Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/481

Rh ETHESIANS 461 this cause I bow niy knees unto the Father from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named &quot; (iii. 14, 15). It has been customary to say that in the church addressed the Gentile element prevailed, and that hence the wants of the Gentiles are mainly before the writer. But, in fact, there is no trace of Jewish readers in the epistle,-&quot; not even iu ii. 15,&quot; and Dr Davidson, observing this, not unnaturally grounds upon it the argument that, addressed to the church at Ephesus, it must be later than St Paul s time, because the apostle could not have left the Jewish Christians unnoticed (Intr., i, p. 379). May not the true conclusion be one of an altogether different character 1 that our epistle to the Ephesians was not addressed to a cliurch at all. There was probably no church at that time in Asia composed of Gentile converts alone. All of them were mixed communities. The tone of the epistle to the Colossians shows us that the errors prevailing in Colossae were of a Judseo-Gnostic character, and that the most powerful element in that church was Jewish. It is not an unfair inference that this must also have been the case in the neighbouring churches of Laodicea, Hierapolis, and Ephesus. How then could St Paul, writ ing to any one of these churches, speak to it as if it were wholly Gentile, as if the Jewish element had no existence in it ? The true explanation seems to be, that we have in the Ephesian epistle not an epistle to a church ; that we have an appeal to Gentile Christians as such ; that the apostle is thinking of his readers in that capacity, and not as a merely constituent part of any local church whatever. 2. A second point claiming consideration is, that we have i as no small reason to suppose that &quot; the epistle from ifrom Laodicea&quot; of Col. iv. 16 is that before us. The authority ricea. O f distinguished critics can be quoted for this view (Grotius, Wetstein, Hammond, Mill, Canon Lightfoot, &c.) ; and it is not to be regarded as mere conjecture. We have seen that Marcion, as the result of diligent inquiry, had come to the conclusion that the epistle to the Ephesians ought to have borne the name of the epistle to the Laodiceans. We know also that a passage quoted by him from the latter is found in the former (see in Tischendorf s New Test. Eph. i. ]), thus identifying the two epistles by their contents as well as by their titles. We must give some weight to the improbability that an epistle to which St Paul attached such importance that he directed it to be passed on from one church to another would be lost ; and, when we put all these circumstances together, there seems every reason to think that &quot; the epistle from Laodicea &quot; is no other than our epistle to the Ephesians. On these grounds, then, rests the suggestion which we offer. 1 Adopting the idea that the epistle to the Ephesians is &quot;the epistle from Laodicea&quot; of Col. iv. 16, it seems to with Meyer, Schenkel (in loc.), and probably Ewald (Geschicht-, vii. p. 243, &c), to apply to individual Christian churches as dis tinguished from the Catholic or universal church, embracing them all in one great whole. The &quot;buildings&quot; thought of are not simply numerically different from one another ; they are different in kind. They may be heavenly or earthly, Jewish or Gentile, &c. As such they are brought into Christ, and then they become parts of one holy temple in Him. The same remark applies to the &quot; every family &quot; of iii. 15. 1 Since this article was written, the writer s attention has been called to the fact that Ewald, in his Sicben ^cndschreiben d. N. T., 1870, has adopted the same view of the destination of the epistle. He had not done so in his Geschichte d. V. /., and the writer was not aware of the fact. Ewald, at the same time, attributes the epistle to a disciple and friend of the apostle, writing 70-80 A.D. He urges that St Paul himself never wrote except to distinct churches (p. 157). But that very circumstance would surely have led any one writing in his name to adhere to the apostle s practice, and to avoid exposing hia epistle to the suspicion which a departure from it could not fail to awaken. Why, too, if the writer adopted from Col. iv. 7 the idea of tending the epistle by Tychicus, does he not adopt from Col. i. 1 the idea of uniting Timothy with himself iu the salutation ? us that it was not intended to be an epistle to the church of the last-named city. It was an epistle to the Gentile converts, as such, in the first place of Laodicea, in the second place of Colossje. The view now taken derives much confirmation from the Confir- light thrown by it upon some of the difficulties connected mation with the epistle which no theory yet proposed has succeeded of view in removing. (1.) It at once explains the want of those taken&amp;gt; local references which we should naturally expect in a letter written to an organized community; while, at the same time, the persons for whom the letter is intended are a sufficiently limited class to justify the expressions of i. 15 and vi. 22. (2.) It explains the absence of any special designation in i. 1, and relieves us from the necessity of supposing that there was a blank space left in that verse. St Paul could hardly have inserted the name of a town withput leading to the false impression that he was writing to its church. (3.) It explains the fact that the name of a place should have been permitted to find its way into i. 1, where no name originally stood. Had the epistle been in tended for any church or churches, they, even though not inserting their own names, would not readily have per mitted the insertion of another. They would have claimed their own epistle. General Gentile readers, as not organized, could not so easily do so. (4.) It explains the remarkable expression of Col. iv. 16, &quot; the epistle from Laodicea.&quot; We might have expected &quot; the epistle to the Laodiceans.&quot; But what had been written was not an epistle to the Laodiceans, and therefore it is not styled one. It was an epistle to a particular section of Christians both in Laodicea and Colossre, and only sent to Laodicea first. Hence the designation, &quot; the epistle from Laodicea.&quot; (5.) It explains what has been found so inexplicable (David son, Intr., i. p. 381 ; Harless, Ephes. Brief, p. 40), that, writing both to the Colossians and the Laodiceans by the same messenger, the apostle should include the brethren in Laodicea in a salutation of the epistle to Colossae, and should enjoin an epistle meant for the Colossians to be read to Laodiceans who had one of their own by the same hand. He was not writing to the church at Laodicea ; therefore let the church there have both its letter and its salutations through the neighbouring church to which he was writing at the moment. (6.) It explains the absence from the epistle of all allusion to doctrinal error on the part of its recipients. We see from the Colossian epistle how deep was the hold of such errors at ColosscC. In any circumstances it would hardly be possible to imagine that similar errors did not exist both at Laodicea and Ephesus ; and this conclusion as to the first of these two cities is in the present instance confirmed by the fact that the epistle to the Colossians, filled with controversy as to doctrinal errors, was directed to be read there. Again, therefore, their being left un noticed in our so-called epistle to the Ephesians seems to be a proof that St Paul is not writing to the church of the city addressed by him. Had he been doing so he would naturally have taken its whole condition into account ; but he is dealing with one portion of its community alone, and with that portion mainly, if not only, upon one point of interest. (7 ) It explains even to some extent the difficult words of i. 1, rots ayt ots rots ovo-tv /cat Trio-rots cv Xptcrr&amp;lt;p b/o-oO. There appears to be but one meaning of which these words are susceptible, &quot; To the saints existing and faithful in Christ Jesus.&quot; All other renderings proposed either do injustice to the Greek, or make the apostle say what it is not possible he should have said in conformity with his general teaching. This, the rendering of Or i gen, is natural and idiomatic. Its peculiarity is of course that it makes the substantive verb of the original more than a simple copula. It makes it a distinct predicate, pointing out a characteristic of the condition of those addressed.