); Hoehner, Ephesians (2002); Frank Thielman, Ephesians, BECNT (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2010); Clinton E. Arnold, Ephesians, Zondervan Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010).

33. 33. On secretaries: Romans 16:22 (Tertius); Jerome Murphy-O'Connor, Paul the Letter-Writer (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1995), arguing that secretarial practice undercuts the style argument. John Paul II, in the theology-of-the-body catecheses, noted in passing the working hypothesis "that St. Paul entrusted some concepts to his secretary, who then developed and finished them": Man and Woman He Created Them, trans. Michael Waldstein (Boston: Pauline Books & Media, 2006), 466n.

34. 34. Brown, Introduction, 629: "the evidence has pushed 70 to 80 percent of critical scholarship to reject" Pauline composition.

35. 35. Council of Trent, Session IV (8 April 1546), Decree Concerning the Canonical Scriptures (Denzinger–Hünermann 1502–1503), listing fourteen epistles of Paul including Ephesians.

36. 36. Ephesians 1:22–23 (NABRE).

37. 37. Ephesians 2:20 (NABRE); the note allows "cornerstone or keystone" for the Greek.

38. 38. Ephesians 4:4–6 (NABRE). The NABRE note observes that the seven unities "reflect the triune structure of later creeds in reverse"—Spirit, Lord, Father.

39. 39. Second Vatican Council, Lumen Gentium (21 November 1964), 6–7, citing Ephesians 5:24–29 (the spotless spouse), 2:19–22 (the temple), 1:22–23 and 4:11–16 (the body); vatican.va. Cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church 796 on the bridal image; vatican.va.

40. 40. Ephesians 2:8–9 (NABRE). The NABRE note on 2:1–10 remarks that these terms "describe salvation in the way Paul elsewhere speaks of justification: by grace, through faith, the gift of God, not from works; cf. Gal 2:16–21; Rom 3:24–28."

41. 41. Second Council of Orange (529), canon 5, quoting Philippians 1:6 and Ephesians 2:8 against the view that "the beginning of faith and the very desire for faith" belong to us by nature; trans. in the Internet Medieval Sourcebook; sourcebooks.fordham.edu. Cf. CCC 1996–1998 on grace as "the free and undeserved help that God gives us."

42. 42. Ephesians 2:10 (NABRE).

43. 43. Ephesians 5:21 (NABRE).

44. 44. NABRE note on Ephesians 5:21–6:9, on the household code's "initial principle of subordination to one another under Christ, thus effectively undermining exclusive claims to domination by one party."

45. 45. Ephesians 5:25 (NABRE), with 5:26–27.

46. 46. Ephesians 5:31–32 (NABRE), quoting Genesis 2:24. Greek: to mystērion touto mega estin; Vulgate: sacramentum hoc magnum est.

47. 47. Council of Trent, Session XXIV (11 November 1563), Doctrine on the Sacrament of Matrimony, trans. James Waterworth: Christ "merited for us by His passion" the grace that perfects natural love, "as the Apostle Paul intimates, saying: Husbands love your wives, as Christ also loved the Church... adding shortly after, This is a great sacrament, but I speak in Christ and in the Church"; papalencyclicals.net.

48. 48. The old Catholic Encyclopedia states the exegetical point candidly: Paul "does not speak of marriage as a true sacrament in explicit and immediately apparent fashion, but only in such wise that the doctrine must be deduced from his words," which is why Trent chose the modest verb innuit; "Sacrament of Marriage," Catholic Encyclopedia (1910); newadvent.org.

49. 49. CCC 1602, 1616–1617; vatican.va.

50. 50. In the Order of Celebrating Matrimony, the Ephesians reading is offered as Ephesians 5:2a, 21–33 (long form) or 5:2a, 25–32 (short form). In the Sunday lectionary, Ephesians is read semicontinuously on the Fifteenth through Twenty-First Sundays in Ordinary Time of Year B, where the Twenty-First Sunday likewise offers 5:21–32 or the shorter 5:2a, 25–32.

51. 51. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Ephesians, Argument, in NPNF, 1st ser., 13 (Oxford translation, rev. Gross Alexander); newadvent.org. The set runs to twenty-four homilies.

52. 52. Jerome, Apology Against Rufinus 1.21, NPNF, 2nd ser., 3: "On the Epistle to the Ephesians Origen wrote three books... These I partly translated, partly adapted," quoting his own commentary preface; newadvent.org. Origen's surviving fragments and Jerome's commentary are translated together in Ronald E. Heine, The Commentaries of Origen and Jerome on St Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

53. 53. Marius Victorinus's commentaries—the earliest surviving Latin commentaries on Paul—cover Galatians, Ephesians, and Philippians; see Stephen A. Cooper, Marius Victorinus' Commentary on Galatians, Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Thomas Aquinas, Super Epistolam ad Ephesios lectura, in the Super Epistolas S. Pauli lectura; Latin-English text at aquinas.cc.

54. 54. Luther, Preface to the New Testament (September 1522): John's Gospel and first epistle, Paul's epistles, "especially Romans, Galatians, and Ephesians," and 1 Peter are "the books that show you Christ"; the passage stood in the September Testament's closing section and was dropped from editions after 1537 (LW 35:361–362).

55. 55. Thomas M'Crie, Life of John Knox, 5th ed. (Edinburgh, 1831), drawing on the contemporary account of Knox's secretary Richard Bannatyne: during his final illness Knox had read to him daily John 17, Isaiah 53, and a chapter of Ephesians, with "some of Calvin's French sermons on the Ephesians"; on 24 November 1572, "he said to his wife, 'Go, read where I cast my first anchor;' upon which she read the seventeenth chapter of John's Gospel, and afterwards a part of Calvin's sermons on the Ephesians." Calvin's Ephesians commentary appeared in 1548 (with Galatians, Philippians, and Colossians); the forty-eight sermons were preached at Geneva in 1558–59.