CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 GIFT OF 
 
 Alfred C. Barnes 
 

 Date Due 
 
 
 ISWH 1 ( 
 
 1 1964^ 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 PRINTED IN 
 
 u. ». «. 
 
 (Of "^' 
 
 NO. 23233 J 
 
 Cornell University Library 
 BS2650 .H82 
 
 Proleaomena to St. Pa£s Epistles to th 
 
 olln 
 
 3 1924 029 292 871 
 

PROLEGOMENA 
 
 TO ST PAUL'S EPISTLES TO 
 
 THE ROMANS AND THE EPHESIANS 
 
«- 
 
PROLEGOMENA 
 
 TO ST PAUL'S EPISTLES TO 
 
 THE ROMANS 
 AND THE EPHESIANS 
 
 BY THE LATE 
 
 F. J. A. HORT, D.D., D.C.L., LL.D., 
 
 LADY MARGARET PROFESSOR OF DIVINITY 
 IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE 
 
 Hontion 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 AND NEW YORK 
 
 189s 
 
 5 
 [A/l Rights reserved} / ,^' ■' ' } } 
 
 r 
 

 PRINTED BY J. & C. F. CLAY, 
 AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS. 
 
 '1U.-^(^.'J: ^-L^^ VS-.Y^ ^ 
 
 0^3 
 
NOTE. 
 
 THESE Lectures introductory to the Epistles to 
 the Romans and Ephesians are published with 
 the fewest possible variations from the manuscript of 
 the Lectures as delivered. It will be obvious that 
 they do not cover the whole ground, as laid out by 
 Dr Hort. But so far as they go, they clearly form 
 an invaluable contribution to the study of those 
 Epistles. This will justify their publication in their 
 fragmentary condition. 
 
 The task of editing has been confined to the 
 verification of quotations and the supply of headings 
 to the pages and chapters. These have been framed 
 as closely as possible on the phraseology of the text 
 itself 
 
 It is hoped that some specimens of commentary 
 on these Epistles may be published with other Adver- 
 saria in another volume. 
 
 Easter, 1895. 
 
PI Cornell University 
 f) Library 
 
 The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029292871 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Epistle to the Romans i 
 
 Epistle to the Ephesians . . ':. . 63 
 Abstract of Lectures on Ephesians . .185 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 TO THE 
 
 EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS 
 
 H. R. 
 
THE EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 
 
 [EASTER TERM, 1886.] 
 
 I PROPOSE this term to lecture on the Epistle to 
 the Romans, in itself an enormous subject. To deal 
 properly with it would need not merely a longer term 
 than this, but many terms. Even however in this 
 unusually short term I hope that by rigorous 
 selection of topics we may be able to get some 
 substantial hold of the Epistle ; and, owing to the 
 peculiar position which it holds among St Paul's 
 Epistles, even a very imperfect study of it will yield 
 more instruction than a somewhat less imperfect 
 study of, I believe we may say, any other single 
 Epistle of St Paul would have done. 
 
 In this case, perhaps more than usual, the benefit 
 to be derived from attending lectures must be pro- 
 portional to the time and care spent upon the subject 
 by members of the class in private work. The 
 utmost that a lecturer can do is to supply suggestions 
 which can be verified and followed up at home. 
 
 I — 2 
 
4 THE WRITER, READERS, DATE, 
 
 One question that often has to be discussed 
 can here be dismissed at once — that of the author- 
 ship. There is practically no dispute among 
 different schools (unless it be in Holland) that 
 St Paul wrote this Epistle, or at least the greater 
 part of it : some would except the last chapter, or the 
 last two : but the bulk of the Epistle may be treated 
 as confessedly written by the Apostle whose name it 
 bears. So also as to its readers : no one doubts that 
 they were Romans and Roman Christians. On the 
 other hand there has been and is much discussion 
 whether these Roman Christians were exclusively 
 Jewish Christians, or exclusively Gentile Christians, 
 or both the one and the other ; and this question is 
 connected with another as to the origin of the Roman 
 Church, and its characteristics at the time when 
 St Paul wrote. 
 
 The fifteenth chapter, if part of the original 
 Epistle, fixes the date at a glance: but even in its 
 absence there is hardly room for doubt. The Epistle, 
 that is, was written at Corinth towards the close of 
 what is called St Paul's Third Missionary Journey, 
 shortly before he sailed for Jerusalem to make the 
 visit which led to that long imprisonment described 
 in the later chapters of the Acts. According to the 
 reckoning now most generally received, this would be 
 in the spring of the year 58, or possibly the preceding 
 winter, when Nero had just completed the third year 
 of his reign. This absolute or numerical date is 
 
PURPOSE, S 
 
 however of less consequence than the relative date, 
 that is, the place of the Epistle in St Paul's writings, 
 and its place in his life. 
 
 The purpose of the Epistle must next be con- 
 sidered. Was it simply polemical.' Was it an 
 abstract and as it were independent dogmatic 
 treatise .' Had it any further special intention .? 
 These questions take us into the heart of the 
 Epistle itself, and lead the way to a consideration 
 of its plan and structure. That the problem is 
 not very simple or easy may be reasonably in- 
 ferred from the extraordinary variety of opinion 
 which has prevailed and still prevails about it. 
 But it is worthy of any pains that can be taken 
 for its solution ; for so long as the purpose of the 
 Epistle remains obscure, the main drift of its doctrinal 
 teaching must remain obscure also ; and though there 
 is much Apostolic Christianity which is not expressly 
 set forth in the Epistle to the Romans, yet that 
 Epistle holds such a place among the authoritative 
 documents of the faith, that any grave misunder- 
 standing respecting it is likely to lead to misunder- 
 standing of Apostolic Christianity. If we look back 
 on the history of doctrine, we can see that in the case 
 of this Epistle, as of all the larger writings of the New 
 Testament, there are considerable elements which 
 have never yet been duly recognised and appro- 
 priated. But it is equally true that portions of 
 the Epistle to the Romans have had an enormous 
 
6 AND TEACHING OF THE EPISTLE. 
 
 influence on theological thought. In conjunction with 
 the preparatory Epistle to the Galatians this Epistle 
 is the primary source of Augustinian Theology, itself 
 renewing its strength from time to time, and more 
 especially in various shapes in the age of the Refor- 
 mation. We have therefore every reason for trying to 
 gain the most comprehensive view that we can of 
 what St Paul really meant, and in so doing I think 
 we shall find that, as usual, the worst stumbling blocks 
 belong not to the Apostolic teaching itself but to 
 arbitrary limitations of it. 
 
 The various points which we have seen to require 
 discussion under the head of Introduction are all 
 closely connected together; so closely that some 
 repetitions will be unavoidable. But for the sake of 
 clearness they must be considered separately. 
 
I. 
 
 THE ROMAN CHURCH. 
 A. 
 
 INFORMATION FROM THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 GENERALLY. 
 
 First, the Roman Church and its origin. At the 
 outset we have to notice the prominent negative fact 
 that it had never been visited by St Paul ; much less 
 had it been founded by him. We shall have to return 
 to this fact presently to bring out its influence on St 
 Paul's thoughts in connexion with the purpose of the 
 Epistle: but for the moment it concerns us only as 
 affecting the Romans themselves. Neither here nor 
 anywhere else in the New Testament have we the 
 smallest hint as to the origin of this great CWrch ; 
 and practically we are left to conjecture respecting it. 
 After a while indeed it was said that St Peter was the 
 founder. He was represented as the first bishop of 
 Rome, and was assigned an episcopate of twenty-five 
 or twenty years, reaching back almost to the beginning 
 of the reign of Claudius. Possibly, as has been sug- 
 gested, this date may be due to a combination of the 
 statement of Justing repeated by Irenaeus, that Simon 
 
 1 Justin M. Apol. i. 26 ; Iren. i. 23. 1 (ed. Stieren). 
 
8 ORIGIN NOT APOSTOLIC 
 
 Magus was worshipped at Rome in the time of Clau- 
 dius, with the tradition^ that St Peter encountered 
 Simon Magus at Rome. However this may be, the 
 whole story of St Peter's early connexion with Rome 
 is a manifest error or fiction ; and all that we know 
 on good authority respecting the early spread of the 
 Gospel is adverse to the belief that the Roman Church 
 was founded by any apostle or envoy of the apostles ; 
 nor is it likely that had such been the case there 
 would have been no trace of it in the Epistle itself. 
 St Paul's own progress towards the work was quite 
 tentative. It was only the vision of the man of 
 Acts xvi. Macedonia that brought him over into Europe in the 
 ^" first instance. When he wrote the fifteenth chapter 
 
 Rom. XV. his labours had extended as far as Illyricum, but still 
 '^' on the Eastern side of the Hadriatic, and there is no 
 
 sign that he deliberately sent pioneers before him. 
 But when he wrote, the Roman Church cannot have 
 been of recent foundation, for he had himself been 
 Rom. XV. for some considerable number of years desiring to see 
 it. Hardly more than six years seem to have passed 
 since he had first entered Europe: so that the founda- 
 tion of the Church must in all probability have taken 
 place in an earlier state of things. 
 
 How early, it is impossible to say. The inter- 
 course between the great Jewish community at Rome 
 and the mother city Jerusalem must have provided a 
 
 1 Euseb. H. E. ii. 14; Hippolytus, Ref. Haer. vi. 20: cf. Lightfoot, 
 Clement, vol. ii. p. 491 (ed. 1890). 
 
 23 
 
BUT EARLY AND GRADUAL. 9 
 
 channel by which the Christian message might be 
 carried to Rome in the first years after the Ascension. 
 The allusion to Roman sojourners at Jerusalem as 
 present on the first Christian Day of Pentecost Acts ii. 10. 
 is a confirmation from the New Testament of what 
 is sufficiently attested from other sources. But 
 whether as a matter of fact the Christian faith did 
 make its way to Rome during that period is more 
 than we can tell. The story of Clement, as told in 
 both the extant forms of the Clementine romance', 
 makes Barnabas bring the Gospel to Rome as early 
 as the reign of Tiberius : but this is a mere fable, 
 probably originating towards the end of the second 
 century. It was probably by a process of quiet 
 and as it were fortuitous filtration that the Roman 
 Church was formed ; and the process is more likely 
 to have repeated itself on different occasions than 
 to have taken plaCe once for all. An obscure and 
 gradual origin best suits the manner of St Paul's 
 language. Andronicus and Junia (or Junias), St Rom. xvi. 
 Paul's kinsmen and fellow prisoners, are said to 
 have been Christians before his conversion : but we 
 cannot tell whether they originally belonged to 
 Rome, or took up their abode there at some later 
 time. We are on somewhat firmer ground in respect 
 of Aquila and Prisca (or Priscilla), who stand at the 
 head of the persons saluted in the sixteenth chapter, 
 
 1 Clementine Homilies, i. 9, Recognitions, i. 6, 7 (Cotelier, Patres 
 Afostolici, 1700). 
 
lo AQUILA AND PRISCILLA 
 
 and are mentioned in very emphatic terms. Aquila 
 was a Jew, by birth a native of Pontus (i.e. probably 
 Sinope, hke the later Aquila the translator), and ap- 
 parently settled at Rome. He first comes before us 
 as having left Italy with his wife Priscilla because 
 Acts xviii. Claudius had decreed that all the Jews should depart 
 from Rome, and having come to Corinth shortly 
 before St Paul went there from Athens. St Luke 
 does not give the least intimation as to the time 
 when Aquila and Priscilla became Christians. On the 
 whole it seems most probable that their conversion 
 preceded their acquaintance with St Paul, and that 
 they had felt Claudius' decree to be as hostile to their 
 stay at Rome as it was to that of unbelieving Jews. 
 It is difficult otherwise to see how St Paul could have 
 at once joined himself to them, and wrought with 
 Aquila at the same employment, as the very next 
 verse describes. Twice more in the same chapter we 
 hear of them, and then they disappear from the Acts. 
 Acts xviii. They accompany St Paul to Ephesus when he leaves 
 Acts xviii. Corinth, and at Ephesus they correct and enlarge 
 Apollos' imperfect knowledge of Christian doctrine. 
 They are either still at Ephesus or again at Ephesus 
 about three years later, when the first Epistle to the 
 T Cor. xvi. Corinthians was written, and at a much later time 
 '^' they are once more at Ephesus when the second 
 
 2 Tim. iv. Epistle to Timothy was written. In the interval, a 
 little less than a year after the writing of the first 
 Epistle to the Corinthians, comes this reference in the 
 
PROMINENT MEMBERS OF ROMAN CHURCH, ii 
 
 sixteenth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, which 
 harmonises with St Luke's original account, for it 
 was natural enough that Aquila and Priscilla should 
 return to Rome when it had become safe to do so. 
 If Rome had not been their usual place of residence, 
 but they had merely paid it a passing visit, it is not 
 likely that St Luke would have gone out of his way 
 to speak of the edict of Claudius, in order to account 
 for their being at Corinth when St Paul went there. 
 It is of course equally clear that they were much at 
 Ephesus. We should probably understand their 
 movements better if we knew more about the 
 occupation which Aquila and St Paul alike followed, 
 that of (TK.T]vo'rroiol, probably rightly translated ' tent- Acts xviii. 
 makers'; most of what is found on the subject in ^' 
 modern books being pure guess-work, with hardly 
 any foundation of ancient evidence. It is likely 
 enough that St Paul's special interest in the Christian 
 community at Rome, though hardly perhaps his 
 knowledge of it, dates from his acquaintance with 
 Aquila and Priscilla at Corinth. This was somewhere 
 about six years before the writing of the Epistle to 
 the Romans, and that interval would perhaps suffice 
 to justify his language about having desired to visit 
 them onto iKavStv irmp (a rather vague phrase, not so Rom. xv. 
 strong as the ctTro -jroWaov iroov which was easily sub- ^^' 
 stituted for it). There is nothing to shew that Aquila 
 and Priscilla were in any sense the founders of the 
 Roman Church: about that we know nothing: but 
 
12 P RISC A OR P RISC ILL A, 
 
 the position which they hold in the sixteenth chapter 
 of our Epistle could hardly have been given them 
 if their position in the Roman Church itself had not 
 been a specially prominent one, even as it was in 
 St Paul's own previous thoughts about the Roman 
 Church. 
 
 In this connexion a suggestion made by Dean 
 
 Plumptre in a paper on Aquila and Priscilla in his 
 
 ingenious and interesting ' Biblical Studies ' deserves 
 
 special attention. It has often been noticed that the 
 
 Actsxviii. wife Prisca is named before the husband Aquila in 
 
 Rom. xvi. fo""^ "^"^ °f t'^^ ^i^ places where both are named : 
 
 3- . the fifth passage is no instance to the contrary, on 
 
 19- account of the structure of the sentence : the only true 
 
 Acts xviii. ...,- ., ,^.,. 
 
 2. exception is in the first tpistle to the Corinthians. It 
 
 I Cor. XVI. j^^g itQQTi the fashion to suppose that Prisca was given 
 this precedence on account of her higher zeal or 
 devotion, of which however the Bible tells us nothing. 
 Dr Plumptre suggests with much greater probability 
 that she was a Roman lady, of higher rank than her 
 husband, and that her position in Rome enabled her 
 to render special services to the Church. On this 
 point St Luke's testimony is simply neutral. He 
 does not say that Priscilla was a Jewess, as is often 
 assumed, or that she was of Pontus : these statements 
 are made of Aquila alone, and then it is added that 
 on his departure from Italy he was accompanied by 
 his wife. Her name with St Paul (according to the 
 true text) is always Prisca, with St Luke Priscilla : 
 
HER SOCIAL POSITION 13 
 
 both forms were doubtless in use. Dr Plumptre 
 justly observes that Priscus was an illustrious and 
 ancient Roman name ; and it may be added that it 
 was borne by many in the age of St Paul. Prisca 
 may of course have been of servile or libertine origin, 
 and derived her name from the household to which 
 she belonged : but it may also have been her own 
 family name. The supposition here made agrees 
 with other known facts. There is good reason to 
 believe that the superstitio externa for which " Pom- 
 ponia Graecina insignis femina ^ " was accused about 
 the time when the Epistle to the Romans was written 
 was the Christian faith; and the same is true of the 
 charge on which Domitian's cousins, Flavius Clemens 
 and his wife Flavia Domitilla, were condemned '. 
 
 Another coincidence corroborative of Dr Plump- 
 tre's suggestion seems to have escaped his notice. 
 Within the last few years it has become clear that 
 during the ages of persecution the Christians at 
 Rome derived great help from immunities connected 
 with cemeteries which they were practically able to 
 use as their own, and that this free use of cemeteries 
 chiefly came to them through the connexion of the 
 cemeteries with important Roman families in which 
 Christians had gained adherents. 
 
 ' Tac. Ann. xiii. 32, cf. Lightfoot, Philippians, p. 21 (4th edition), 
 Clement, i. p. 31 ff. (ed. 1890). 
 
 " Lightfoot, Phil. p. 21 ff. (4th edition). Clement, i. pp. 33 ff. 
 (ed. 1890). 
 
14 AND CONNEXIONS. 
 
 Thus one, which was called the Coemeterium Do- 
 mitillae, has been shown with great probability to 
 have belonged to this very Flavia Domitilla who was 
 banished as a Christian \ Now another cemetery, 
 or (to use the popular word) 'catacomb', bearing 
 marks that, in the opinion of the best judges, shew 
 it to be one of the most ancient of all, probably 
 dating from the first century^', was known from 
 a very early time as the Coemeterium Priscillae. 
 The Roman traditions contain no reference to the 
 name as belonging to the cemetery : but it seems 
 likely enough that it came from the wife of 
 Aquila. One tradition of no authority in itself, 
 makes the cemetery to have belonged to Pudens^ 
 1 Tim. iv. named in the second Epistle to Timothy ; and 
 another makes Priscilla to be the mother of Pudens*. 
 Thus indirectly tradition, valeat quantum, affords 
 some confirmation of a supposition which has been 
 suggested by other considerations. 
 
 If such was the social position of Prisca or 
 Priscilla, fresh light is thrown thereby on the 
 prominence given to both her and her husband in 
 the sixteenth chapter of this Epistle, and on their 
 special fitness for being the chief connecting link 
 
 ^ Lightfoot, Clement, i. p. 35 ff. (1890). 
 
 2 Kraus, Roma- Soil. 71 f., 3845., 640 (2nd edition, 1879); Real- 
 Encycl. ii. 108 b. 
 
 3 Kraus, R.E. I.e., cf. R. Sott. 71. 
 ^ Kraus, R. Sott. 549. 
 
ROMAN CHRISTIANITY NOT ANTIP A ULINE, 15 
 
 between St Paul and the Roman Church before 
 he visited Rome himself. 
 
 Next, these relations between St Paul and Aquila 
 and Priscilla have an important bearing on the much 
 debated question as to the nature of the Christianity 
 which prevailed among the Roman Christians. But 
 first we must look back a little. If the new faith was 
 carried direct to Rome at a very early time, say 
 before the preaching of St Stephen, it would naturally 
 bear the stamp of Palestine and be marked by the 
 limitations of a state of things in which the transitory 
 nature of Judaism was not yet clearly recognised. If 
 however some time had passed before the Gospel 
 reached Rome, or if it arrived there not direct from 
 Palestine but through some intermediate channel, 
 Jewish characteristics are likely to have been, at least, 
 less strongly impressed upon it : such would be the 
 natural result alike of the general influence of the Jews 
 of the Dispersion, and of the Hellenistic movement at 
 Jerusalem itself which we associate with the name of St 
 Stephen. Nay even if the earliest Roman Christianity 
 was of a strictly Judaic type, there was no reason why 
 it should not in due time be modified by the influence 
 of the progress which was going on in the East, pro- 
 vided that the communications with the Christians of 
 the East were continued or renewed : we have no right 
 to call it unnatural either that the old characteristics 
 should be stiffly maintained, or that they should 
 gradually yield to new influences. Again, a third 
 
i6 AS SHOWN FROM GENERAL PROBABILITIES 
 
 state of things took its beginning when St Paul went 
 forth from Antioch to preach the Gospel to the 
 heathen. From this time forward the labours of St 
 Paul himself and his associates, first in Asia Minor 
 and then in Macedonia and Greece, must have started 
 many little waves, as it were, of Christian movement, 
 some of which could hardly fail to reach as far 
 as Rome. The Christianity they carried would as 
 a matter of course be the Christianity of St Paul 
 himself, so far as it was understood by the bearers of 
 it : and, as in the former supposed case, if it found at 
 Rome a pre-existing Christianity of more Jewish type, 
 the old might either pass into the new or remain 
 unchanged. There was no necessity or likelihood that 
 any violent antagonism should arise between them, 
 unless a fresh element should be introduced in the 
 shape of Jewish emissaries deliberately sent from the 
 East to counterwork St Paul. Such would certainly 
 be a possible contingency : but what evidence we 
 have is not favourable to it. The words spoken to 
 St Paul by the Jews at Rome in the last chapter of 
 Actsxxviii. the Acts, the genuineness of which I cannot see any 
 sufficient reason to doubt, render it virtually incredible 
 that only a few years before attempts had been made 
 at Rome to oppose St Paul and his Gospel in the 
 Jewish interest. 
 
 But at this point his relations with Aquila and 
 Prisca come in with special force. Their close 
 association with St Paul would of itself have been 
 
AND THE POSITION OF AQUILA &- PRISCILLA, 17 
 
 almost decisive for the Pauline character of their 
 Christianity. But it so happens that the chapter of 
 the Acts which first introduces them exhibits them Acts : 
 also at Ephesus in a light which leaves no room 
 for doubt. It was as a Christian that Apollos came 
 to Ephesus (he had been KaTtjxn^t.kvo'; T-qv oSbv 
 Tov Kvplov), and iSlBacrKev dtcpi.^m to, irepl tov 'Irjaov, 
 while he was familiar (eVto-Ta/iei/os) with the baptism of 
 John only : and this imperfection in his knowledge of 
 the faith, however we may understand the terms in 
 which it is described, was corrected by Aquila and 
 Prisca, who expounded to him the way of God more 
 exactly (aKpi^iaTepov). It is incredible that St Luke 
 would have used this language if their own belief had 
 fallen short of the standard of growth represented by 
 St Paul's Gbspel. Now it would not be safe to argue 
 backwards from this fact to the time when Aquila and 
 Prisca were at Rome before they knew St Paul. 
 Their Christianity at that time, on the assumption 
 that they were at that time Christians, might be 
 either Pauline or not, for doubtless intercourse with 
 St Paul at Corinth during that year and a half would 
 have sufficed to bring them to his point of view if 
 , they did not occupy it already. But we may safely 
 draw a conclusion as to the time subsequent to that 
 intercourse at Corinth. The Christianity which they 
 maintained in person at Rome when they were there, 
 and which they encouraged in others at Rome with 
 whom they held communications when themselves at 
 H. R. 2 
 
1 8 THOUGH PROBABLY COMPREHENSIVE. 
 
 Ephesus or elsewhere at a distance, must, we may- 
 be sure, have been such as St Paul would have 
 approved. This does not exclude the possibility 
 that older and cruder forms of the faith still survived 
 at Rome: it does exclude the supposition that the 
 Epistle was intended to introduce a new doctrine 
 hitherto strange to the Roman Christians. 
 
 This is all, I believe, that can be safely laid down 
 respecting the probable or possible conditions under 
 which the Church of Rome was founded, and under 
 which it had lived up to the time when St Paul's 
 Epistle was written. As regards the nature of Roman 
 Christianity at that time, looking for the moment 
 exclusively at these probabilities as to the origin arid 
 history of the Roman Church, and at the relations in 
 which Prisca and Aquila stood to St Paul on the 
 one hand and to the Roman Church on the other, we 
 first find reason to believe, that Pauline Christianity 
 had at least a firm footing there and not, apparently, 
 on hostile terms ; and next, it is probable, rather on 
 general grounds than on definite historical evidence, 
 that Jewish types of Christianity, one or more, had 
 likewise their representatives. 
 
THE ROMAN CHURCH. 
 B. 
 
 INTERNAL EVIDENCE OF THE EPISTLE. 
 
 We must now give a little attention to the evidence, 
 as to the character of the Roman Church, which- the 
 Epistle itself contains, partly in its language, partly 
 in such inferences as we may be able to draw from 
 peculiarities and limitations in the subjects which it 
 treats and the arguments which it uses. Critical 
 discussion of the problem has run through a curious 
 history, into the minute details of which however it 
 would take us too long to enter. The old view, 
 suggested by certain conspicuous phrases, was that 
 the Epistle was addressed to heathen converts. 
 Nearly half a century ago a complete change was 
 brought about by one of the most brilliant and most 
 perverse of critics, Ferdinand Baur. He rendered a 
 great service to the criticism of this as of other books 
 of the New Testament by insisting strongly on the 
 need of reading it in connexion with the movements 
 and controversies of the age in which it was written : 
 but unfortunately his own view of the Apostolic Age 
 was full of exaggeration and distortion ; and thus the 
 
 2 — 2 
 
20 THE READERS. 
 
 misreading of history produced a misreading of litera- 
 ture, which for the moment undid the salutary effects 
 of reading history and literature together. Hence the 
 Roman Church addressed in the Epistle was declared 
 to be a Church of Jewish Christians. This paradox 
 was for many years accepted by leading critics of 
 very different schools, though sometimes with more or 
 less modification and dilution. Ten years ago how- 
 ever an essay by another great critic, Weizsacker', 
 caused an important reaction. The error introduced 
 through an appeal to external history was corrected 
 through an appeal to a better understanding of ex- 
 ternal history. It was urged that there was no ground 
 for assuming, as practically was done, that all Christ- 
 ians of that date were members either of a definitely 
 Pauline party, or of a definitely Judaizing party hostile 
 to St Paul and his doctrines. It was more reasonable 
 to suppose that multitudes of Christians occupied a 
 virtually neutral ground, neither following the stricter 
 precepts of the Jewish Law, nor making it a matter of 
 principle to treat the Law as no longer binding. The 
 existence of large bodies of Christians of such a type 
 was a natural consequence of the fact that the com- 
 munities of Jews and strict proselytes were surrounded 
 by large numbers of what we may call semi-proselytes, 
 men whose faith was the Jewish faith, but who adopted 
 Jewish observances to a limited extent only. 
 
 During the last ten years this idea of the Roman 
 
 1 [Jahrbuch fiir deutsche Theologie, 1876, p. 248 f.] 
 
USE OF THE TERM eONH. 21 
 
 Church as largely of Gentile origin has been con- 
 stantly gaining ground. It is now agreed virtually 
 on all hands that it cannot have been either exclusively 
 Jewish or exclusively Gentile. The differences of 
 opinion which still exist are chiefly as to the propor- 
 tion borne by the one element to the other, and as to 
 the nature of the relations between the two elements 
 presumed to have given rise to St Paul's arguments 
 directed against the permanence of Judaism. 
 
 It has been said that the language of the Epistle to 
 the Romans presupposes Gentile readers, and its sub- 
 stance Jewish readers. The meaning of this exaggera- 
 tive paradox is that St Paul repeatedly uses the term 
 eOvT) as, apparently, applicable to his readers, while a 
 large part of his argument is intended to convince 
 men disposed to believe that the Jewish Law was 
 meant to be permanently binding. It is worth while 
 to glance at some of the passages which contain the 
 former class of evidence : the arguments which form 
 the other class are too obvious to need pointing 
 out. In the opening salutation, St Paul speaks of Rom. i. 5, 
 having received grace and apostleship iv irdaiv roi<i 
 edveaiv, ' among whom are ye also, called of Jesus 
 Christ.' Here the interpretation of edveaiv as a geogra- 
 phical, not a religious term, i.e. as meaning nations, 
 including the Jewish people, not nations as opposed 
 to it, makes ev oh ia-re koI v/j,ei<; a peculiarly bald and 
 flat mode of expression : yet this is the only way to 
 escape the inference that the men addressed were 
 
22 A GENTILE ELEMENT. 
 
 Gentiles. So also mv. 13 of the same chapter, ' that I 
 may have some fruit in you also as also kv Toi'i Xolttoi^ 
 edveaiv', the Romans are as distinctly called eOvq, and 
 the phrase was an unnatural one to use without the 
 special force that it would have for him as iffvSv 
 mroaToXo^. This last phrase, edvwv am-oa-ToXo^, about 
 the meaning of which there is no room for doubt, occurs 
 in another of the passages which have a bearing on 
 the present question, xi. 13. After a passage on the 
 rejection of unbelieving Israel, and on God's ultimate 
 purpose involved in it, St Paul turns swiftly round, 
 vfiiv Be Xeya rot? edveertv. Here the case is not so clear. 
 As a matter of Greek, I cannot see that there is any 
 difficulty in taking vfilv either as covering the whole 
 Roman Church, in which case no doubt they are as 
 before identified as a body with Gentiles, or as indicat- 
 ing a part of the Roman Church, contradistinguished 
 from a Jewish part, supposed to have been addressed 
 by him just before. The allegation that in this latter 
 case we must have had Tot<: Se iv vfiiv edveaiv is 
 certainly unfounded. In any case the presence of at 
 least a Gentile element is implied in the words. But 
 though the Greek is ambiguous, the context seems to 
 me to be decisive for taking vfuv as the Church itself, 
 and not as a part of it. In all the long previous ex- 
 position bearing on the Jews, occupying nearly two 
 and a half chapters, the Jews are invariably spoken of 
 in the third person. In the half-chapter that follows, 
 the Gentiles are constantly spoken of in the second 
 
THEIR DESCENT FROM ABRAHAM. 23 
 
 person. Exposition has here passed into exhortation 
 and warning, and the warning is exclusively addressed 
 to Gentiles : to Christians who had once been Jews 
 not a word is addressed. Lastly we come to a very 
 important and difficult passage near the end of the 
 Epistle, XV. 14 — 21. We must not pause over its 
 details, but merely notice that St Paul in v. 15, 16 
 justifies his boldness in writing thus to the Romans by 
 appealing to the grace which had been given him from 
 God that he might be a minister of Christ Jesus unto 
 the Gentiles (et? ra Wvt]). 
 
 These are the chief passages which point to the 
 Roman Christians as Gentiles. We must now glance 
 at one or two passages which have been supposed to 
 lead to the opposite conclusion. In iv. i, Abraham 
 is called ' our forefather [after the flesh] ', and it has 
 been urged that this was true only of Jews. Certainly. 
 if the passage be taken by itself, this would be the 
 most obvious interpretation, provided that Kara a-dpKa 
 must be taken with tov irpoivaTopa 7]fi5)v ; though some- 
 thing might also be said for Weiss's interpretation', 
 that in '!]fi&v St Paul has in view himself and his own 
 countrymen and not the Romans. But the context 
 shews that whether e.vpt]Ke.vai is genuine or not, KaTa 
 aapKa belongs not to the preceding words but to rt 
 ovv ipov/j,ev [evpr]Kevai\, being thrown to the end for 
 emphasis : and if so, Abraham might as well be called 
 the forefather of both Jews and Gentiles (which is 
 ^ Weiss, Einleitung in das N. T. p. 230 n. (ed. 1889). 
 
24 THEIR KNOWLEDGE OF LAW. 
 
 what the preceding verses suggest) as 'the father of 
 all that believe yet being uncircumcised ' {v. ii) or 
 'the father of us all' i.e. both Jews and Gentiles 
 {v. 1 6). This assignation to Gentiles of a Jewish 
 ancestry in the spirit is really less strange than the 
 similar language in which St Paul in writing to the 
 I Cor. A. I. Greeks of Corinth calls the whole Jewish people 
 " our fathers " (" all were under the cloud " &c.). 
 
 Another passage, to which appeal has often been 
 made, is still more worthy of attention. It is the 
 argument in vii. i — 6 about the limitation of the 
 authority of a law over a man to his lifetime. The 
 phrases which specially are in question are in vv. i 
 and 4. The argument begins 'Or know ye not, breth- 
 ren,' lyivQXTKovaiv yap vofiov XaXm k.t.X. Here the 
 supposed reference to Jewish readers rests exclusively 
 on the assumption that v6/io<; and 6 z^o/xo? are identical 
 in this Epistle. That is too large a question to argue 
 now : it is enough to say that the supposed identity 
 makes sad havoc of St Paul's sense in many places, 
 though no doubt in the case of this word, as of all 
 Greek substantives, the uses both with and without 
 the article are various, and by no means to be reduced 
 to a single absolute sense. Here it is by no means 
 likely that St Paul has the Jewish law in view, what 
 he says in the immediate context being equally 
 applicable to the Roman law, with which he naturally 
 assumes the Romans to have acquaintance in so 
 simple a matter. But even, if the Jewish Law were 
 
THE JEWISH LAW A LAW FOR ALL MEN. 25 
 
 meant, all Christians must be presumed to have an 
 amount of knowledge of it sufficient for St Paul's 
 purpose. The evidence of v. 4 is quite different and 
 primd facie stronger. " So that, my brethren, ye also 
 were made dead to the law through the body of the 
 Christ, that ye might be joined to another, even to 
 Him that was raised from the dead, that we might 
 bear fruit to God." Here " the law " unquestionably 
 means the Jewish Law, and so there is an apparent 
 implication that the persons addressed had previous 
 to their conversion been bound by the Jewish Law ; 
 and this, it is natural to say, could be true only of 
 Jews. Natural, but not correct. According to St 
 Paul's conception the Jewish Law was God's law for 
 all men, not for Jews only, previous to Christ's 
 coming, just as the Judaizers treated it as binding on 
 all men still. Language closely parallel to what we 
 find here is used by St Paul in writing to the Ga- 
 latians, who certainly had not previously been Jews. 
 See Gal. iii. 13 — iv. 7, where St Paul speaks of himself 
 and the Galatians alike, in words that we might have 
 supposed applicable to Jews only. These passages 
 therefore cannot on examination be held to yield a 
 testimonyat variance with thatgiven by the passages in 
 which the Romans are addressed as edvri. The passages 
 which appeal to the Old Testament as a common 
 heritage of course prove nothing. The last thing that 
 St Paul would ever have thought of saying of the 
 Gospel was that it was a new religion. In his eyes, 
 
26 A JEWISH ELEMENT 
 
 as with all the Apostles, it was the old religion of 
 Israel carried to perfection, not a new faith super- 
 seding it ; and so the history and Scriptures of Israel 
 remained the heritage of those who received the new 
 Covenant. 
 
 The question however still remains. Is the lan- 
 guage which identifies the Romans generally with 
 Gentiles to be taken as exclusive of Jewish Christians ? 
 It is hard to think so when we read such chapters as 
 the second and the fourth. Directly addressed to 
 Jewish Christians they certainly are not : but they 
 read as if among the recipients of the Epistle there 
 were men to whom either it was already salutary, or 
 at least it might easily become salutary, to have such 
 words brought before them by way of antidote or 
 prophylactic against ways of thinking which might 
 have too great attraction for them. 
 
 A similar inference may be drawn from the remark- 
 able language about the strong and the weak in the 
 fourteenth chapter and the early verses of the fifteenth. 
 Care is needed indeed not to exaggerate the force of 
 the evidence ; and the passage is worth while dwelling 
 upon here for its own sake. Thus much is clear that 
 the Roman Church included persons who had scruples 
 against eating flesh-meat and drinking wine and who 
 observed some special distinction of days (these are 
 called "the weak"); and that on the other hand it 
 included Christians who, like St Paul himself, did not 
 share these scruples (these are called the "strong"); and 
 
OF A SPECIAL TYPE. 27 
 
 moreover the whole tone suggests that they either 
 formed the majority of the Church or were at least 
 the most influential part of it. The first party were 
 tempted to judge (Kplveiv, vv. 3, 10) the others, accusing 
 them of following a low standard of conscience : the 
 temptation of the second party was to "despise" 
 (e^ovOevetv, vv. 3, 10) the others, holding them to be 
 poor superstitious creatures. As regards this moral 
 question of mutual demeanour St Paul holds the 
 balance perfectly even, without in the least concealing 
 with which party he had most personal sympathy. 
 But throughout he does not by a single word hint at 
 the Law, or any kind of tradition, or any kind of 
 authority, or anything affecting the relation of Jew 
 to Gentile, as being concerned in the matter. He 
 treats the matter exclusively from the point of view 
 of individual conscience and faith on the one hand, 
 and love, peace, and mutual building up on the other. 
 Further the nature of the scruples creates a difficulty 
 in referring the division here spoken of simply to a 
 division of Jewish and Gentile Christians. Whatever 
 may be said of the difference of days, abstinence from 
 flesh and from wine was not taught either by the Old 
 Testament or by the ordinary Jewish tradition. Of 
 course abstinence from the flesh and the wine of heathen 
 sacrifices was taught: but that cannot be meant here: 
 otherwise we should at least have some hint of the prin- 
 ciples laid down in the first Epistle to the Corinthians. 
 The true origin of these abstinences must remain some- 
 
22— 30. 
 
 28 THE CALL TO MUTUAL FORBEARANCE. 
 
 what uncertain: but much the most probable suggestion 
 is that they came from an Essene element in the Roman 
 Church, such as afterwards infected the Colossian 
 Church'; and an Essene element implies Judaism, 
 though not of the strict Pharisaic type. Thus on the 
 whole this passage suggests that the Roman Church 
 must have contained at least some Jewish members. 
 This conclusion is strengthened by the verses which 
 
 XV. 7—12. follow. They begin with words evidently addressed 
 to both parties alike, inculcating mutual forbearance 
 and cordiality, TrpoaXaiJu^avecrOe aXKrjXov;, appealing to 
 Christ's similar reception of rifi>d'i^, i.e. probably both 
 
 cf. iii. 9, Jews and Gentiles : St Paul then goes on Xe^to 7a/3°, 
 thereby making a close connexion with what precedes ; 
 and the statement so introduced is that Christ became 
 a minister of circumcision on behalf of God's truth (i.e. 
 in order to give effect to God's counsels as declared 
 through the prophets, God's truth being His faithful- 
 ness in performing what He had spoken); and this 
 vindication of God's truth St Paul sets forth under 
 two heads, (i) for the confirming of the promises made 
 to and concerning the fathers, and (2) for occasion 
 being given to the Gentiles to give glory to God for 
 
 ' Cf. Col. ii. 16, M^ ovv Tcs iifiSs Kpiviru hi ^pdira koX iv jricrei 17 iv 
 fi4pet eopTTJs T] veofx-qvlas ri ca^^ATWv. 
 
 ^ According to the more probable reading: the other reading ijMS, 
 if genuine, would probably refer to the admission of the Gentiles only; 
 but though well attested (as ^/tas also is) it seems to be a natural 
 assimilation of person to the imperative Trpoakaii^dveade. 
 
 ^ Not U, as the inferior authorities have it. 
 
THE REFERENCES TO THE OLD TESTAMENT. 29 
 
 mercy shown them ; and then he adds four quotations 
 from the Psalms and Prophets all of which speak of the 
 nations or Gentiles as joining in acts of faith or praise, 
 and two of which expressly associate Gentiles with 
 Israel ("with His people," "the root of Jesse"). Now 
 if vv. 8 — 12 were detached from what precedes, 
 this significant coupling of Jews and Gentiles, as 
 having each a distinctive share in the blessings 
 brought by Christ, would be sufficiently explained by 
 the general purpose of the Epistle, to which we shall 
 come presently. But seeing that they are connected 
 by that yap with v. 7, and so with the whole preceding 
 section beginning at xiv. i, one can hardly doubt that 
 the relations of Jew and Gentile were directly or 
 indirectly involved in the relations of the weak and 
 the strong in the Roman Church. Joint acceptance 
 by the revealed Messiah, accompanied by recognition 
 of diversity, would naturally be set forth by St Paul 
 as a Divine command of mutual acceptance in spite of 
 diversity. 
 
 On the strength of these indications it is reasonable 
 to conclude that the Church of Rome at this time 
 included Jewish as well as Gentile converts. This is 
 also what might have been anticipated from the his- 
 torical probabilities or possibilities as to the origin 
 and history of the Church. That is, although it is 
 possible that the first foundation of the Church of 
 Rome was due to Gentile Christians influenced by 
 St Paul's own preaching, this supposition would throw 
 
30 PROBABLE ORIGIN OF THE CHURCH. 
 
 the foundation to an improbably late date ; and it is 
 more likely that it took place in the middle period be- 
 tween St Stephen's preaching and St Paul's (so-called) 
 First Missionary Journey, if not yet earlier in the 
 first period. In either of these two cases the first 
 converts would doubtless be chiefly if not wholly 
 Jews, and this element of the Church would continue 
 by the side of the later contingent furnished by 
 heathen converts. As regards the question as to the 
 numerical proportion of the two elements to each 
 other, there are no trustworthy data for giving an 
 answer; nor is the question of any real importance, 
 so long as it is taken for granted that both elements 
 were considerable. St Paul, as we have seen, ad- 
 dresses the Church collectively as of heathen origin ; 
 but the force of this fact is more positive than negative. 
 He could not have done so had there been a lack of 
 Gentile converts, but neither would he, as far as we 
 can judge, refrain from doing so merely because there 
 were many Jewish converts likewise : his thoughts 
 were fixed more on the Church as a whole, occupying 
 the centre of civilised heathendom, than on such 
 details as a census would have supplied. 
 
 Account must also be taken of the probability 
 that many of the converts to the Gospel had previously 
 been converts to Judaism ; that is, in a word, had 
 been proselytes, whether of the stricter or the laxer 
 sort. This probable fact will not suffice by itself to 
 solve the problem of the Epistle to the Romans, as 
 
ROMAN CHRISTIANS NOT JUDAIZERS. 31 
 
 one eminent critic, Beyschlag', has tried to make it do: 
 but it is an important contribution towards under- 
 standing the state of things. Obviously the presence 
 of a number of Christians who had belonged both to 
 heathenism and to Judaism would form a connecting 
 link between Christians who had belonged to hea- 
 thenism alone and Christians who had belonged to 
 Judaism alone, thus hindering the formation of sharp 
 boundary lines and of tendencies towards antagonism. 
 This would especially be the case with those who had 
 belonged to the less strict class of proselytes, and who 
 therefore even before their acceptance of the Gospel 
 had held a position intermediate between Judaism 
 and a devout and purified form of heathenism. 
 
 Thus far we have been chiefly considering the 
 question of the previous creed or creeds of the Roman 
 converts. The question of their relation to the great 
 contemporaneous controversy within the Church at 
 large, though not identical with this, is in great 
 measure answered along with it. If the relations 
 between the heathen and the Jewish converts at 
 Rome were such as we have been supposing, it is very 
 unlikely that the Jewish converts were to any great 
 extent Judaizing Christians in the noxious sense of 
 the word. It is an important fact, often overlooked 
 even by great commentators, that Judaizing Christi- 
 anity as such is hardly at all directly attacked in the 
 Epistle to the Romans, which thus stands in marked 
 
 ' Theol. Studien utid Kritiken, 1867, p. 627 f. 
 
32 NOT DECLARED PARTISANS OF S. PAUL, 
 
 contrast to the Epistle to the Galatians. Indirectly- 
 much that St Paul here says has the gravest bearing 
 on that controversy : but he gives such matter the 
 most impersonal form that he can. 
 
 Are we then on the other hand to say that the 
 Church of Rome substantially took St Paul's side 
 against the Judaizers ? As far as I see, this would be 
 saying too much. One passage is often cited as at 
 least shewing that the Romans had definitely com- 
 mitted themselves to a distinctive Pauline Christianity, 
 vi. 17, where he says "But thanks be to God, that 
 whereas ye were bondservants of sin, v-rrr^KovaaTe 
 he eK KapBiWi et? ov TrapeBodijTe tvttov SiBa'^rji;," it 
 being assumed that there is a reference here to a 
 distinctive Pauline tutto? BiBaxv'i, contrasted with one 
 or more other tvttoi StSa%^?. Without discussing the 
 details of this difficult and peculiar phrase of nine words, 
 it is enough to say that nothing like this notion of a 
 plurality of Christian rinroi BoBwy^i; occurs anywhere 
 else in the New Testament, and further that it is 
 quite out of harmony with all the context. In St Paul 
 Rom.v.14. Ti;7ro9 always means either an image of something 
 Phil. hi. future or else a personal pattern to be imitated; and so, 
 iThess i i" accordance with this second sense, the meaning here 
 7- is " the personal standard of Christian living " (BiBaxv'i 
 
 iii. 9. having rather a moral and religious than a doctrinal 
 
 1 Tim. iv. 
 12. 
 
 force) as opposed to heathen modes of life^. Hence 
 
 Tit. ii. 7. 
 
 ^ Cf. Eph. iv. 10 — 24, where kn&Bin and edidaxOriTe answer to 
 Sidaxvt here. 
 
THOUGH FAVOURABLE TO HIS TEACHING. 33 
 
 the passage has nothing to do with one form of 
 Christianity as distinguished from another. The 
 facts already noticed about Prisca and Aquila leave 
 little doubt that Pauline Christianity had at least 
 some conscious and zealous adherents at Rome, and 
 was not an object of suspicion there : but both 
 the probable historical antecedents and the general 
 tenour of the Epistle suggest rather that the Roman 
 Church presented a favourable soil for the reception 
 of St Paul's Gospel, doubtless combined with personal 
 good-will to himself, than that it was as a body in 
 such a sense definitely Pauline that the teaching of 
 the Epistle would have been in the main a mere 
 recalling to mind of what was already known and 
 believed. 
 
 H. R. 
 
II. 
 
 THE PURPOSE OF THE EPISTLE. 
 
 A. 
 EXTERNAL CIRCUMSTANCES. 
 
 We come now, after these preliminaries, to the 
 question what was St Paul's purpose in writing the 
 Epistle. We have considered what can be known or 
 reasonably surmised respecting the state of the Church 
 to which he wrote it, and we may be sure that it 
 was intended to bear very directly on what he knew 
 of the Roman needs at that time. But it is difficult 
 to believe that this single Italian Church alone was in 
 his mind. Various indications suggest that the Epistle 
 was partly prompted by thoughts about the Churches 
 of all lands, and also that it was connected with a 
 peculiar crisis in his own personal life. It will there- 
 fore be well to leave Rome for the present, and try to 
 see what light is thrown on the purpose of the Epistle 
 by any particulars in the life and work of the writer, 
 which we must remember were at this time, humanly 
 speaking, the greatest moving power in the enlarge- 
 ment and building up of the Universal Church. 
 
 The first great extension of the preaching of the 
 
THE FIRST MISSIONARY JOURNEY. 35 
 
 Gospel beyond the Holy Land to the capital of Syria, 
 Antioch, took place without St Paul. It was due in 
 the first instance to the sporadic teaching of unofficial Acts xi. 
 converts, just as we have seen to have been the case 
 with the foundation of the Church of Rome. The 
 Church at Jerusalem however sent down Barnabas 
 to Antioch and he in turn went to Tarsus and fetched Acts xi. 
 St Paul to Antioch, where they remained and taught. 
 The next step in the spread of the Gospel is what 
 is called St Paul's First Missionary Journey, described 
 in the thirteenth and fourteenth chapters of the Acts. 
 But there is a prelude to this journey which must not 
 be overlooked. We read of Barnabas and Paul being Acts xi. 
 deputed by the disciples at Antioch to carry relief to xii. 25.' 
 the brethren at Jerusalem who were suffering from 
 the great famine. By this act the new Syrian Church 
 gave practical acknowledgement of obligations to the 
 original Church of Jerusalem, and St Paul himself 
 was brought afresh into personal friendly relations 
 with the original apostles. After the return to Antioch 
 Barnabas and Paul are sent out by the Church of 
 Antioch in obedience to a prophetic monition, and so 
 the first deliberate official mission begins. The range 
 covered by it is not great. It begins with Cyprus, 
 then proceeds to the neighbouring coastland of Pam- 
 phylia on the north-west, and then to the adjoining 
 districts of Pisidia and Lycaonia in the interior. The 
 preaching is accompanied by much resistance and op- 
 position on the part of the Jews. The return is made 
 
 3—2 
 
36 THE SECOND AND 
 
 through Pamphylia by sea to Antioch, where the two 
 envoys give an account of their mission. 
 
 As the First, so also the Second of St Paul's known 
 Missionary journeys is preceded by a visit to Jeru- 
 Acts XV. salem. This visit to Jerusalem is a very memorable 
 one. Paul and Barnabas were deputed by the Church 
 of Antioch to confer with the apostles and elders about 
 the question that had arisen owing to the declaration 
 made by certain men coming from Judea that circum- 
 cision was indispensable. How grave the crisis was we 
 Gal. ii. can see from St Paul's own account, for there can be no 
 reasonable doubt that the occasion to which he refers 
 is that which is mentioned here by St Luke'. Both 
 accounts conspicuously agree as to the cardinal fact 
 that St Peter and St James cordially supported 
 St Paul and recognised his special work. The ratifi- 
 cation thus obtained for the Gentile Gospel gave a safe 
 basis for further work among the Gentiles without 
 estrangement from the mother Church of Jerusalem. 
 Then came what is called St Paul's Second Mis- 
 Acts XV. sionary Journey. It begins with labours in con- 
 j(_ xviii. gj-j^^jjQj^ Qf |.j^g results obtained on the former occa- 
 sion, as well as of the nearer conquests in Syria and 
 Cilicia. Then St Paul penetrates inner Asia Minor, 
 makes his way to the north-west, crosses over to 
 Macedonia in obedience to a vision, thus entering 
 
 ' On this question, and on the difficulties which have quite naturally 
 been felt as to the apparent diiTerences of the two narratives see Light- 
 foot, Galatians pp. 123 — 128 (ed. 5). 
 
THIRD MISSIONARY JOURNEYS. 37 
 
 Europe by divine ordinance, not of his own will; goes 
 
 to Philippi and Thessalonica, and works his way down 
 
 to Athens and Corinth, where he stays one and a half 
 
 years. This Missionary Journey is then, in like manner 
 
 as the former, followed by a return to Jerusalem, in Acts xviii. 
 
 spite of a request from the Ephesian Church that 
 
 he would stay there some time. From Palestine he 
 
 returns by Antioch and Central Asia Minor till he 
 
 reaches Ephesus, where he stays two years. Ephesus Acts xix. 
 
 10. 
 thus becomes his base of operations, as Antioch had 
 
 formerly been. 
 
 Now we reach the third set of labours. After 
 this long and successful stay at Ephesus St Paul sets 
 out afresh with three objects in view. His immediate 
 object was the confirmation of the recently founded 
 Churches of Europe in Macedonia and Achaia. His 
 ultimate object was a visit to Rome. He did not 
 however propose, as we might have expected, having 
 once started westward, to go on further west to 
 Italy. Between the two westward journeys to Greece 
 and to Rome he intended to interpose a long east- 
 ward journey to Jerusalem. The words are worth Acts xix. 
 notice: "Now after these things were ended Paul 
 purposed in the spirit (a curiously emphatic phrase), 
 when he had passed through Macedonia and Achaia, 
 to go to Jerusalem, saying. After I have been there, 
 I must also see Rome." Each of these three purposes 
 St Paul was, as we know, enabled to carry out, and in 
 the proposed order : but the details were very different 
 
38 HIS JOURNE V TO JERUSALEM AND ROME. 
 
 from what he had evidently anticipated. The story 
 of this journeying fills all the book of the Acts from 
 c. xix. 21 onwards. After a little further delay at 
 Ephesus he reached Macedonia and Greece, where he 
 stayed three months, and during this stay he wrote the 
 Epistle to the Romans. But in order to understand 
 the position of things it is well to recall some leading 
 facts in the events that followed. As St Paul was on 
 the point of sailing direct from Greece to Syria, to go 
 to Jerusalem, he heard of a Jewish plot against him, 
 probably intended to be executed on board ship. 
 He suddenly changed his direction, and went north- 
 ward round the head of the Aegean. He refused to 
 submit to the delay which would have been involved 
 in visiting Ephesus, but addressed the Ephesian elders 
 at Miletus. He then sailed to Syria, and went up 
 to Jerusalem disregarding the warning prophecies of 
 the brethren at Tyre and of Agabus. Once more he 
 was welcomed by the Church of Jerusalem, and had 
 friendly intercourse with St James, the head of the 
 Christians of the circumcision. At his request he con- 
 sented to perform a ceremonial act which would shew 
 that he had not in his own person broken loose from 
 the law under which he had been born, in the hope 
 that such an act would have a soothing effect on the 
 minds of uneasy Jewish Christians. Then came the 
 Jewish attack upon him in the temple and his conse- 
 quent captivity, with its various incidents at Jerusalem 
 and Caesarea, and finally his voyage as a Roman 
 
THE APOSTLE TO THE GENTILES. 39 
 
 prisoner to Rome, which he reaches only after ship- 
 wreck and consequent delay. Thus the three purposes 
 expressed were all accomplished, though three years 
 had passed before the final goal, Rome, was attained. 
 At Rome, as all know, he spent at least two years ; 
 and from there he wrote what are called the Epistles 
 of the Captivity. With subsequent events or subse- 
 quent writings we have no special concern in relation 
 to the Epistle to the Romans. 
 
 Now let us consider a little what line of conduct, 
 what policy as it were, is implied in the leading acts 
 of St Paul, as interpreted by his own words. On the 
 one hand we have the obvious and familiar idea of 
 hin^ as the Apostle of the Gentiles. In his own 
 person he is indefatigable in preaching the Gospel 
 to the Gentiles, and in paying later visits to stablish 
 and confirm the Gentile Churches so founded. He 
 is also the champion of the Gentile Churches, the 
 zealous prophet of their calling by God, the defender 
 of their liberties against the claim set up on behalf 
 of the Jewish Law as binding on all who would be 
 recognised as worshippers of the one true God, the 
 God of Abraham. This, I say, is obvious. But 
 what is no less important, and not so obvious, is his 
 sleepless anxiety to keep the Gentile and Jewish 
 Christians in harmony and fellowship with each 
 other, and himself to act in concert with the original 
 apostles, never for a moment allowing that they had 
 any authority over his faith or his actions, but shewing 
 
40 THE GUARDIAN OF UNITY, ESPECIALLY 
 
 them every consideration, and doing his best to gain 
 their approval for his own course. 
 
 It would have been easy, as it must have been at 
 times most tempting, to sever sharply the hampering 
 links which bound him to the Churches of Judea, and 
 to form the new Gentile Churches into a great 
 separate organisation. But this was just what he 
 was most anxious to prevent. He could see how 
 great the danger was that such a result might be 
 brought about by the force of circumstances ; and so 
 he set himself with all his might to counteract the 
 tendency. This was doubtless the primary motive — 
 there may of course have been lesser temporary 
 reasons in each case — which made him visit Jeru- 
 salem before each of his great missionary journeys. 
 He would not suffer long absence to cause any 
 coldness to spring up between himself and the 
 authorities of the mother city, as though he had 
 become only a stranger at a distance. Before each 
 fresh outward start he made a point of knitting 
 afresh the old bonds of fellowship and each time 
 anew exhibiting in outward act the principle laid 
 
 Luke xxiv. down by Christ Himself, "preaching unto all the 
 
 '•■'■ nations, beginning at Jerusalem." 
 
 One special embodiment and symbol of this 
 reconciling purpose on St Paul's part is the collection 
 on behalf of the Jewish Christians of Palestine, the 
 "saints" as he calls them, which has a considerable place 
 in the Epistles of the second group, those to the Gala- 
 
THROUGH THE COLLECTION FOR THE SAINTS 41 
 
 tians, Corinthians and Romans. We have not time to 
 go into details of language on this subject. But the 
 main points are clear, if looked at steadily. Three 
 main elements can be distinguished in the thoughts 
 to which St Paul gives expression on this subject. 
 He was anxious that the various Gentile Churches 
 should feel sympathy for their Jewish brethren, and 
 make sacrifices to shew practical Christian fellowship 
 towards them. He was anxious, secondly, that the 
 Jewish Christians should accept the offering with 
 brotherly cordiality and be led by it towards 
 a warmer and less grudging sympathy with the 
 Gentile Churches who dispensed with observances 
 so dear to many of themselves. Thirdly, he was 
 anxious to be in his own person the living organ 
 both for the offering of the Gentile gifts and for the 
 Jewish acceptance of them. For this purpose this 
 last journey to Jerusalem was absolutely necessary. 
 Its purpose was the gathering up and crowning of 
 the purposes of former visits. If only he could 
 accomplish it successfully, he felt that the most 
 effectual of all possible steps would have been taken 
 towards securing the threatened unity of the Jewish 
 and the Gentile Churches. He would then be able 
 with full peace of mind to return to the far West 
 and carry the Gospel across the Mediterranean to the 
 as yet untouched shores of Spain. On the way he 
 would be able with full propriety to pay his long 
 desired visit to Rome itself, the centre of the Empire 
 
42 AND HIS VISITS TO JERUSALEM, 
 
 Cf.Luke which embraced Jew and Gentile alike, the place 
 which more than any other by political position 
 represented the universality which he was struggling 
 
 Rom. XV. to secure for the Church. " I know," he wrote, " that 
 in coming to you" (i.e. as the context shews, in 
 coming to you after accomplishing this purpose at 
 Jerusalem) " I shall come in the fulness of the 
 blessing of Christ.'' 
 
 But this glowing anticipation was blended with 
 anxious misgivings. St Paul had to contend not 
 only with the perversity and narrowmindedness of 
 Jewish Christians, but also with the sanguinary 
 malignity of unbelieving Jews. Just now it seemed 
 as if they were bent on justifying more and more the 
 tremendous language in which he had denounced 
 
 I Th. ii. them long ago. The plot, which, just after this 
 Epistle was written, compelled St Paul to abandon 
 his direct voyage to Syria and take a circuitous 
 route, illustrates the danger which constantly beset 
 him from this source. But in Jerusalem the danger 
 would be greater still : there would be the very 
 focus of hostility, and his enemies could there safely 
 count on a large number of sympathizers among 
 the population. To all this St Paul was not blind, 
 though he resolutely adhered to his purpose of 
 carrying the Gentile offering to the poor brethren of 
 Judea. His keen sense of the danger breaks through 
 various phrases of those seemingly tranquil and 
 almost commonplace verses xv. 22 — 33. Hitherto, 
 
WITH THEIR PECULIAR DANGERS. 43 
 
 he says, he has been hindered from coming to the 
 Romans, but '' now having no longer place in these 
 regions," and so on, with language evidently leading 
 up to a proposal to visit them now: yet he has to 
 break off; and says not that he is going to them, 
 but that he is going to Jerusalem. Then, later, he 
 completes the account of what he hoped to do, and 
 having so said breaks off afresh in an earnest entreaty 
 to them to join him in an intense energy of prayer, 
 (wrestling, as it were, a-vvw^covLcyaaOai) that he may 
 be delivered airo rmv aireiBovvTwv iv rrj 'lovSaoa, 
 and that his ministration to Jerusalem may be 
 acceptable to the saints, that he may come to the 
 Romans in joy by an act of God's will, and find rest 
 with them (avvavaTrava-tifiat opposed to the avvaycovi- 
 eraa-dai) ; rest after the personal danger and after the 
 ecclesiastical crisis of which the personal danger 
 formed a part. We cannot here mistake the twofold 
 thoughts of the apostle's mind. He is full of eager 
 anticipation of visiting Rome with the full blessing 
 of the accomplishment of that peculiar ministration. 
 But he is no less full of misgivings as to the proba- 
 bility of escaping with his life. He was utterly free 
 from the mere passion of martyrdom, which in after 
 times overmastered many of less apostolic spirit. 
 His life is full of instances which shew how he held 
 it to be his duty in ordinary cases to use all lawful 
 means for escaping from imminent dangers. But he 
 prepared for this journey with the solemnity of a 
 
44 CONSCIOUSNESS OF THESE DANGERS 
 
 sacrifice. It was no mere vague general readiness 
 to suffer death that he professed at Csesarea when 
 Actsxxi. he rebuked the friends who remonstrated with 
 '^' him for persevering in spite of the warning by 
 
 the mouth of Agabus, "What do ye, weeping and 
 breaking my heart (or rather enfeebling, distracting 
 it), for I am ready (eToifio)^ ^'%o)), not merely ' willing,' 
 but already long ago prepared for it, not to be bound 
 only but to die at Jerusalem for the name of the 
 Lord Jesus." This expectation, balanced though it 
 be by the hope that it was part of God's providence 
 for him and his work that he should see Rome, is a 
 measure of the height of importance which he 
 attached to this mission to Jerusalem. 
 
 If such was the attitude of his mind towards the 
 future when he was setting out, it was impossible 
 that it should not exercise a powerful influence over 
 the whole writing of an epistle sent forth about this 
 time, and not merely over the few lines in which he 
 directly refers to his own plans. Its words could 
 hardly fail to have something of the character of last 
 words. An interesting confirmation of this is afforded 
 by the only other words of any length of which we 
 have a record as spoken or written by him from this 
 time till his arrival at Jerusalem, namely the address 
 Acts XX. to the Ephesian elders at Miletus. Being spoken to 
 ^ ' the representatives of a Church in the midst of which 
 he had lived and taught so long, it naturally differs 
 much in character from an epistle written to a 
 
INFLUENCES THE WHOLE EPISTLE. 45 
 
 Church as yet unseen. But the underlying motive 
 of the whole is the feeling that, according to what he 
 then supposed, the men of Ephesus were destined, as 
 he says, to see his face no more. 
 
 The parallelism is not however complete. It is 
 quite possible that by the time St Paul reached 
 Miletus in his journey round the ^gean, his sense of 
 impending danger had become even stronger than 
 it had been a little before he left Corinth : the plot 
 which made him change his course might itself well 
 have that effect, and there may have been other in- 
 cidents and other tidings unknown to us which would 
 tend in the same direction. But at all events it was 
 impossible that a mere revisiting of Ephesus should 
 stand out before St Paul's mind with the same vivid 
 reality of idea, so to speak, as a first apostolic visit to 
 Rome. Whatever the intervening dangers might be, 
 that imagined arrival at Rome would seem to gain 
 substance from the fitness with which it would crown 
 a Divine order of events. While therefore, as I said 
 just now, the Epistle to the Romans as a whole may 
 be expected to have something of the character of 
 last words, it would not be surprising to find it 
 leaving a space, as it were, for future teaching on 
 other topics, to be built as a superstructure on this 
 foundation. Such an apparent contradiction would 
 in fact be the natural fruit of the contradiction (if 
 one may so call it for want of a better word) in the 
 apostle's own mind, a contradiction due not to any 
 
46 HIS LAST WORDS UPON THE 
 
 confusion of mind, but rather to his combination of 
 the strongest faith in God's providence with the 
 keenest sense of the mysteriousness of its wisdom, 
 and the unexpectedness of the ways by which it 
 often arrives at its ends. It is no paradox to say 
 that he was too true a prophet of God to be able to 
 predict his own future. 
 
 The length and elaboration of the Epistle may I 
 think be best explained by the sense, that it might 
 probably be the writer's last words to the Romans. 
 If he really expected, as he seems to have done, to be 
 back in the West and at Rome in a few months, if 
 only he escaped death at Jerusalem, there was little 
 apparent need for more than a few lines to explain 
 his plans, unless he had grave reason to fear that it 
 might be his last opportunity for speaking to the 
 Romans in full measure. The sense of the danger 
 on the other hand, was just what would make him 
 desirous to ensure the full conveyance of his thoughts 
 on these matters to Rome, doubtless not without 
 a prospect that in due course the record of them 
 would be sent on to other Churches. A final and 
 orderly review of the subjects discussed would con- 
 stitute just such a legacy of peace, as it was impor- 
 tant to bequeath to all the Churches, if the apostle's 
 own guiding hand were to be withdrawn by 
 death. 
 
 Much of the Epistle may be called a summing up 
 of a long and fierce controversy : but it is a summing 
 
RELATION OF JEW AND GENTILE. 47 
 
 up in which the inevitable hmitations and antago- 
 nisms of mere controversy have disappeared. With 
 the exception of one remarkable passage towards 
 the end, which we shall have to notice again, Rom. xvi. 
 there is no reference to opponents throughout. The 
 matter of controversy is dealt with by way of peaceful 
 discussion, going down into the fundamental principles 
 which underlie it. Whether the breadth of treatment 
 apparent here was but the expression of what had all 
 along been St Paul's own mental state, or he had 
 himself risen to serener vision as years went by, we 
 cannot tell : what is clear is that the serener vision is 
 here, and that it shews itself near the end of a long 
 period of conflict. This character of the Epistle, 
 however independent it may seem of any local cir- 
 cumstances and needs, would, as far as we can tell, 
 be appropriate to its Roman destination. There was 
 no need that St Paul should simply fight his old 
 battles over again for the sake of the Romans if they 
 were as yet comparatively untroubled by the con- 
 troversy. On the other hand he could supply them 
 with no more effectual or less questionable safeguard 
 against future Judaistic invasion, than this temperate 
 and orderly and yet most warm and vivid exposition 
 of principles. 
 
 The controversy about law and faith is however 
 but a part of the great subject of the relation of Jew 
 to Gentile, and this, quite as much as that controversy, 
 may be called the subject of the Epistle to the 
 
48 THE UNIVERSALITY OF CHRISTIANITY 
 
 Romans. Here the doctrinal or universal and the 
 historical or personal elements of the Epistle meet. 
 The carrying of the Gentile offering to Jerusalem to 
 be followed, if successful, by the visit to Rome, is the 
 practical expression of the leading thought of the 
 Epistle, the comprehension of Israel and the nations 
 alike, but in due order, in the final commonwealth of 
 God. And here too there was a correspondence 
 between the purport of the Epistle and its destination. 
 In Rome, the centre of the universal empire, it was 
 easier to realise the new Christian universality than 
 any where else on earth. Nor must we forget that in 
 thus writing to others St Paul was but giving ex- 
 pression to what he felt respecting himself It must 
 always be remembered that he was himself a Roman 
 citizen, glorying in his Roman citizenship, and sharing 
 Roman ideas. He united indeed all the three 
 principal factors of the civilised humanity of his day, 
 answering to the three languages on the Cross. He 
 was at once Jew, Greek, and Roman ; and this 
 personal universality was, if we may venture to say 
 so, essential to his unique office, of at once accom- 
 plishing and expounding the true universality of the 
 Church. 
 
 The teaching of this Epistle undoubtedly held a 
 very large place in St Paul's total creed, and it 
 relates to what is at bottom, if not on the surface, an 
 issue of deep and vital interest. But it does not 
 follow that this Epistle includes all the important 
 
ASSUMED IN LATER EPISTLES. 
 
 49 
 
 part of St Paul's body of belief. If this were true\ 
 unless the later Epistles are unreal excrescences 
 we should, as an important school teaches, have 
 to account them spurious. The fact is, St Paul has 
 two comparatively general Epistles, the Epistle to 
 the Romans and the Epistle to the Ephesians, and 
 the contrast between them illustrates both. Both are 
 full of the especially Pauline Gospel that the Gentiles 
 are fellow-heirs, but the one glances chiefly to the 
 past, the other to the future. The unity at which the 
 former Epistle seems to arrive by slow and painful 
 steps, is assumed in the latter as a starting point with 
 a vista of wondrous possibilities beyond. The Epistle 
 to the Romans sketches out how the need of the 
 Gospel arose. It dwells on the failures of the whole 
 ancient world, Jewish and Gentile. In the main it is an 
 exposition of the remedial aspect of the Gospel, that 
 aspect in which it stands in relation to past efforts 
 that had failed. 
 
 The Epistle probably further contains the sub- 
 stance of a spiritual autobiography. The Epistle to 
 the Galatians, the most definitely special of all his 
 Epistles to Churches, gives certain outward facts in 
 relation to his apostleship. The second Epistle to 
 the Corinthians unveils the inward conflicts of a 
 peculiar time. But the Epistle to the Romans gives 
 a retrospective experience. St Paul in it interprets 
 
 ^ From this point the treatment becomes more summary : the MS. is 
 printed as it stands. Edd. 
 
 H. R. 4 
 
50 PERSONAL AND DIDACTIC ELEMENTS. 
 
 the failure of the old work, Jewish and Gentile, by 
 his own sense of despair as a Jew and as a man. In 
 this Epistle therefore he is not sitting down to teach 
 the Romans what the Christian faith is, still less 
 trying to put one theory of the Christian faith in 
 place of another, a Pauline Christianity in place of 
 somebody else's Christianity, but bringing into clear 
 consciousness for Christians of the metropolis of the 
 world their relation to all their spiritual forefathers, 
 mainly however in the appropriate Roman province — 
 righteousness, belonging to law and morality alike, or 
 the legal aspect of morality, and so Christian duty 
 as part of the new conception and power of right- 
 eousness. 
 
 Here we have another limitation and contrast. 
 He is writing to Romans, not Greeks. To Greeks he 
 wrote, partly in the first Epistle to the Corinthians 
 partly in the Epistle to the Ephesians, of Christ as 
 the Wisdom of God in relation to human wisdom and 
 to the knowledge of all truth. But of this in the 
 Epistle to the Romans there is next to nothing ; not 
 because St Paul did not care for it, or had not yet 
 come to care for it, but because he was careful in his 
 stewardship and gave each the fitting portion. 
 
APPENDIX ON CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 The structure of the sixteenth chapter is by no 
 means obvious : and it may be well to say a few 
 words about it, the more because the differences of 
 text which occur in the latter part have increased 
 the confusion, and led to various untenable theories 
 as to the origin of the different portions of the chapter. 
 These differences of text concern no mere ordinary 
 variations, but the presence or absence or transference 
 of whole verses or passages. 
 
 The prayer which forms the end of the fifteenth xv. 33. 
 chapter, with its solemn dfjiriv, is evidently a special 
 conclusion to the single glowing sentence, in which St xv. 30—32. 
 Paul calls upon the Romans to associate themselves 
 by prayer with his dangerous conflict, that its purposes 
 may be fulfilled and that he may be allowed to come 
 in joy and find rest with them. The force of Se 
 6eo<; rrj'} elpijvrj'; would then seem to be, " But, 
 whether I am preserved to come to you thus and so 
 complete the mission of peace or not, I pray that the 
 God of peace may be with all of you, so that the 
 
 4—2 
 
52 . Chapter xvi. 
 
 blessing which I am seeking for the Church may at 
 least descend on you from its heavenly Source." 
 
 There is no reason to suppose that the Epistle was 
 ever meant to end with this prayer. The impassioned 
 strain of the last few lines was in form a digression 
 from the external matters of which St Paul had begun 
 
 xvi. 1—3. to speak in xv. 22 — 29. To those matters he now 
 returns, and completes the unfinished information. 
 The connexion is, " I have long been wanting to 
 come to you, I hope to come to you on my way to 
 Spain if I can bring my Judean mission to a happy 
 close, but till then I cannot : meanwhile I would 
 commend to you — i.e. as my representative, so to 
 speak — Phoebe our sister, who is also a minister of 
 the Church that is at Cenchreae." There can be no 
 moral doubt that Phoebe carried the letter to the 
 Romans, and her going to Rome may possibly have 
 given the first impulse to writing. After this com- 
 
 xvi. 3— 15. mendation we have a long series of salutations to 
 different persons at Rome, beginning with Prisca and 
 
 xvi. 16. Aquila, followed, first by the general bidding aoTra- 
 aaade aXXriXov^ ev <j}iXrifj,aTt djlo), and secondly by 
 a general salutation not from individuals but (strangely 
 comprehensive language) from "all the Churches of 
 the Christ." The phrase itself " Churches of the 
 Christ " is absolutely unique. It occurs only here ; 
 and our familiar phrase " the Church of Christ " (or 
 "the Christ") in the singular occurs nowhere in the 
 New Testament : while St Paul speaks several times 
 
Chapter xvi. c ^ 
 
 of "the Church of God," and twice directly (i Cor. 
 xi. i6; 2 Thess. i. 4), several times indirectly, of 
 " Churches of God." The nearest approximations to 
 the phrase used here are in Gal. i. 22 rat? iKK\riaiai<; 
 T^9 'louSat'a? Tat? iv Xpia-rm, and I Thess. ii. 14 t&p 
 eKic\rj(TiQ}v Tov ®60v Twv ovawv iv ry 'lovBala iv 
 Xpto-Tfio 'Irjcrov. In both cases the phrase is used 
 with reference to Judean Churches, which are thus 
 distinguished from unbelieving Jewish eKKXTjo-iat. 
 The unique phrase here used seems meant to mark 
 the way in which the Church of Rome was an object 
 of love and respect to Jewish and Gentile Churches 
 alike, the name 'Kpia-ro'i having its primary signifi- 
 cance as it were for the Jew, though this significance 
 was expounded so as to hold good likewise for the 
 believing Gentile : it thus answers to xv. 19 (ware 
 fxe aTTo lepovcraXrj/j, kuI kvkXw /J'i'x^pt, tov 'lWvpi,KOv 
 "TreTrXrjptoKevaL to evayyeXiov tov ILpicrTov) and xv. 29 
 (olSa Se OTi ip')(Ofj.evo<; 7rpo<i v/Lid<; iv ■jrXTjpco/j.aTi evXo- 
 yia'; X.piaTov iXevcrofiai). Doubtless St Paul had infor- 
 mation which enabled him to convey this greeting. 
 
 Here St Paul might have ended, merely appending 
 a line of benediction. But before this comes he 
 breaks out in an unexpected direction. Up to this 
 time, as we have seen, he has refrained from direct 
 controversy. Throughout the elaborate expositions 
 and arguments not an antagonist has appeared. Here 
 however at last we have a vehement outburst against 
 certain teachers. It is conceivable that just as St 
 
54 Chapter xvi. 
 
 Paul was on the point of finishing or sending his 
 letter, fresh tidings reached him of impending doc- 
 trinal troubles at Rome. But it is more likely that 
 all the time he had been writing the thought was 
 forcibly present to his mind that the Roman Church 
 was likely sooner or later to be invaded by the false 
 teachers, and that he therefore wished to lay a solid 
 positive foundation which might secure them against 
 perversion. It might well be that when he was 
 reaching the end, with a keen sense that this might 
 be his last opportunity of saying a word to the 
 Romans, he became fearful lest the point and bearing 
 of his expositions should be missed if he gave no hint 
 of the dangers ahead. Accordingly he interjects a 
 warning in emphatic and yet guarded language, 
 abstaining from any doctrinal catchword, but using 
 language that would sufficiently interpret itself when 
 the time came, if it did not now. The distinguishing 
 marks of these false teachers are the divisions and the 
 occasions of stumbling of which they became the 
 authors, and that, contrary to the teaching which the 
 xvi. 17,18. Romans had already received. They 'serve not our 
 Lord Christ but their own belly, and they use flattering 
 and plausible speech ' (the precise force of evXoylai; is 
 uncertain, but at all events thus much is contained 
 in ^pr]aTo\oyia<;). There can be little doubt, I think, 
 that Christian zealots for the Law are meant, not liber- 
 tine antinomians, as many have gathered from ry 
 KoiXia. The passage must at all events be taken in 
 
Chapter xvi. 55 
 
 connexion with Phil. iii. 17 — 21, while that passage 
 again is illustrated by Col. ii. 20 — iii. 4. It is note- 
 worthy how peculiarly careful St Paul is not to seem 
 to hint that any of the leaven was already working 
 in the Romans themselves. His fear only is that 
 their simplicity and innocence may disable them 
 from detecting falsehood when they hear it. Their 
 own obedience (to the Gospel) is, he says, universally 
 known. He ends this passage with an assurance that 
 the God of peace, He Whose presence with them he 
 had implored a few verses above, would indeed not 
 only be with them but quickly enable them to tread 
 under foot the adversary, the author of all slander 
 and all strife. 
 
 Then at last comes the benediction " The grace of xvi. 20. 
 our Lord Jesus [Christ] be with you." The letter is 
 now complete. It receives however a very natural 
 postscript. Some of the brethren who were with 
 St Paul at Corinth, including Timothy, Tertius his 
 amanuensis, and Gaius his host, express a desire 
 to add their greetings to the Roman Church. These 
 greetings end with the words "Epao-ro? oIkovoixo^ 
 T^9 TToXetB?, KoX K.ovapro'i a.BeX<j)6^. Could such 
 words really stand at the very end of a great and 
 solemn epistle, even though the actual passage which 
 they closed were merely a postscript made up of 
 four short sentences of individual greetings ? It is 
 difficult to think that such an ending would satisfy 
 St Paul's sense of fitness. And accordingly the best 
 
56 Chapter xvi. 
 
 documents add a very remarkable and pregnant 
 xvi. 25— doxology, T<o Se Swafiipo) k.t.X. It rises out of 
 the anxieties just expressed lest the. Roman sim- 
 plicity should be beguiled ("To Him that is able 
 to stablish you according to my Gospel and the 
 preaching of Jesus Christ "), and then goes on to speak 
 of ' the mystery kept silent through the ages but now 
 at last manifested and proclaimed among the Gentiles, 
 by means of prophetic scriptures, by command of the 
 eternal God, the Lord of the ages, unto an obedience 
 inspired by faith'; and for all this he glorifies "the 
 only wise God through Jesus Christ unto all ages." 
 The resemblances of language between this doxology 
 and later Epistles (especially the Epistle to the Ephe- 
 sians and the Pastoral Epistles) have often been noticed 
 and have led, in conjunction with some textual phe- 
 nomena, to the supposition that it really comes from 
 a later Epistle, and was subsequently attached to the 
 Epistle to the Romans. The truth however is that 
 even in language the affinities of the doxology with 
 the rest of this Epistle and the Epistles of the same 
 period are at least as great ; while as regards the ideas 
 of the middle portion of the doxology, their absence 
 in an explicit form from the early group is explained 
 by the considerations presented in the second chapter 
 of the first Epistle to the Corinthians, and by the 
 immature condition of the Churches at that time. In 
 substance however these ideas have much in common 
 with the thought of Rom. viii. 18 — 30, and still more 
 
Chapter xvi. 57 
 
 with the drift of Rom. ix — xi. They have also the 
 special fitness of restoring to the Epistle at the close 
 its former serene loftiness, after the jarring inter- 
 ruption caused by the necessary interposition of the 
 warning in vv. 17 — 20. 
 
 Such is the last chapter of the Epistle as presented 
 in the best MSS. and other authorities, and I believe 
 quite rightly. We have no time for going over all' the 
 textual variations, much less discussing them. It is 
 enough to indicate the leading points, neglecting the 
 less important combinations. The benediction which 
 properly comes (20 b) after the warning verses, was 
 early (in Western texts) transferred to what seemed a 
 fitter place, after the postscript of greetings. When 
 the verses were numbered in the sixteenth century, 
 it was reckoned as v. 24. 
 
 The doxology or concluding verses has a more 
 varied history. It was omitted altogether in what is 
 probably the earliest form of the Western text ; it 
 was on the contrary duplicated in the Alexandrian text, 
 being inserted at the end of c. xiv. as well as at the 
 end of the Epistle. In the Syrian revision the earlier 
 of the two places was preferred, and in accordance 
 with Western authority it was struck out at the end. 
 The arrangement familiar to us all, by which it stands 
 
 ' [See the discussion in the Appendix to "The New Testament in the 
 Original Greek " 1881 ; also the articles in the Journal of Classical and 
 Sacred Philology, Vol. ii. iii., reprinted in 'Biblical Essays' by Bishop 
 Lightfoot (1893). Edd.] 
 
eg Chapter xvi. 
 
 at the end of the Epistle and not at the end of c. xiv., 
 is one of the most important of the comparatively 
 few cases in which the Textus Receptus differs from 
 the Syrian text. Erasmus here followed the Latin 
 Vulgate against the Greek evidence accessible to him, 
 and his collocation of the doxology has been retained 
 in all the common subsequent editions. Thus, but for 
 his retention of the double benediction, in which he had 
 likewise the support of the Latin Vulgate as known 
 to him (though not, as it happens, of the best MSS. 
 of it), the structure of the chapter in the Received 
 Text would have needed no correction. There re- 
 main critical questions of much interest as to the 
 cause of the insertion of the doxology after c. xiv. in 
 the Alexandrian text, the alleged omission of cc. xv., 
 xvi. by Marcion, and the undoubted omission of the 
 doxology altogether in the Western text : but it 
 would take a disproportionate amount of time to 
 discuss them now. There are none of the textual 
 phenomena which cannot, I believe, be reasonably 
 explained on the assumption that all the extant 
 matter not only is by St Paul but belonged to the 
 Epistle to the Romans as originally dictated by him ; 
 and that the right order is that to which we are 
 accustomed in the ordinary editions and in the 
 English Bible ; the only correction needed being the 
 removal of v. 24, that is of the repetition of the 
 benediction found in its proper place in v. 20. 
 
ANALYSIS OF 
 THE EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 
 
 I. i — iv. Jew and Gentile before God in respect of right- 
 
 eousness, 
 i. I — 7. Salutation, emphasizing tlie Gospel as a fulfilment, and 
 
 the nature of his own Apostleship in relation to the Romans. 
 i. 8 — 17. Desire for personal fellowship with the Romans, founded 
 
 on his debt to all alike, because the Gospel makes known a 
 
 Divine righteousness by faith, 
 i. 18 — fin. The revelation of a Divine wrath in the moral evil 
 
 that followed on refusal to know God. 
 ii. I — 16. Self-righteousness condemned in every quarter, 
 ii. 17 — iii. 8. The false and the true privilege of the Jew. 
 iii. g — fin. No inferiority of the Jew, but all alike, Jew and 
 
 Gentile, found wanting, and all alike freely justified by faith 
 
 through the redemption in Christ Jesus, 
 iv. The forefather Abraham himself an example of righteousness 
 
 by faith. 
 
 II. V — viii. The universal peace springing from the mani- 
 fested love of God. 
 
 (A summing up of present results with a view to action : but inter- 
 rupted after v. 1 1 by a digression on sin, which eventually gives a fuller 
 sense to these results.) 
 
 V. I — II. Plea for peace arising from God's love shewn in 
 His sacrificing His Son. 
 
6o ANALYSIS OF THE 
 
 V. 13 — fin. Christ replaces Adam as the one representative man, 
 
 bringing life instead of death, 
 vi. God's grace no incentive to immorality, because the Death is 
 
 intelligible only as a step to the Resurrection, which involves 
 
 a new and better life. 
 vii. I — viii. ii. The Law becomes at last an instrument of evil, 
 
 and cannot be the final form of righteousness, which can only 
 
 be found in the life of the Spirit, 
 viii. 1 2 — fin. The Spirit or Spirit of Sonship, bearing witness of 
 
 God's fatherly love, which must be infinite and omnipotent. 
 
 III. ix — xi. Jew and Gentile in history according to the 
 counsel of God. 
 
 (Comment on the seeming separation of God's own people from God's 
 love [cf. Acts xxviii. 25 — 28] by reference to His larger counsel. Diffi- 
 cult and uncertain.) 
 
 ix. I — 13. The excision of Israelites, and its consistency with 
 
 retention of Israel, 
 ix. 14 — fin. Justification of God's ways by His supremacy and 
 
 for manifestation of His full purposes. 
 X. I — xi. 12. The Jew's special prerogative of godliness that in 
 
 which his failure was greatest : reception and rejection of 
 
 good tidings : the remnant represents the nation : the incoming 
 
 of the Gentiles the purpose of the Jew's failure, 
 xi. 13 — 32. Excision may await the Gentiles : mercy the condition 
 
 of all reception. 
 xi. 33 — fin. (May be taken with what precedes.) Concluding 
 
 doxology on the triumph of God's will. 
 
 IV. xii — xvi. Fruits of acknowledged mercy. Salutations 
 and last words. 
 
 xii. I, 2. The Christian sacrifice and its probation of God's will 
 
 (just exemplified in Jew and Gentile), 
 xii. 3— xiii. fin. Duty within the Christian body, and without the 
 
 Christian body, both founded on love, shewn forth in works of 
 
 light, 
 xiv. I — XV. 6. The law of love applied to scruples of conscience 
 
 through mutual bearing of burdens. 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 6i 
 
 XV. 7 — 13. Resumption of all preceding matter as tending to 
 
 joy, peace, and hope in the Spirit. 
 XV. 14 — 21. Apologies for instructing the Romans, partly on 
 
 the ground that he is the Apostle of the Gentiles, though 
 
 scrupulous in choice of spheres of preaching. 
 XV. 22 — fin. His hope of seeing them now: the object of his 
 
 mission to Jerusalem : and the reason why it must precede his 
 
 visit to Rome, 
 xvi. I, 2. Commendation of Phoebe. 
 
 3 — 16. Greetings. 
 
 17 — 20. Interjected warning against Judaisers. 
 
 20 b. Grace. 
 
 21 — 23. Resumed greetings from Corinth. 
 
 25 — 27. Final doxology and thanksgiving. 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 TO THE 
 
 EPISTLE TO THE EPHESIANS 
 
THE EPISTLE TO THE EPHESIANS. 
 
 [MICHAELMAS TERM, 1891.] 
 
 The subject on which I propose to lecture this 
 term is the Epistle to the Ephesians. None of the 
 apostolic Epistles more needs the most exact and 
 careful study to ascertain its meaning, and none repays 
 more richly any labour and thought bestowed upon 
 it. A large proportion of its verses is taken up with 
 theology in the strictest and purest sense of the 
 word, the speech of God to man, and especially the 
 meaning of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. 
 On the other hand the message descending from 
 heaven to earth is preeminently in this Epistle made 
 the foundation of true religion, of the true manner of 
 life in all the great human relations. In the present 
 day the Epistle has a peculiar value, because in 
 various ways its teaching stands in close relation to 
 some of the problems which cannot now but exercise 
 our minds both in theology and in the sphere of 
 H. R. 5 
 
66 PURPOSE OF THESE LECTURES. 
 
 practical life. Thus what is true of the Bible 
 generally is specially true of the Epistle to the Ephe- 
 sians: light falls on the study of it from present 
 experience, and so read, it casts back yet more light ' 
 for present needs. 
 
 But there is no disguising the fact that it is a 
 very difficult book, needing much patience to trace 
 out its meaning, and even then by no means always 
 as yet allowing its precise sense to be discovered. 
 Still no one can work at it with labour and thought 
 without learning much at every step, provided he 
 comes to the book as a learner indeed, not imposing 
 on it the preconceptions which he may have derived 
 from quite other sources. Among those who are 
 proposing to attend these lectures there will no doubt 
 be great differences of capacity and acquirements, 
 and it is obviously impossible to find a style of 
 lecturing which will be equally well suited to all. 
 I am anxious however not to forget the various needs 
 of my hearers, though it may be impossible to avoid 
 what is said seeming at times too elementary for 
 some, and at times too elaborate for others. It is, I 
 believe, well that all divinity students should have 
 some knowledge of the processes which have to be 
 gone through before an apostolic Epistle can be either 
 securely named and its historical place securely 
 determined, or its contents- securely interpreted. 
 Nothing more than specimens, as it were, of these 
 and the like processes can by the nature of the case 
 
NECESSARY LIMITATIONS. 67 
 
 be given within the limits of University lectures : but 
 even from such specimens any attentive hearer, I 
 venture to hope, may gather thoughts and suggestions 
 likely to be of use to him in his own subsequent 
 study of other books of the Bible, in addition to what 
 he may learn respecting the book which forms the 
 immediate subject of the lectures. Much must, how- 
 ever, depend on the amount of personal work which a 
 student puts into the subject before and after hearing 
 lectures upon it. Lectures can never take the place 
 of personal study, and it is not in the least desirable 
 that they should. Their primary office is to stimulate 
 reading and to guide reading ; though no doubt they 
 may also be of use in supplying positive instruction in 
 the immediate subject, as regards both facts and the 
 conclusions which may be safely drawn from facts. 
 It is the simple truth that most men have a greatly 
 exaggerated sense of their own incapacity for personal 
 study of such subjects as these. Doubtless there will 
 be always much that has to be taken on trust, 
 whether the authority be a book or a living voice. 
 But there is much also on which every one can 
 exercise his faculties with advantage to himself: and 
 without some preliminary exercise and learning of 
 this kind he is but too likely to listen in a fog, and 
 so to lose whatever chance he might otherwise have 
 of finding interest or instruction. 
 
 In dealing with one of the apostolic Epistles, as 
 indeed with many other works of ancient literature, 
 
 5—2 
 
68 TEXT, INTERPRETATION, INTRODUCTION. 
 
 three heads of study have to be taken into account, 
 Text, Interpretation, and what is now called Intro- 
 duction. The determination of the Text means the 
 ascertainment of what the author of the book actually 
 wrote, i.e. the detection and removal of blunders or rash 
 changes made by copyists during the period between 
 the writing of the book itself and the writing of the 
 extant manuscripts in which the book has been trans- 
 mitted to us. On this head I shall say nothing at 
 the outset, merely noticing some of the most important 
 various readings as they may come before us in their 
 turn. One such indeed of peculiar interest we shall 
 have to consider immediately. The Interpretation of 
 the text is the main subject of these lectures. It is 
 not at all probable that we shall be able to get far into 
 the Epistle this term, my purpose being not to set 
 before you a long line of mere opinions of my own as 
 to the meaning of this or that word or sentence : but 
 rather to suggest how their meaning may be worked 
 out with more or less certainty by weighing evidence 
 and tracing connexions of thought. Before however 
 we enter on Interpretation I hope to devote some 
 time to the third head, Introduction, the constituent 
 parts of which will come before us shortly. 
 
 This seems to be the best time for saying a little 
 about books. Some of the chief questions belonging 
 to Introduction are still matters of lively debate ; so 
 that no book can be referred to as giving a statement 
 of generally recognised conclusions. In English the 
 
BOOKS TREATING OF THE INTRODUCTION. 69 
 
 best material coming under this head is to be found in 
 what are literally " Introductions " to Commentaries. 
 The older books, which though old are by no means 
 superannuated, are that of Meyer, the first really great 
 commentary on St Paul in recent times, well trans- 
 lated, and published by Messrs Clark ; and next the 
 work of our own Alford, which is in a great measure 
 founded on Meyer, but often shews independent and 
 usually intelligent judgment, without however special 
 penetration or originality. A much more recent and 
 very valuable book is the separate Introduction to 
 the New Testament by Bernhard Weiss, now made 
 accessible to English reading in a translation. On 
 two considerable points belonging to the Introduction 
 to the Epistle to the Ephesians he seems to me to 
 take a perverse line, as he does also about some of the 
 other Epistles. But what he has written is full of good 
 materials and good observations, well worthy of being 
 studied. On questions of authorship in particular his 
 judgments are usually comprehensive and sensible. 
 
 Of untranslated German books probably the most 
 important are Woldemar Schmidt's recasting of the 
 Introduction to Meyer's Commentaries and Bleek's 
 Lectures on the Epistles to the Ephesians and Colos- 
 sians, on the side favourable to St Paul's authorship ; 
 and on the other side, Holtzmann's and Hilgenfeld's 
 Introductions to the New Testament, the former 
 following an earlier work of the author devoted 
 specially to the relations between the Epistle to the 
 
70 COMMENTARIES. 
 
 Ephesians and that to the Colossians. The same 
 general line, adverse to St Paul's authorship, is 
 taken in the Introductions to two Commentaries 
 published within the last few months, those of 
 Klopper and Von Soden. 
 
 Of books useful for purposes of interpretation 
 some of the most important names have been already 
 given in the list for Introduction, viz. for English 
 readers the translated Meyer and Alford. To these 
 must of course be added Lightfoot's commentary on 
 the Epistle to the Colossians, as containing much 
 illustrative matter : Bishop EUicott's editions of 
 both Epistles are likewise useful books of reference 
 on matters of language and grammar. There are 
 no additional German commentaries of exceptional 
 importance, though there are several of considerable 
 value. Woldemar Schmidt, by no means so great 
 a commentator as Meyer, has corrected some of his 
 crotchets, and has the advantage of profiting by 
 the labours of many students down to a much later 
 time ; so that on the whole his commentary is the 
 best we have. Others that may be named are 
 Olshausen (now rather of old date, to whom Arch- 
 bishop Trench was much indebted), Ewald and 
 Harless. Bengel's Gnomon Novi Testamenti, in terse 
 and pregnant Latin, is one of the very few Com- 
 mentaries that can never become obsolete: twenty- 
 nine only of its pages are required for the Epistle to 
 the Ephesians. 
 
GRAMMAR AND LEXICONS. 71 
 
 All commentaries are however unprofitable with- 
 out an assiduous previous use of grammar and lexicon 
 or concordance. Winer's Grammar of the New 
 Testament, as translated and enlarged by Dr Moulton, 
 stands far above every other for this purpose. It does 
 not need many minutes to learn the ready use of the 
 admirable indices, of passages and of subjects : and 
 when the book is consulted in this manner, its ex- 
 tremely useful contents become in most cases readily 
 accessible. Dr Moulton's reference to the notes of the 
 best recent English commentaries are a helpful ad- 
 dition. As regards New Testament Lexicography 
 much remains to be done : but there is abundance of 
 excellent matter in two books of curiously unlike sort, 
 both unfortunately rather dear, Thayer's translation 
 (with enormous additions) of Grimm's general New 
 Testament Lexicon (itself in Latin a cheap and por- 
 table book), and Cremer's Biblico-Theological Lexicon 
 of New Testament Greek, now well translated, con- 
 taining thoughtful but too elaborate and cumbrous 
 articles on select words. Trench's well-known book 
 on the Synonyms of the New Testament, very diffe- 
 rent in form, has somewhat similar merits and defects, 
 but is much less rich in illustrative passages. More 
 valuable, however, than any lexicon is Bruder's in- 
 valuable Greek Concordance to the New Testament. 
 If it be true, as assuredly it is, that the New Testa- 
 ment is best illustrated by itself, i.e. by the light which 
 one passage receives from comparison with other pas- 
 
72 INTRODUCTION: ITS THREE HEADS. 
 
 sages, a good Greek concordance is the most indis- 
 pensable of all instruments of study to every Biblical 
 student. Using it patiently and thoughtfully, anyone 
 will soon find the need of the additional help which 
 may be found in commentaries, i.e. in the answers 
 which preceding students of the sacred words have 
 found, or thought they found, to the same questions 
 which had suggested themselves to him. But the 
 previous process will have put him in a position to 
 receive real help from the commentaries; and they 
 in turn will in most cases send him back to his New 
 Testament and concordance with subjects for fresh 
 search. 
 
 This must suffice about books. We must now 
 enter on questions belonging to Introduction. The 
 most important of these fall under three heads ; first, 
 the Recipients of the Epistle, secondly, its Author, and 
 thirdly, its Date and the Circumstances under which it 
 was written — and connected with this its Purpose. 
 All these points bear closely and directly upon in- 
 terpretation. The Divine purpose by which the 
 Epistle came to be written and was allowed to be- 
 come-part of our Scriptures of the New Covenant 
 accomplished itself by human means and under 
 human conditions. Just as we are always liable to 
 misunderstand a verse when we detach it from its 
 context of surrounding verses, so also we are liable to , 
 misunderstand the drift of the whole Epistle and the 
 meaning of many of its parts when we detach it from 
 
PECULIAR DIFFICULTIES. 73 
 
 its context of historical circumstances ; and its con- 
 text of historical circumstances is but a single phrase 
 combining those various heads of Introduction. 
 Other heads of Introduction concern the history of 
 the Epistle after it was written, its reception in 
 different Churches, or by different writers, and its 
 subsequent preservation in the original and in trans- 
 lations. But these have only an indirect bearing on 
 the greater questions which I mentioned first ; and 
 for the most part we shall be able to avoid letting 
 them encroach on our limited time. 
 
 For the sake of clearness it is worth noticing at 
 once that those questions of Introduction which can- 
 not be passed over without discussion include in the 
 case of this Epistle some peculiar points which have 
 nothing answering to them in the case of most of the 
 other Epistles. For reasons which will soon appear 
 the question of the recipients is of curious complexity, 
 viz. whether the Epistle was written to the Ephesians 
 only, or to various other Churches only, or to the 
 Ephesians as well as to those other Churches. So 
 also the question of authorship, and thus of purpose, 
 is mixed up with a question as to the relation between 
 this Epistle and the Epistle to the Colossians, and 
 also, though to a less degree, with the question as to 
 the relation between this Epistle and the First Epistle 
 of St Peter. 
 
 To prevent the possibility of misunderstanding, it 
 is as well to express at the outset my own firm 
 
74 A UTHORSHIP. 
 
 conviction that the Epistle was written by St Paul. 
 The reasons which have been supposed to enforce a 
 different conclusion will have to be carefully con- 
 sidered presently. But it will be convenient to begin 
 with the less burning question who were the re- 
 cipients of the Epistle. 
 
RECIPIENTS. 
 
 The title is 7r/309 'E^eo-t'ou?, To the Ephesians. 
 Whatever be the date or authority of that title, of 
 course it does not proceed from St Paul : it expresses 
 simply an early belief or an early tradition, the 
 probable authority of which we must reserve for 
 further consideration. But obviously this title is 
 supported by the common text of w. i, which clearly 
 says TOK afytoi? rots" ovabv iv ^<f>eaa> Kai irKnoifi ev 
 'X.piaro) ^Irjaov. This common text, however, is open 
 to the gravest doubts. The greater part of the exter- 
 nal evidence unfavourable to it has become known 
 only in quite recent times : yet for some two centuries 
 past a succession of critics have strongly questioned 
 its integrity. The words ev 'E^eo-w are omitted by 
 the two manuscripts which are not only oldest, 
 but also best, H* B, and by the corrector of a later 
 MS. (6^) whose corrections are evidently taken from 
 another quite different MS. of great excellence, now 
 
76 EARLY OMISSION OF eN 'Ec|)ect,j. 
 
 lost. Early in the third century Origen', com- 
 menting oh the Epistle, uses language which shews 
 that these words were absent from his text, i.e. his 
 interpretation would be unintelligible if they were 
 present. About one and a half centuries later 
 Jerome" shews a knowledge of Origen's interpretation 
 but this cannot count as independent evidence. In 
 the same period, however, Basil' refers to the fact 
 that Iv 'E^eo-ft) was omitted both by predecessors 
 of his (doubtless meaning again Origen) and in the 
 older manuscripts (rot? TraXatot? twv avriypd^mv) : 
 the way in which he distinguishes these two classes 
 of authorities renders it practically certain that he 
 spoke exactly when he said he had found this reading 
 {riiJLet<;...evprjicaiiev) in those manuscripts. 
 
 Going back to Origen's time we find Tertullian 
 reporting a very interesting fact respecting Marcion. 
 We learn from him that Marcion, who is com- 
 monly, but not very correctly, reckoned among 
 Gnostics, retained our Epistle in his collections of 
 his favourite apostle St Paul's Epistles, but under 
 
 ' (In Cramer's Catena, p. 102). ivi ixdvwv "E^caluv eiipo/ieK Kel/i^vov 
 rb ToTs ayioLS rots offfft. Kal ^7iTovfj.ev, el fiij irapiXKei irpoffKeifieifOP rb 
 Tois aytois tols oSiri, ri Sivarai. aijixalvav Spa ovv d iiT) wavep ip rg 
 E^6S(^ ovofxd (pTjfftv eaifToO b xRVf^'^ri^cop Mwtret rb wv oijTios ol fier^xovres 
 ToO oVtos ylpovrai ovres, KoKoi/xevoi. olovel iK toO iJ,i) elvai els rb etvai, k.t.\. 
 
 ^ Comm. in Ep. ad Eph. i. i. Quidam curiosius quam necesse est 
 putant ex eo quod Moysi dictum sit Haec dices JiHis Israel: Qui est misit 
 me, etiam eos qui Ephesi sunt sancti et fideles, essentiae vocabulo 
 nuncupates &c. 
 
 ^ I. 255 (Adv. Eunomium, 11. 19). 
 
MARCION'S DESIGNA TION OF THE EPISTLE. 77 
 
 the title "To the Laodicenes'." This can only- 
 mean (i) that Marcion used the title IIpos Aao- 
 SiKea<; (which we actually find in connexion with his 
 name in a confused passage of Epiphanius, I. 374 B), 
 and, (2) that he had no corresponding words in 
 his text of the Epistle. Had he had iv 'E^eaa, the 
 contradiction would have been too flagrant. Had he 
 had iv AaoBiKLu (a reading of which there is no trace 
 anywhere), TertuUian, who describes the Epistle as 
 " according to the verity of the Church intituled ' to 
 Ephesians'" would assuredly have used strong language 
 about him, for what he would have assumed to be a 
 falsifying of the Apostle's own words. It has further 
 been concluded with great probability that TertuUian's 
 text likewise did not contain either pair of words, 
 since otherwise he would have censured Marcion for 
 omitting them. It is better, however, not to lay much 
 stress on this inference, as he might possibly be less 
 impressed by the omission of two words, than by the 
 change in the whole address of the letter involved in 
 the change of title. 
 
 Thus much at least comes out clearly that the words 
 ev 'E^eo-ft) were absent from at least some manuscripts 
 early in the second century, early in the third century, 
 
 ' Aiiv. Marc. v. 17. Ecclesiae quidem veritate epistolam istam ad 
 Ephesios habemus emissam non ad Laodicenos : sed Marcion ei titulum 
 aliquando interpolare ( = falsify) gestiit, quasi et in isto diligentissimus 
 explorator. Nihil autem de titulis interest &c. Cf. c. 11. Praetereo 
 hie et de alia epistola, quam nos ad Ephesios praescriptam habemus, 
 haeretici vero ad Laodicenos. 
 
78 IVAS LAODICEA THE DESTINATION? 
 
 and late in the fourth century, the geographical 
 regions in the three cases being different ; as well as 
 from the three important manuscripts still extant. 
 
 How came Marcion, however, to have " the Lao- 
 dicenes" in the title to his copy of the Epistle? 
 Evidently this fact must somehow be connected with 
 what we read in Col. iv. i6. There St Paul desires that 
 the Epistle to the Colossians after being read in the 
 Colossian Church, may also be read in the Laodicean 
 Church, and, he adds that they themselves, the men 
 of Colossae, should likewise read the letter Ik Aao- 
 BiKia<; (kuI Trjv €k AaoBLKi,a<; Xva Koi vfiei<; dvayvwre), 
 which in this context can only mean a letter of St 
 Paul himself received at Laodicea and sent on thence. 
 On the strength partly of this passage, partly of a 
 shrinking from recognition of the former existence of 
 Epistles of St Paul not preserved to us, it has often 
 been supposed not only that the Epistle there spoken 
 of is our Epistle to the Ephesians, but that Laodicea, 
 and not Ephesus, was its real destination, and that 
 Marcion's copy thus bore the only correct title. We 
 must here carefully distinguish the two points, identity 
 with what we call the Epistle to the Ephesians, and 
 exclusive destination for Laodicea. The first sup- 
 position is not only possible, but highly probable ; but 
 only under conditions which exclude the second. If 
 indeed it were true that our Epistle implies St Paul to 
 be in person unknown to all to whom he wrote it, then 
 no doubt Laodicea would suit better than Ephesus. 
 
EXTERNAL EVIDENCE FOR TITLE. 79 
 
 But, as we shall see presently, that is not tenable 
 ground ; and in all other respects whatever difficulties 
 there are in an exclusive address to Ephesus, apply 
 in still greater force to the supposition of an exclusive 
 address to Laodicea. It follows that either the 
 Epistle was indeed addressed to Laodicea, but not to 
 Laodicea alone, and that Marcion's copy was derived 
 from the specially Laodicene copy; or that Marcion 
 found irpo'i 'E(f>e(Tiov^ in the title to his copy, but 
 deliberately changed it to Trpo? AaoS(,Kea<;. If this 
 latter supposition be true, i.e. if he altered the title 
 which he found, then no doubt he did so on grounds 
 of criticism, probably because he thought it must be 
 the Epistle mentioned at the end of Colossians, and 
 so supposed himself to be correcting a nameless title- 
 maker on the authority of the Apostle himself A 
 phrase of Tertullian seems to imply that this was 
 indeed the case : he would hardly have said " quasi et 
 in isto diligentissimus explorator," if he thought that 
 Marcion was only making an arbitrary guess, rather 
 than performing a critical process. In what sense or 
 senses Laodicea may indeed have had a share in the 
 address of the Epistle we shall see presently. But 
 that has nothing to do with Marcion, if this is the 
 right explanation of Marcion's title. To all appear- 
 ance that title of his attests nothing but the existence 
 of a very ancient text of the Epistle from which the 
 words iv 'E^eo-o) were absent. 
 
 Our next step is to consider the textual question, 
 
So INTERNAL EVIDENCE. 
 
 did these words really belong to St Paul's text or not ? 
 No version omits them, so far as is known. The 
 evidence of Fathers is ambiguous, because no one not 
 yet mentioned quotes the verse at all till late in the 
 fourth century and early in the fifth century, when 
 we find eV 'E^ecrw in the Syrian Fathers, and then in 
 Cyril of Alexandria. But the authorities which do 
 omit, estimated by what we know of their excellence 
 elsewhere, afford a strong presumption against the 
 words. 
 
 What then is the Internal Evidence? Here we 
 come upon those special characteristics of the Epistle 
 which have long attracted attention. Contrary to 
 St Paul's custom, one man alone besides himself 
 is named in it. It was to be carried by Tychicus, 
 
 Eph.vi.2i, whom he calls "the beloved brother and faithful 
 minister {hiaKovoi) in the Lord," whom he was sending 
 to them to give them tidings of himself, and to 
 encourage their hearts. St Paul uses as nearly as 
 possible the same language about Tychicus in writing 
 
 Col. iv. 7. to the Colossians. But there the similarity ceases. 
 In the Epistle to the Colossians we have salu- 
 tations from several named persons, salutations or 
 messages to others. It is the same in the little private 
 Epistle to Philemon, which was evidently sent with 
 that to the Colossians. Of all this we have nothing in 
 our Epistle. In both those other Epistles " Timothy 
 our brother" stands at the head with St Paul himself; 
 in the Epistle to the Ephesians St Paul stands alone. 
 
IMPERSONAL CHARACTER OF THE EPISTLE. 8i 
 
 This difference in externals that catch the eye is 
 repeated even more remarkably in the inner substance. 
 In the Epistle to the Colossians, and in all St Paul's 
 other writings, the special circumstances, or conduct, 
 or tendencies of the Christians addressed, have left a 
 deep mark on part of the Epistle, or on the whole of 
 it. But nothing thus special and limited can be re- 
 cognised in the Epistle to the Ephesians, the little 
 that is said of its destined recipients being couched 
 in quite general language. In the Epistle to the 
 Colossians much of the teaching is manifestly contro- 
 versial, directed against mischievous tendencies at 
 work in the Church addressed. In the Epistle to the 
 Ephesians there are no clear or express warnings of 
 this kind: from first to last the teaching, whether 
 theological or religious, is exclusively positive in 
 form ; whatever reference there may be to tendencies 
 dreaded is exclusively indirect. These are character- 
 istics which would most naturally be found in a letter 
 addressed to a number of Churches, differing from 
 each other in circumstances, condition, and personal 
 relations with the writer of the Epistle. It would be 
 difficult on the other hand to account for them in an 
 Epistle addressed solely to the Church of a single 
 city, above all, if that city were Ephesus. 
 
 Let us pause here a little to consider what the 
 H. R. 6 
 
82 ST PAUL'S PAST RELATIONS WITH EPHESUS. 
 
 past relations between this Ephesian Church and St 
 Paul had really been. The evidence all lies on the 
 surface of the New Testament, but its full significance 
 does not always make itself felt without a little 
 consideration. In St Paul's first 'missionary journey,' 
 as everyone will remember, he entered what we call 
 Asia Minor from the south, and penetrated northward 
 inland, without swerving westward to the great cities 
 on or near the ^gean. On his second journey, after 
 visiting and stablishing the Churches founded on that 
 former occasion, he was appai'ently making his way 
 to Proconsular Asia, doubtless specially meaning to 
 preach in its great capital Ephesus, when he received 
 a Divine warning which led him to pass onwards 
 further to the north-west : St Luke's words are "being 
 
 Actsxvi.6. hindered (plural, i.e. Paul and Timothy and Silas) 
 by the Holy Spirit from preaching the word in Asia." 
 Other monitions led him on across the Hellespont, 
 and so he found himself carrying out a succession of 
 European missions, while Ephesus, the chief city of 
 Asia Minor, still lay behind him untouched. On his 
 return to the East, though he had little time to spare, 
 it would seem that he could not be satisfied without 
 at least setting foot in Ephesus, and making some 
 small beginning of preaching in person there. He 
 left Aquila and Priscilla to carry on the work : 
 
 Acts xviii. but he himself entered into the synagogue according 
 to his usual practice, and reasoned with the Jews. 
 Then resisting all entreaties to remain, he said fare- 
 
PREPARATION FOR A LONG STAY. 83 
 
 well with a promise to return again if God should 
 will, sailed to Palestine, visited first Jerusalem and 
 then Antioch, where he stayed some time, and then 
 followed his old course through southern Asia Minor, 
 and this time was allowed to follow it right on to its 
 natural goal, Ephesus. How closely in St Luke's Acts xviii. 
 view that first short visit to Ephesus was connected ' 
 with this second much longer visit, may be inferred 
 from the extraordinary brevity with which he gathers 
 together the three long journeys to and from Ephesus, 
 dispatching them in five or six lines. The whole 
 story gains in point and clearness if we suppose that 
 it is essentially a record of the steps by which 
 St Paul was enabled to carry out a cherished desire, to 
 be himself the founder of a Christian Church in that 
 great metropolis in which the East looked out upon 
 the West. His desire was granted, and moreover 
 Ephesus was the only city of the first rank which, so 
 far as any trustworthy evidence goes, had as its 
 founder either St Paul or any other apostle. 
 
 As a prelude to St Paul's arrival at Ephesus this 
 second time, we are told of Apollos' reception and 
 instruction by Aquila and Priscilla. Then comes the 
 incident of the men who had received only the 
 baptism of John the Baptist, St Paul's preaching in 
 the synagogue for three months, and then, when this 
 course was hindered by the resistance of unbelieving 
 Jews, his forming the disciples into a separate body 
 in Tyrannus's lecture-hall. Next comes a compre- 
 
 6—2 
 
84 THE CENTRE OF GENTILE CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 Actsxix. hensive verse, "and this continued for the space 
 '°' of two years, so that all they which dwelt in Asia 
 
 heard the word of the Lord, both Jews and Greeks," 
 followed by an account of St Paul's miracles, and of 
 the incident which led to the burning of the magical 
 books. Of this long period (two years and more), 
 during which St Paul was building up the Ephesian 
 Church we know little. It does not seem to have 
 been quite without interruptions, but probably these 
 interruptions were few and briefs On the other hand, 
 as is proved by allusions in the Epistles, it must have 
 been a time of sore anxieties to St Paul about the 
 state of other Churches, and of dangers and sufferings 
 encountered by him in his own person^. But at this 
 stage in the course of events, we are led by the Acts 
 to regard Ephesus as the centre and starting point of 
 Gentile Christendom, just as the Syrian Antioch had 
 been at first, when the Gospel had gone forth beyond 
 Jerusalem and Judea, and as Rome was to be pre- 
 sently, from the time marked by the end of St Luke's 
 narrative. 
 
 When at last St Paul had decided to leave 
 Ephesus for a series of long journeys ending at Rome, 
 the great tumult occurred which was stirred up by 
 Demetrius in the name of Diana of Ephesus. After 
 this memorable occurrence St Paul set forth on his 
 journey into Macedonia and Greece. Then returning 
 
 1 See Lightfoot, Col. 30 f. 
 
 2 Lightfoot, Gal. 38 ff. 
 
SUMMARY OF EVENTS. 85 
 
 from the west, and making his way to Jerusalem, once 
 more he craved converse with Ephesus, though too 
 much pressed for time to risk the delay which a visit 
 there might bring; and so from Miletus he sent for 
 the elders of the Ephesian Church, and gave them 
 those peculiarly solemn warnings, in which he re- 
 minded them of his own labours among them, and 
 told them that they would see his face no more. 
 
 Let us now gather up in our minds these successive 
 stages in the relations between St Paul and the 
 Ephesians — his original desire to preach among them, 
 checked for the time by a Divine warning, his recep- 
 tion on his first short visit when he left his two trusty 
 associates behind, the two or three long and evidently 
 eventful years during which Ephesus was his home, 
 and lastly the summons to the rulers and teachers of 
 its Christian community to meet him and receive what 
 he then believed to be his last admonitions. Having 
 so done, if we turn to the Epistle and read it through, 
 we cannot but marvel how it could be so entirely 
 devoid of all traces of such rich and heartfelt ex- 
 periences, if it really was addressed to the Ephesians 
 alone. No doubt the difficulty does not exist for those 
 who say that the Epistle was not written by St Paul 
 at all, but by some one in his name, to whom the 
 Ephesian Christians suggested themselves as persons 
 to whom St Paul might naturally be supposed to 
 write. But, apart from the improbability that an 
 epistle should be thus fictitiously written without the 
 
86 QUESTION OF READING en 'E^eccf) RESUMED. 
 
 slightest attempt to infuse any local colour, we 
 shall presently find ample reason for accepting its 
 genuineness. If however it is genuine, these charac- 
 teristics which we have been considering suggest that, 
 if addressed to the Ephesian Church, it must have 
 been likewise addressed to other Churches, whose 
 circumstances in relation to St Paul were entirely 
 different. This inference is quite independent of the 
 external or documentary evidence for omitting iv 
 'E^e'o-p : but evidently they afford strong support to 
 each other. 
 
 Before we go on to consider what kind of destina- 
 tion for our Epistle would be at once most probable 
 in itself and most in accordance with these conditions, 
 we had better finish what is involved in the question 
 whether on the whole internal evidence does or does 
 not sustain the omission of eV 'E^ecrci). It is alleged 
 that the omission of these words leaves a sentence 
 which yields no reasonable meaning. Certainly no one 
 could now be satisfied to follow Origen and Basil in 
 putting a transcendental force into rot? oxxriv — "the 
 Saints that ARE," as partaking of Him Whose name 
 is I AM. But, as meaning " the saints who are also 
 faithful in Christ Jesus," the phrase would be by no 
 means the unmeaning platitude that it is sometimes 
 said to be ; since it might indicate the combination of 
 
HO IV ABSENCE OF WORDS TO BE EXPLAINED. 87 
 
 the old title of ' saints ' belonging to ancient Israel with 
 the distinctive characteristic of Christians. On the 
 other hand this way of referring indirectly to those who 
 once had been called ' saints,' ill suits the tone of the 
 Epistle, especially as those addressed are treated as 
 having been heathens. And it is a still more serious 
 objection, that both words stand together in no such 
 antithetical sense in the opening salutation of the 
 Epistle to the Colossians tok ev KoXotraal^ a^/ot? Kal 
 •KKTTo'l'; aheX^oh ev Xpto-rd). Though however the 
 simple omission of ev 'E^eo-w would undeniably leave 
 an awkward and improbable phrase, the same cannot 
 be said if the omission is replaced either by alter- 
 native names preceded by ev, or by a blank space 
 such as might be somehow filled up in this manner. 
 Supposing a plurality of Churches to be intended to 
 be recipients of the Epistle, such a plurality of alter- 
 native geographical names or such a blank would be 
 natural enough. 
 
 The suspicion that others besides the Ephesians 
 were intended to be the recipients of the Epistle, goes 
 back as far as Beza, the great Genevan commentator 
 of the latter part of the sixteenth century, who in a 
 note on the subscription at the end says " Sed suspicor 
 non tam ad Ephesios ipsos proprie missam epistolam, 
 quam Ephesum ut ad ceteras Asiaticas ecclesias 
 transmittereturV' which, he adds, perhaps induced 
 some to omit ev 'E(j)ea-q). The same view is worked 
 1 p. 288 (ed. J 598). 
 
I Pet. i. I, 
 
 V. 12. 
 
 88 BEZA'S THEORY DEVELOPED BY USSHER. 
 
 out more fully by Archbishop Ussher in his Annales 
 Veteris et Novi Testamenti\ Referring to the evi- 
 dence of Basil and Jerome, he translates the Greek 
 without Iv 'E^eo-w thus "vel ut in literarum ency- 
 clicarum descriptione fieri solebat Sanctis qui sunt 
 * * * * et fidelibus in Christo Jesu " ; as if, he pro- 
 ceeds, it had been first sent to Ephesus, as the chief 
 metropolis of Asia, to be thence transmitted to the 
 remaining Churches of the same province, with the 
 name of each inserted : and as if some of them, 
 whom Paul himself had never seen, were chiefly 
 referred to in those words of his (he quotes i. 15; 
 iii. 2), which Marcion perhaps regarded as suiting the 
 Laodicenes, who had not seen the apostle in bodily 
 presence, rather than the Ephesians with whom he 
 had so long held converse. 
 
 This suggestion of Ussher's, that the letter was 
 what the Greeks called an encyclical letter, a letter 
 sent on a round of successive places and that the 
 omission of iv 'E^eo-w should accordingly be inter- 
 preted as a gap left blank, supplies the essential 
 points for an explanation which really suits the facts, 
 though Ussher fails to notice the confirmation which 
 it receives from the contents of the letter. That an 
 Epistle should be practically encyclical is not unex- 
 ampled in the New Testament. The First Epistle of 
 St Peter was to be carried round by Silvanus, in his 
 journey through most of what we call Asia Minor, the 
 
 1 Aetas Mundi, vii. p. 680 (ed. 1673). 
 
THIS AN ENCYCLICAL EPISTLE. 89 
 
 provinces in this case being named. How the Apoca- 
 lypse was to be conveyed, we do not know : but in its 
 epistolary aspect it in a manner combines encyclical 
 and so to speak individual characteristics. It includes 
 an epistle addressed to each of seven representative 
 Churches of Proconsular Asia; while the whole book 
 was addressed to them all. 
 
 But we have still to consider the questions, (i) as 
 to its identity with the Epistle called by St Paul "the 
 Epistle from Laodicea," and (2) as to the inclusion of 
 Ephesus itself in the circle of places to which it was to 
 be carried. We have already seen that if our Epistle 
 is identical with the "Epistle from Laodicea," then it 
 cannot have been definitelyaddressed to the single Lao- 
 dicean Church as our Epistle to the Colossians was to 
 the Colossian Church: its internal character makes that 
 incredible. Either then the " Epistle from Laodicea " 
 was indeed addressed singly to Laodicea, but is a lost 
 letter entirely unknown to us ; or it was our Epistle to 
 the Ephesians, having neither more nor less to do 
 with Laodicea than with other cities of that region, 
 and the notice of it under a name connected with 
 Laodicea must be due only to local causes. 
 
 The former supposition is not incredible, but St 
 Paul's language contains indications which make it 
 highly improbable. First writing to Colossae, he sends 
 greetings to the brethren in Laodicea. This would Col. iv. 15. 
 be a strangely circuitous proceeding if he were at 
 the same time writing a letter of the same kind to 
 
90 TAKEN TO LAO DICE A AMONG OTHER PLACES 
 
 Laodicea ; but it is quite intelligible if Laodicea was 
 to receive only an encyclical letter, by its very nature 
 unfitted to contain personal greetings. Again, though 
 the phrase ttjv Ik h.aohiKia<; can be justified by 
 classical precedents as an ordinary case of attraction, 
 it cannot be said that such figures of speech are in St 
 Paul's manner. It is more probable that he purposely 
 avoided saying -rriv et? AaoBiKMv just because it would 
 suggest a letter written specially to Laodicea, whereas 
 the use of Ik would have merely a formal, not a 
 practical ambiguity, and this would rather suggest a 
 letter carried on (or forwarded on) from Laodicea, as 
 an encyclical letter would be. 
 
 This supposition, therefore, of an encyclical Epistle, 
 of which Laodicea was one of the recipients, remains 
 finally as alone satisfying the conditions. Two points 
 have to be noticed here ; (i) personal, as to its mode 
 of conveyance ; (2) geographical, as to the position of 
 Laodicea and Colossae. It was conveyed, we can see, 
 by Tychicus, who probably went on a series or tour of 
 visits to different Churches. 
 
 About the course and limits of his journey we 
 know nothing. The usual supposition is however 
 probably correct that the Churches which Tychicus 
 visited were those of Proconsular Asia, the region 
 most nearly associated with St Paul's long stay 
 at Ephesus. Proconsular Asia was also Tychicus's 
 own native province, as we learn from Acts xx. 4, 
 'Aaiavol Se TuT^t«os koL T p6(j>ifio<;. Indeed, since 
 
IN PROCONSULAR ASIA BY TYCHICUS. gi 
 
 Trophimus, here coupled with him, was an Ephesian, Acts xxi. 
 it is often inferred that Tychicus was an Ephesian 
 too. But St Luke's words, carefully read, rather 
 suggest that he was not an Ephesian. They stand 
 at the end of a list of seven companions of St Paul 
 in his last journey from Greece to Jerusalem, and 
 four out of the preceding five have their city men- 
 tioned, not their province ; one is from Beroea, two 
 from Thessalonica, one from Derbe ; Timothy (about 
 whom enough had been said in a former chapter) 
 being the fifth. We should therefore have expected 
 'E^ecrtot here, had both Tychicus and Trophimus 
 been from Ephesus ; and the substitution of 'Acriavol, 
 suggests that St Luke was glad to speak of their 
 common province because they had not a common 
 city. To what part of Proconsular Asia Tychicus 
 belonged we cannot in the least tell : but the 
 language of Col. iv. 7 — 9, especially the contrast 
 with the Colossian Onesimus, suggests that he did 
 not come from the district to which Colossae be- 
 longed. 
 
 It can hardly be necessary to remind any one 
 who has read ever so little of Lightfoot's Commentary 
 on the Epistle to the Colossians, how vivid a picture 
 is there^ drawn of this district, the region in which 
 "the Churches of the Lycus" were planted. He 
 describes the great city of Hierapolis and the still 
 greater city of Laodicea, facing each other some 
 ' Epistk to the Colossians, pp. i — 11. 
 
92 ONE COPY CARRIED TO SEVERAL CITIES. 
 
 distance apart on each side of the Lycus, one of the 
 rivers tributary to the Maeander, and then, some ten or 
 twelve miles higher up, the much smaller city of 
 Colossae on the very banks of the river. He reminds 
 us (pp. 17 ff.) that though in one sense belonging to 
 Phrygia this district belonged politically in St Paul's 
 time to the provinces of Asia, of which it formed a 
 remote and distinct part. We have an indication 
 of the close connexion between these three young 
 Col.iv. 13. Christian communities in St Paul's words about 
 Epaphras the Colossian, how he had much toil for the 
 Colossians and for them in Laodicea and for them 
 in Hierapolis. But evidently there were special perils 
 threatening the Church at Colossae which called forth 
 a special letter to them, perils not improbably arising 
 out of proximity to Phrygia proper, though it would 
 also be well that the Laodicenes should hear what it 
 contained. 
 
 Whether the blank in the text of the encyclical 
 epistle was only a blank, or whether for each city it 
 was filled up with the local name, is wholly unim- 
 portant. It is possible but hardly likely that St Paul 
 would provide Tychicus with a number of copies, 
 one for each Church. It seems more natural that 
 Tychicus should carry with him the one original 
 Epistle with a blank space, that in each Church the 
 local name should be orally inserted when the letter 
 was publicly read aloud on Tychicus's arrival ; and 
 perhaps that if, as we should expect, a copy were taken 
 
WAS EPHESUS AMONG THEM? 93 
 
 for local preservation before Tychicus passed on to 
 the next city, the local name should be inserted in 
 writing in such local copy. The only gain, however, 
 of such speculations is to give reality and shape to 
 our conception of the Epistle, not as constituting a few 
 pages of our Bible, but as an actual letter carried 
 actually round and read to gatherings of eager 
 listeners for whom it was expressly written. 
 
 But to return to weightier matters, if our Epistle 
 was an encyclical letter, the question still remains 
 whether it has any right to bear its present title. 
 Was Ephesus itself part of the circle ? If it was the 
 chief cities of Proconsular Asia that formed the circle, 
 it would a priori be natural to expect the circle to 
 include the capital. Here, however, we are met by 
 certain passages which undeniably at first sight 
 suggest that the persons to whom they were written 
 had had no personal intercourse with St Paul, much 
 less such long and close intercourse as we know the 
 Ephesian Christians to have had with him. 
 
 The least important is the first, "Wherefore I Eph. i. 15. 
 also, hearing of the faith in the Lord Jesus that is 
 in yourselves and that ye shew toward all the Saints." 
 This is language not likely to have been chosen 
 without some accessory words if a Church founded by 
 the Apostle were alone addressed. Accordingly 
 Theodore of Mopsuestia, the most acute of ancient 
 critics who have left commentaries on St Paul, assumes 
 on the strength of these words that the Epistle must 
 
94 PASSAGES ALLEGED TO PROVE RECIPIENTS 
 
 have been written before St Paul visited Ephesus^ ; and 
 he is followed by other Greek writers (see Dr Swete's 
 note). But, while in the strictest sense appropriate 
 to the great mass of the Churches just addressed, 
 Churches with which St Paul had no personal acquaint- 
 ance, it would not be inappropriate in reference to 
 tidings about the present condition of the Ephesian 
 Church, from whom, according to the most probable 
 date of the Epistle, he had now been separated for a 
 considerable time. It is likewise worth notice that, 
 
 Col. i. 4. while very similar language is used to the Colos- 
 sians, in their case St Paul says expressly some way 
 
 Col. ii. I. further on " I would have you know how great a 
 striving I have for you and for them at Laodicea 
 zx\d.for as many as have not seen my face in the flesh." 
 We must reasonably have a fortiori expected some 
 such words as these last to occur somewhere in our 
 Epistle, if it was addressed exclusively to Churches 
 who had had no personal contact with the Apostle. 
 
 The other two passages are of a different kind, 
 though they in like manner turn on the word aKova 
 which is applied however to "hearing" on the part of the 
 recipients, not of the writer. They resemble each other 
 still more closely, as both containing the phrase eliye 
 T^KOvaare, "If so be that ye heard (or 'have heard')." 
 
 Eph. iii. 2. In the first of them we read " For this cause I Paul, 
 the prisoner of Christ Jesus, on behalf of you Gentiles, 
 
 ' Professor Swete : Theodore of Mopsuestia on the Minor Epistles of 
 St Paul {1880), vol. I. p. 112. 
 
NO T TO HA VE KNO WN ST PAUL INTIMA TEL V. 95 
 
 — if so be that ye have heard of the stewardship of 
 that grace of God which was given me to you-ward," 
 explained further on as meaning "that the Gentiles 
 are fellow-heirs.'' How was it possible, it is asked, 
 that St Paul should have a shadow of doubt whether 
 the Ephesians, of all men, had heard of that Divine 
 stewardship of his, his special mission to the Gentiles ? 
 Must he not have been exclusively addressing Churches 
 with which he had come into no contact ? The usual 
 answer to these questions is, I think, a true and 
 sufficient one. The compound particle eiye, though 
 it never can mean ' since ' but remains always an 
 intensified "if," is not unfrequently used with a 
 rhetorical or appealing force where no real doubt is 
 meant to be expressed ^ This appealing force is 
 fully expressed here by the context. St Paul is going 
 to plead the cause of Christian holiness as against 
 Gentile indulgence towards vice as one entitled to 
 speak as a prisoner who owed his imprisonment to 
 his zeal for the true welfare of Gentiles : but having 
 made this claim, before he catches up and completes 
 his pleading, he turns aside to ask, as it were, in these iv. 1, 17. 
 words whether they were not pledged to accept the 
 validity of that claim by their knowledge of the 
 special charge divinely entrusted to him. But this 
 is not all. If it is incredible that St Paul should 
 have had real doubts whether the Ephesian Church 
 had heard of that special charge, it is only a shade less 
 
 ' See Bishop EUicott's note. 
 
96 PASSAGES PROVE IF ANYTHING TOO MUCH. 
 
 incredible that any Church of Proconsular Asia should 
 have remained in similar ignorance. The Colossian 
 Christians, in one of the remotest corners of the pro- 
 vince, had, we know with moral certainty, received 
 their faith not from him but from his disciple Epa- 
 
 Col. i. 7. phras^; and there can be no reasonable doubt that 
 it was by men like Epaphras that the Gospel was 
 carried through the province during St Paul's long 
 
 Acts xix. stay at Ephesus, when " all that dwelt in Asia heard 
 
 '°' the word of the Lord, both Jews and Greeks." 
 
 Thus the appealing force of etVe, as distinguished 
 from its doubting force, is alone possible here if the 
 writer was St Paul. 
 
 Eph.iv.21. In the remaining passage St Paul again uses 
 6(76 with an appealing force, though not now on his 
 own behalf but on behalf of his readers. " But ye 
 did not so learn the Christ ; if so be that ye heard 
 him, and were taught in him, as truth is in Jesus ; 
 that ye put away, as concerning your former manner 
 of life, the old man &c." That is, he appeals to that 
 historical Gospel of Jesus of Nazareth which they 
 had originally received as fixing the moral standard 
 of the highest Christian faith. On the other hand it is 
 inconceivable that about any Church of Proconsular 
 Asia, any more than about the Ephesian Church, 
 St Paul could have expressed a real doubt whether 
 they had heard Christ, at least in any sense compatible 
 with the context. Thus both these passages, if they 
 ' See Lightfoot, Colossians, pp. 24 — 31. 
 
TRADITIONAL TITLE FAIRLY CORRECT. 97 
 
 prove anything about the Churches addressed, prove 
 too much : that is, they have no real bearing on the 
 question whether the Ephesian Church was among 
 these Churches. 
 
 Accordingly we are brought back once more to the 
 traditional title irpo'i 'E^eo-t'oi/?. Of its precise date or 
 origin we know nothing. But we do find the Epistle 
 cited under this name by the five chief fathers of the 
 three-quarters of a century ending in the middle of 
 the third century, the period when first with the 
 rarest exceptions the titles of books appear, viz. 
 Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Tertullian, 
 Cyprian ; and nowhere do we find a trace that 
 any other title existed except in Marcion's case, and 
 he, as we saw, probably represents not a tradition but 
 a criticism. Even a title thus carried back to the 
 second century, and probably to an early part of it, 
 would have no decisive authority against really strong 
 evidence of other kinds. But it must carry consider- 
 able weight if in the text itself eV 'E^eo-w is entirely 
 spurious, and not less if these words have been truly 
 transmitted from one original of the Epistle, though 
 not from others. It would also be difficult to think of 
 St Paul as excluding Ephesus from view in writing to 
 a circle of Churches of Proconsular Asia an Epistle 
 having the character and purpose which we shall, I 
 hope, presently find to belong to our Epistle. Thus, 
 on a review of the whole evidence, we are led to the 
 conclusion that the familiar title may rightly be 
 H. R. 7 
 
98 , ST PAUL HAD EPHESUS IN MIND. 
 
 considered defective or inadequate in so far as it gives 
 no indication of the varied range of Churches to which 
 the Epistle was sent ; but that so far as it goes it is true. 
 If we have an adequate sense of what Ephesus was to 
 St Paul, we cannot but feel that there is a true and 
 worthy fitness in the association of our Epistle with 
 the Ephesian name. 
 
II. 
 
 TIME AND PLACE OF WRITING. 
 
 We have now considered all the most essential 
 points respecting the destination of our Epistle, the 
 question, that is, who it was that St Paul had in 
 mind when he was writing. The next great question, 
 whether St Paul himself was indeed the writer, may 
 with advantage stand over a little to be considered 
 with some cognate questions as to the purpose of the 
 Epistle. It will be most convenient to take now a 
 more external question, in this respect resembling 
 that which we have hitherto been considering; to 
 ask at what time and place the Epistle was written, 
 on the assumption that St Paul wrote it. For this 
 purpose we are able to use the evidence supplied by 
 the Epistles to the Colossians and to Philemon, as 
 they were evidently carried by Tychicus on the same 
 journey. 
 
 The most obvious mark of external circumstances 
 is the language about imprisonment, "I Paul the Eph. iii. i , 
 prisoner of Christ Jesus " ; "I therefore the prisoner iv. i- 
 
 7—2 
 
100 THE WRITER A PRISONER. 
 
 Col. iv. 3. in the Lord" ; "to speak the mysteries of the Christ, 
 i. ■24. for which I am also in bonds (BeSefiai) " (cp. " now I 
 iv. 18. rejoice in my sufferings for your sake ") ; " Remember 
 Philem. i my bonds"; "Paul a prisoner of Christ Jesus"; "Paul 
 9- an ambassador and now a prisoner also of Jesus 
 
 10. Christ " ; " my child, whom I have begotten in the 
 
 13. bonds, Onesimus"; "that in thy behalf he might 
 
 minister to me in the bonds of the Gospel." 
 
 What imprisonment then is meant .'' There are only 
 two which are worth considering, each of them two 
 years long, both closely connected historically and 
 separated from each other by only a few months ; yet 
 differing remarkably from each other in the associations 
 which they respectively suggest. They are of course 
 the imprisonment at Caesarea, and the imprisonment 
 at Rome. St Paul had come for the last time to 
 Jerusalem to bring the Gentile offering, where he 
 was rescued from a murderous plot of the Jews by 
 the chief captain Lysias, who sent him by night 
 with a guard of 200 soldiers to Caesarea. There 
 he was in charge of Felix the Roman Proconsul, 
 Caesarea being the civil capital of Palestine since 
 the time of Herod the Great, who built it, a mag- 
 nificent seaport town between Joppa and Mount 
 Carmel. Two years later, Felix was succeeded by 
 Festus, and after a hearing by him in company 
 with Agrippa, St Paul was sent forth on his Rome- 
 ward journey, which was interrupted for the winter 
 by the shipwreck. The last sentence of the Acts 
 
CAESAREA OR ROME? loi 
 
 leaves him still a prisoner at Rome after two years 
 more. 
 
 Now it used to be assumed without question that 
 the three Epistles, to the Ephesians, to the Colossians 
 and to Philemon were written in the Roman captivity. 
 On the other hand for the last half century or there- 
 abouts a considerable body of critics, including some 
 distinguished for sobriety of judgment, have referred 
 them to the Caesarean captivity. Such evidence as 
 we have seems to me to go the other way, and to 
 support the old view. But the whole evidence of 
 what may be called a historical or a literary kind 
 is curiously scanty in amount, and probably few 
 who have not had occasion to look into it would 
 imagine how rash it would be to express a con- 
 fident opinion without close examination. As we 
 shall see presently, the decision is by no means a 
 matter of idle curiosity, but intimately connected with 
 interpretation. 
 
 The first piece of evidence is connected with the 
 Epistle to the Philippians. That Epistle, you will re- 
 member, is no less a Captivity Epistle than the three 
 which we have now in hand. Four verses of the first 
 chapter contain references to the Apostle's (present) Phil. i. 7, 
 bonds ; there is no other clear link connecting the 
 one Epistle with the three. Still it is but right to ask 
 whether it was written before them or after them. 
 Now it is very widely believed that it was written 
 very late in St Paul's captivity at Rome and after our 
 
 13. 14. 17- 
 
I02 WITNESS OF EPISTLE TO THE PHILIPPIANS, 
 
 three. Very few refer it to the Caesarean time. This 
 part of the subject has been so admirably worked out 
 by Lightfoot in the essay headed "Order of the 
 Epistles of the Captivity " in his commentary on this 
 Epistle', that I will not take up time with going over 
 the ground now. Lightfoot urges with great force, 
 that there is no real weight in the arguments, chiefly 
 four, which are commonly put forward as decisive for 
 a very late date for the Epistle to the Philippians, the 
 most plausible perhaps being a comparison of the 
 persons named as present with St Paul in the several 
 Epistles. Against these at best inconclusive considera- 
 tions he urges the less catching but more substantial 
 evidence of style and language. This, he shews, is 
 intermediate between the style and language of the 
 earlier Epistles and those of our triad : in particular 
 the affinities with the Epistle to the Romans, the last 
 of the earlier Epistles, are very great. If this is the 
 right conclusion, as I fully believe it to be, our three 
 must of course have been written in the Roman cap- 
 tivity, since their predecessor was likewise. 
 
 It would not be right however to leave the matter 
 here, Lightfoot 's view about the position of the Epistle 
 to the Philippians having so few friends. We must 
 therefore go on to consider how the evidence lies when 
 that Epistle is excluded from view. Here we shall 
 have little help from Lightfoot except on one impor- 
 tant historical point on which his remarks are of special 
 
 1 Epistle to the Philippians, pp. 30 — 46 (ed. 1878). 
 
AND OF OTHER CAPTIVITY EPISTLES. 103 
 
 value. We should have had more from his pen on 
 the subject had his proposed edition of the Epistle 
 to the Ephesians ever been written. 
 
 We may begin with a few words from Weiss, the 
 most competent of the champions of Caesarea. Dis- 
 cussing the question whether the Epistles to the Colos- 
 sians and to Philemon were written at Caesarea or 
 at Rome, he writes', "Much that is untenable has been 
 "urged for the one as for the other view. But what 
 " is quite decisive is the fact that according to Philip- 
 " pians ii. 24 Paul intended to proceed from Rome to 
 " Macedonia in the event of his being set free, whereas, 
 "when he wrote Philemon 22 it was his wish to go 
 " immediately to Phrygia ; and the manner in which 
 " he already bespeaks for himself lodging in Colossae 
 " for his visit there makes it altogether unlikely that 
 " the letter was written in Rome, where moreover in 
 " the course of a regular judicial proceeding Paul could 
 " never reckon so definitely on his liberation." 
 
 Three points are involved here. First, the diffe- 
 rence of destination on being set free. Here there 
 are two obvious answers. Between writing the two 
 Epistles, St Paul might well have found reason to 
 change his mind as to his course on his release : 
 first, Macedonia and Philippi might seem to claim 
 him most, and then Asia and Colossae, or vice 
 versa. And again even this supposition is not neces- 
 sary, for he might well take Philippi on his way 
 
 ^ Weiss, Einleitung in das Neue Testament (Berlin, 1889) § 24, c. 1. 
 
22 
 
 I04 THEIR ANNOUNCEMENT OF ST PAUnS PLANS. 
 
 from Rome to Colossae, Philippi being, as Lightfoot 
 says', on the great high road between Europe and 
 Asia, so that Ignatius passed it when he was brought 
 from Asia to Rome. 
 
 The next point urged by Weiss is the greater 
 Philemon neamess of Colossae to Caesarea than to Rome with 
 reference to the request to prepare a lodging. But in 
 truth both places are far too distant from Colossae to 
 make the request intelligible in its crude literal sense. 
 How little St Paul meant Philemon to take it thus is 
 tolerably clear from his next words, " for I hope that 
 through your prayers I shall be granted to you'' ; not 
 granted to you soon, but simply granted to you, and 
 of this there is no more than a hope. Had St Paul 
 been really expecting a speedy release, we may be 
 sure there would have been some trace of it in 
 the Epistle to the Colossians. What seems to be 
 the true sense here, or something like it, is hinted 
 by Jeromel St Paul spoke to Philemon not in strict 
 truth {vere) but dispensatorie (doubtless olKovofiiKm) 
 ut diim. eum exspectat Philemon ad se esse venturum, 
 magis faciat quod rogatus est. It is but a playful way 
 of saying to Philemon, " Remember that I mean to 
 " come and see with my own eyes whether you have 
 "really treated your Christian slave as I have been 
 "exhorting you"; and then giving the thought a 
 serious turn by assuring him that, ' coming is no 
 
 ^ Philippians, p. 48 f. 
 
 ' Comment, in Ep. ad Philemonem, v. 22. 
 
EARTHQUAKES IN THE LYCUS VALLEY. 105 
 
 mere jest, for he does indeed hope some day to 
 be set free through their prayers, and then he will 
 haste to visit them.' 
 
 As regards the third point the comparative possi- 
 bilities of looking for a speedy release, at Rome and at 
 Caesarea, we really have very little material for judg- 
 ing. But thus much is plain that, when the prosaic 
 interpretation of the bespoken lodging falls away, 
 the language to Philemon with reference to future 
 release is even more wanting in definite anticipation 
 than the language to the Philippians. 
 
 More really plausible than these three argu- 
 ments which Weiss thinks decisive for Caesarea 
 is the comparison of dates with reference to earth- 
 quakes which visited the cities of the Lycus about 
 this time. This is the matter which I referred to 
 as illustrated by Lightfoot^, who has carefully con- 
 structed a list of the earthquakes known to have 
 devastated that region in various ages. The only 
 points however which concern us here are these. 
 Under the year 60, the year which includes the last 
 part of St Paul's Caesarean imprisonment, Tacitus 
 states that " Laodicea, having fallen down (prolapsa) 
 by an earthquake, recovered itself by its own re- 
 sources without help from us (i.e. from public 
 funds) V Four years later, at the time of Nero's setting 
 Rome on fire, Eusebius's Chronicle states that " three 
 
 ^ Epistle to the Colossians, pp. 37 — 40, ed. 1875. 
 ' Ann. xiv. 27. 
 
io6 HIS SILENCE CONCERNING THEM EXAMINED. 
 
 cities in Asia, Laodicea, Hierapolis and Colossae, fell 
 down (conciderunt) by an earthquake'." On the double 
 assumption that these two statements refer to the same 
 event and that Tacitus is more to be trusted for 
 the year than Eusebius, it is urged that an Epistle 
 addressed by St Paul to Colossae, if written from 
 Rome, would naturally have contained some allusion 
 to the calamity which not long before had befallen 
 the city. Lightfoot argues however from another 
 example in an earlier reign that Eusebius followed 
 unusually good authorities about earthquakes^ and 
 is not unlikely, therefore, to have the right date, in 
 which case the Roman captivity as well as the 
 Caesarean would precede the catastrophe ; and again 
 that even on the other supposition it would not be 
 surprising to find no allusions to the earthquake if the 
 Epistle was written, as he supposes, quite late in the 
 Roman captivity, i.e. some three years after the city 
 had suffered. There is also much to be said for Hertz- 
 berg's suggestion' (quoted by both Lightfoot and 
 Schiller) the two notices refer to two different earth- 
 quakes, in which case the only positive evidence for 
 the extension of the first earthquake as far up the 
 valley as Colossae disappears. 
 
 Of quite a different kind is the argument from Kal 
 
 ' Chron. Ol. 210 (11. p. 154 f. ed. Schbne). 
 
 ^ In the case of another earthquake of this reign, Schiller \Nero, 160, 
 172] holds that Tacitus gives the wrong year. 
 
 ' Geschichte Griechenlands unter der Herrschafi der Rdmer II. p. 
 96 n. (ed. 1868), 
 
CONVERSION OF ONESIMUS. 107 
 
 in Eph. vi. 21, 'Cva Se etS-^Te koI viid'i. This it is said 
 must mean " you as well as the Colossians," implying 
 that the Colossians had received this knowledge first, 
 which would imply that Tychicus went from East 
 to West, not vice versa. But it is really inconceivable 
 that an allusion should be made to the Epistle to the 
 Colossians in this faint unintelligible way, and not 
 likely that in a letter to the Ephesians, much less to 
 a great body of Churches, such a reference should be 
 made to little Colossae. A far more natural meaning 
 would be "you in the recesses of Provincial Asia, 
 as well as the brethren at Rome or in constant inter- 
 course with Rome." 
 
 We need hardly dwell on the suggestion that had 
 Tychicus and Onesimus been travelling from the 
 West, the Epistle to the Ephesians must have con- 
 tained a special commendation of Onesimus ; or 
 again that Onesimus as a runaway slave was more 
 likely to expect to escape detection at Caesarea 
 than at Rome. This is a point on which no guessing 
 can be worth much ; but if one is to guess, the miscel- 
 laneous swarms that thronged Rome would seem to 
 offer exceptional chances of escaping detection. 
 
 A more tangible subject is the comparative oppor- 
 tunities of the two captivities for the conversion of 
 Onesimus. In some way or other the runaway slave 
 had been brought into contact with the imprisoned 
 apostle, and learned from him the Christian faith. „, ., 
 
 ^ Fhilemon 
 
 The words to Philemon are quite express, tov 10. 
 
io8 COMPARA TIVE FREEDOM ALLO WED WRITER 
 
 ifiov Teicvov, ov eyevvrjaa ev Tot9 Secr/iot? 'Ov^a'tiiov. 
 Now as regards Caesarea all we know of a state of 
 things which would make such an incident possible is 
 contained in Acts xxiv. 23, where we read that FeHx 
 " gave order to the centurion that he (Paul) should be 
 kept in charge, and should have indulgence (exeiv re 
 dvecnv), and not to hinder any of his friends {twv IBimv 
 avTov) from ministering unto him.'' ' Having indul- 
 gence' evidently means a less rigorous and painful 
 form of imprisonment, as by transference from a 
 noisome cell', and especially leave to use better food 
 than prison fare^ It is evidently such little allevia- 
 tions as these that are meant by the vTrriperelv of 
 friends'. This limited access of friends, for St Paul's 
 own relief, would not naturally introduce a heathen 
 runaway slave, and a heathen he must have been when 
 he came in contact with the imprisoned apostle. 
 
 Very different were the circumstances of the 
 
 Actsxxviii. Roman captivity as described by St Luke. On 
 St Paul's arrival in the city he was allowed to 
 
 V. i6. live in a private house (fieveiv KaO^ eavrov) "with 
 the soldier that guarded him." "And he abode," we 
 
 w. 30, 31. read, "a whole space of two years in a hired lodging 
 of his own" (whether this iiicrOoina is or is not the same 
 
 ' Passio S. Perpetu* 3. 
 
 ^ Cf. Lightfoot's Ignatius i. 345 f. (ed. 1885). Also Josephus Ant. 
 xviii. 235 <pvKaKT) fj.€v yap Kol r-^pTjfrLS rjv fiera fUvToi dv^o'eojs ttjs di ttjv 
 Slanav. 
 
 ^ The Syrian addition 17 Trpoff^pxecBcu. enlarges the sense in appear- 
 ance only. 
 
POINTS TO ROMAN CAPTIVITY. 109 
 
 as the ^67/ta spoken of in the intermediate v. 23, is un- 
 certain and unimportant), "and received all that went 
 "in unto him, preaching the Gospel of God, and 
 " teaching the things concerning the Lord Jesus 
 " Christ with all boldness, none forbidding him." 
 Here then was free access for any one who chose, 
 not for private friends only ; and the opportunity 
 was freely used by St Paul for preaching. Under 
 such circumstances Onesimus might easily have 
 heard from others of the prisoner's wondrous dis- 
 course : perhaps, as Lightfoot suggests \ he might 
 have known St Paul's name already, familiar as it 
 must have been in the ears of Philemon's house- 
 hold : thus he might well be led to enter one 
 day with the rest, and might be overcome by the 
 divine words which he heard. At all events Onesi- 
 mus's conversion falls much more naturally into the 
 ■Roman than into the Caesarean captivity ; and there- 
 by fresh evidence is given for the conclusion involved 
 in the priority of the Epistle to the Philippians to 
 the other three, according to Lightfoot's view of their 
 order. Nor is there any even plausible evidence to the 
 contrary unless it be that of the earthquakes, which 
 we have seen is not really at variance with the as- 
 signation of all these letters to the Roman captivity. 
 How well this conclusion fits in with the contents of 
 the Epistle to the Ephesians, we shall see presently. 
 
 ' ColosHans and Philemon, p. 31-2. 
 
no PROBABLE DATE ABOUT 63 a.d. 
 
 The most probable year for the journey of Tychicus 
 and the writing of the three Epistles which he carried 
 is 63 A.D., or thereabouts; that is, late in St Paul's 
 Roman imprisonment. In July 64 Rome was set on 
 fire, and the persecution of Christians known by Nero's 
 name began. It was the last period of comparative 
 quiet before a long line of troublous days indeed. 
 
III. 
 
 A UTHORSHIP. 
 
 A. External Evidence. 
 
 Thus far we have been assuming that the Epistle 
 was written by St Paul as it professes to be. But 
 was it so indeed .'' The question having been raised 
 by a large number of competent critics ought not to 
 be left wholly unconsidered, though it is impossible 
 within our limits to deal with it in any thorough 
 manner. 
 
 It will be well to begin with looking quickly at 
 the evidence afforded by the use of the Epistle in early 
 writings. This does not directly touch authorship but 
 only age. Since however most of those who dispute 
 the genuineness of the Epistle place it in this or that 
 generation much later than St Paul, the field of dis- 
 cussion may be greatly narrowed by evidence bearing 
 on age. Of course we are concerned only with early 
 evidence and that is almost always a little confused 
 and vague. In due time we should get clear quotations 
 and names of books, but by that time we should have 
 
112 CLEMENT OF ROME. 
 
 reached a part of the second century unimportant for 
 our purpose. 
 
 We begin with Clement of Rome, about 95 — 6 A.D. 
 Many passages of his have been marked as derived 
 from the Epistle to the Ephesians. None of them 
 seem to me to be quite certain, but two or three admit 
 of very little doubt. The strongest case perhaps is in 
 c. 64 o eKX6^dfievo<; top K.vpiov 'Irjcrovv X.piaTov koI 
 rjjjL.db'i ZC avrov ek Xaov Treptovaiov. The combination 
 eKXe^dfievo<; and et? Xaov •jrepiovcnov is probably a 
 reminiscence of Deuteronomy xiv. 4: but the remark- 
 able combination of God's election of the Lord Jesus 
 Christ and His election of Christians into a people 
 for His own possession, the latter depending on the 
 former {riijia<; ht avrov), looks as if it must have come 
 from Eph. i. 4, Ka6a)<; i^eXe^aTO rjfia'i ev avrm k.t.X., 
 with an analogous Sia 'Irjcrov X/atcrroO in the next 
 verse. The second case is in c. 46 " Have we not one 
 God and one Christ and one Spirit of grace which 
 (Spirit) was poured out upon us, and one calling in 
 Christ.'" This passage, which is part of a warning 
 against strifes and divisions, if compared carefully 
 with Eph. iv. 4 — 6 will be seen to be probably 
 derived from it, particularly 'one calling' as repre- 
 senting ' one hope of your calling ' ; more especially 
 as the next sentence is " Why do we drag and rend 
 asunder the members of Christ, and act seditiously 
 toward our own body (or, the proper body, to crw/xa 
 TO 'iSiov), and come to such madness that we forget 
 
IGNATIUS. 113 
 
 that we are members one of another?" (cf. Eph. iv. 25). 
 The other most probable coincidences are in c. 36 
 "Through Him the eyes of our heart were opened" 
 (cf. Eph. i. 18, where the right text is ■7re^coTia-fj,ivov<i 
 Tov<; 6<f)0a\fiov'; tjj? KapSla^ [v/xoiiv]); and in c. 38 
 "Let each man be subject to his neighbour" (cf. 
 Eph. V. 21). 
 
 We come next to Ignatius probably about fifteen 
 years later, i.e. roughly no A.D. (possibly but less 
 probably a few years later). First must be put aside 
 two or three passages which for one reason or another 
 might seem to be specially good evidence, but are 
 really irrelevant. The twelfth chapter of his Epistle 
 to the Ephesians ends with the sentence 0? iv Trday 
 e-maro\fi fivrjfjLovevet vfiwv ev Xpiaro) 'Irjaov, often ren- 
 dered " in all his epistle 'to you,'" and taken as a clear 
 recognition of our Epistle. But this is an impossible 
 rendering of eV Trda-rj eVto-roX^, and moreover, as Light- 
 foot says, " would be singularly unmeaning, if not un- 
 true," if our Epistle were meant^. The meaning is of 
 course " in every Epistle," a strange exaggeration no 
 doubt, but not without foundation^ Zahn even 
 goes so far as to say that the words show our 
 Epistle not to have been known to Ignatius with any 
 Ephesian associations : but that is too much to say. 
 
 • ' See Lightfoot, in loco (TTie Apostolic Fathers, Part II. vol. ii. Sect. 
 I, ed. 1885). 
 
 - See Lightfoot I.e. and Zahn, Ignatius von Antiochien, p. 607 f. 
 (ed. 1873). 
 
 H. R. 8 
 
114 IGNATIUS. 
 
 The salutation at the head of the Epistle contains 
 several words that seem to have been suggested by 
 early verses of St Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians, 
 though some of them appear likewise in other 
 Ignatian salutations : the important words are evKo- 
 yrifiSvy, '!f\7]pa>fiaTi, Trpocopicr/jLevrj irpo aicovcov eivai... 
 6t9 So^av, eKXeXey/jLevrj. Further on in c. i the Greek 
 manuscript of Ignatius has a clear quotation from 
 Eph. V. 2 ; but late editions have rightly expelled 
 it on the authority of the ancient versions\ Once 
 more, no reliance can be placed on tov ■^yaTrrj/j.evov 
 'iTjaov XpKTTov in the salutation to the Smyrnaeans 
 notwithstanding the coincidence with ev toJ ^yawTj- 
 fievw of Eph. i. 6. This was a widely spread 
 designation, occurring e.g. in Clement of Rome (the 
 prayer in c. 59), Barnabas, and Hermas, and found 
 repeatedly in what are supposed to be the Christian 
 parts of the Ascensio Esaiae' It was simply an easy 
 alternative for the aiya-nriTO'; of the words spoken from 
 heaven at the Baptism and Transfiguration. But 
 when in his Epistle to Polycarp (c. 5) Ignatius enjoins 
 him to exhort "his brethren" to love their consorts 
 (o-v/i/Sioii?) as the Lord the Church, we must feel sure 
 that so little obvious a thought can have come only 
 from Eph. v. 25; and then the allusions to a Christian 
 
 ^ Lightfoot, ib. p. 31 note. 
 
 ^ See references of Lightfoot and Zahn (Patr. Apost. Opera, Fascic. 
 II. ed. 1876) on this passage, and Harnack on Barn. iii. 6 (ib. Fascic. 
 I. Part II. ed. 1878). 
 
POLYCARP. HERMAS. 115 
 
 •irept,ice<j>a\ala and iravoirKia in c. 6, indecisive in 
 themselves, may be naturally referred to Eph. vi. 11, 
 17; and the phrases above cited from Ignatius's 
 salutation to the Ephesians may be reasonably 
 derived from the beginning of our Epistle. 
 
 A few months after the writings of Ignatius, comes 
 the Epistle of Polycarp to the Philippians. Here 
 there are more distinct quotations from the New 
 Testament than in any previous writing, and they 
 include two from our Epistle. Near the end of c. i. 
 ')(apni ia-re creacoafievoi, ovk i^ epyav must come 
 from Eph. ii. 5, 8, 9 ; and in c. xii. (the Greek is 
 lost) ut his scripturis dictum est irascimini et nolite 
 peccare et Sol non occidat super iracundiam vestram 
 must come from Eph. iv. 26. 
 
 The date of the Shepherd of Hermas is still an open 
 question, but within certain limits, viz. the first forty 
 years of the second century. It can hardly be more than 
 a little earlier or later. The very difficult question of 
 its use of Scripture language is best handled by 
 Zahn in his book on Hermas^ The exhortations in 
 Eph. iv. 25, 29, 30 to speak truth each with his 
 neighbour, to let no corrupt word proceed out of the 
 mouth, and to grieve not the Holy Spirit of God find 
 echoes in Mand. iii. ' AXijOeiav aydira, koI iracra 
 aXrjdei.a eK tov aT6fiaT6<; crow eKTropeveaOai, and then 
 after a few lines pi/qhe XvTrrjv iirdyeiv rm Trvevfiari, ra> 
 a-e/j-vS Kal dXTjdei] this last phrase being taken up 
 
 ^ Der Hirt des Hermas, pp. 412 fif. (1868). 
 
 8—2 
 
ii6 BARNABAS. DID ACHE. 
 
 again more precisely in Mand. x. 2, Xvird to TrveC/to 
 TO a/yiov, and several times repeated in the following 
 lines. Doubtless the original source is Isaiah Ixiii. lO: 
 but there the LXX. word is •jrapo^wco, while Hermas 
 follows St Paul in substituting Xvttw. There is a 
 less clear, but still reasonably certain borrowing from 
 Eph. iv. 4, 5 in Sim. ix. 13, ecrovrai eh ev irvevfia, 
 KoX ev a-wfia, and again (in the same chapter) riv 
 avTcov ev trvevfjLa koX ev (juifia {jcai ev evhvfia\ ; and four 
 chapters further on (c. 1 7) icaX /xia Tri'trrt? avrwv eyevero, 
 followed presently (cc. 17, 18) by ev aSfia three times 
 repeated, the last time in association again with /tt'a 
 iricTi.^. Other supposed coincidences between Hermas 
 and the Epistle to the Ephesians are too uncertain to 
 rest on. 
 
 There remains only a passage common to the 
 Epistle of Barnabas and to the AtSa^^^ rtSv airoajokav. 
 Whatever be the date of the Didache as a whole, the 
 part of it called the Two Ways, worked up by Barna- 
 bas, is unquestionably very early. In Did. iv. 10, 11 
 the injunctions to masters, Ovk e'KiTa^ei<; hoiiXai aov ■q 
 iraiBiaK'tj, Tol<; eTTt tov avrbv deov eKiri^ovaiv, ev iriKpia 
 <Tov, and to servants, "Tfieh Se ol hovKoi, v'rroTayrjcrea'de 
 
 Tc"? KVploi<; V/McSv o5? TVTT^ OeOV iv aicT'X^VVT) KoX ^0^(0 
 
 (Barnabas' has only trifling differences besides trans- 
 posing the precepts) are probably founded on Eph. 
 
 ' c. xix. 7. His words are viroTayriari Kvptois us Tirifi Beov bi 
 al<rxivri Kal (pS^ifi. oi fxri iinTd^jis doiiXif crov ij TraiSicKri iv iriKplif, to! 
 iwl rbv aOrdv deov 4\lril^0V(nv. 
 
GNOSTIC WRITERS. 117 
 
 vi. 9, 5, aireCKr] being represented by iruKpia, which is 
 used earlier in the Epistle. In both cases the coin- Eph. iv. 
 cidence lies in the thoughts rather than in the ^'" 
 words, but it is best accounted for by supposing the 
 Epistle to the Ephesians to have been known to the 
 writer. 
 
 To this evidence furnished by those who are called 
 the Fathers, there is little that is substantial to add 
 from the sadly scanty remains of those who are called 
 the heretics. The Epistle was evidently extant in 
 Marcion's time, and must have been extant some 
 time before him, if his Apostolicon was founded on a 
 previous collection of St Paul's Epistles ; but this is a 
 disputed point, on which we have no positive evidence. 
 Nor do we know Marcion's own time except vaguely, 
 and to what period of his life the Apostolicon belongs 
 we do not know at all. Apparently his main activity 
 belongs to the latter part of the first half of the second 
 century. The Epistle is several times quoted in the very 
 interesting extracts made by Hippolytus from a book 
 attributed to Basilides. Basilides belongs to Hadrian's 
 reign, i.e. about the second or third decade of the 
 second century, and I fully believe those extracts to 
 be genuine : but some think them to have been written 
 by a later disciple, so that for our present purpose it 
 is better to leave them out of consideration. Other 
 quotations of the Epistle to the Ephesians in Pseudo- 
 Gnostical writings or extracts apparently belonging 
 
Ii8 SUMMARY OF EXTERNAL EVIDENCE. 
 
 to the latter part of the second century, may be 
 neglected as too late to come into account. 
 
 We have now gone over all the early evidence for 
 the existence of the Epistle to the Ephesians, and 
 what we have found is this. In the authorities cer- 
 tainly belonging to the first century, Clement of Rome 
 and the Two Ways, we have highly probable though 
 not absolutely certain evidence. Of Hermas, a writer 
 who may belong to any time early in the second 
 century, much the same may be said, though here the 
 probability almost reaches certainty. In Ignatius, 
 probably about ten years from the beginning of the 
 century, we find absolute certainty in one case (eo? 6 
 Kvpto'i rrjv eKKkTjaiav), as well as high probability in 
 others. Lastly, in Polycarp, about the same time, 
 there are two clear quotations which do not admit 
 of doubt. From Barnabas and from the Didache 
 —except the Two Ways — we obtain no evidence. 
 Thus it is all but certain on this evidence that the 
 Epistle to the Ephesians was in existence by about 
 95 A.D., quite certain that it was in existence by 
 about fifteen years later, or conceivably a little more. 
 Escape from this conclusion is possible only to those 
 who treat the Epistles of Clement of Rome, Ignatius, 
 and Polycarp as likewise spurious; and for the dis- 
 cussion of that question no better guide can be found 
 than Lightfoot. 
 
119 
 
 B. Internal Evidence. 
 
 From this preliminary survey of the external 
 evidence bearing on possible limits for the date of 
 the Epistle, as supplied by the traces of its use in the 
 earlier post-biblical Christian writers, we pass to the 
 internal evidence bearing on both its date and its 
 authorship. It will simplify matters to begin with 
 the more extreme views which have been entertained 
 as to the late date implied by internal evidence : they 
 will not detain us long. Half a century ago the 
 prominence given to the Holy Spirit in the teaching 
 of the Epistle, and the way in which prophets are in Eph. ii. 20, 
 three places associated with apostles, were supposed "'■*''^'"' 
 to prove the author of the Epistle to have sympa- 
 thised largely with the Montanist movement, and 
 this would no doubt carry it a long way into the 
 second century. Another supposed indication of 
 Montanist influence was found in the language 
 about the " building up of the body of Christ " c. iv. 12 f. 
 and the "growing up to a perfect man," which 
 was taken to reflect the Montanist idea of a fuller 
 ripeness of the Church brought about by the 
 Paraclete ; though there is not a trace of Montanist 
 watchwords. Again the language about Christ and 
 the Church was thought to be connected with the 
 
120 DISCARDED THEORIES. 
 
 Montanist doctrine of Monogamy; on which supposi- 
 tion no comment is necessary. This particular fancy 
 soon went out of favour, as the utter incongruity be- 
 tween our Epistle and the Montanistic habit of mind 
 became more apparent on consideration. As Holtz- 
 mann himself says, " With such an explanation almost 
 all the Pauline Epistles might be Montanistic'." 
 
 More widely spread and more lasting has been the 
 appeal to certain words prominent in the Epistle as 
 derived from those whom we call Gnostics, and so 
 suggesting a date in or about the second quarter of 
 the second century. The most tempting of these 
 words were ifK-qpaiiia and alcove<i, both however used in 
 senses alien to the Pseudo-Gnostical, though it is 
 probable enough that a misunderstanding of the 
 language of our Epistle contributed to the Pseudo- 
 
 Eph. iii. Gnostical terminology. The 7roXvTroLKiXo<s cxo^ia 
 ascribed to God in the Epistle was supposed to be 
 an allusion to the varied romance of doings and 
 sufferings attributed to the Divine Hachamoth (or 
 Wisdom) in the Valentinian mythology. Accessory 
 evidence to the same purport was found in the weight 
 
 c. i. 9, 17. given to a-o(})La in two other places of our Epistle, 
 though we 'find a similar emphasis in St Paul's earlier 
 Epistles ; and, strange to say, even in the use of the 
 word yvoo(ri<; in the prayer that the recipients of the 
 
 c. iii. 19. Epistle might " come to know the .love of Christ which 
 is above all knowing," though in the earlier Epistles 
 
 1 Kritik der Epheser- und Kolosserbrief, p. 276 (Leipzig, 1872). 
 
/S THE PAULlNISsM LATER THAN ST PAUL? 121 
 
 the word is freely used in a sense really nearer that 
 which we call the Gnostic sense. 
 
 This dating of the Epistle by imagined references 
 to Pseudo-Gnostical phraseology of the second century 
 has still some few supporters, but has no claim to be 
 discussed further. This cannot, however, be said of 
 the view which has next to be considered, and which 
 in one form or another has many able advocates. 
 These critics recognise the absence from the Epistle 
 of any tangible marks of the second century, but they 
 hold that it belongs to a different and later stage of 
 thought and feeling from that of St Paul, though it 
 goes on the same general lines ; that is, they ascribe 
 it to an advanced disciple of St Paul rather than to 
 the apostle himself. Such a view allows considerable 
 latitude of dating : in accordance with it the Epistle 
 might be almost as old as St Paul or — to take the 
 other extreme — it might be as late as a quite 
 early part of the second century. Then, in addition 
 to the supposed marks of a Paulinism too advanced 
 for St Paul, it is likewise alleged that there are marks 
 of simply different authorship, differences of language, 
 style and the like. And further, besides the evidence 
 said to be afforded by the Epistle itself taken alone, 
 appeal is made to other evidence obtained from com- 
 parison with other Epistles, that to the Colossians 
 and the First Epistle of St Peter. All these kinds 
 of supposed evidence have been worked out with 
 admirable care and subtlety in a succession of recent 
 
122 PRESENTMENT OF DOCTRINE 
 
 books, such as Holtzmann's introduction to the New 
 Testament^ (which, however, needs to be supple- 
 mented from his earlier book on the Epistles to the 
 Ephesians and Colossians), the new edition of Pflei- 
 derer's Paulinismus^, and the recent commentaries of 
 Klopper' and Von Soden*. 
 
 It would be vain to attempt to set forth and 
 examine all the particulars of the supposed evidence 
 under these heads within the limits of these lectures. 
 But it will be well to give some little time to those 
 points in which either the appearance of difference is 
 most plausible or which have otherwise most interest 
 If in this way we are delayed from entering on the 
 interpretation of the opening verses of the Epis- 
 tle, yet it would be a mistake to suppose that 
 we shall be occupied exclusively with questions 
 of Introduction. Our inquiry must inevitably include 
 some examination of important passages of the 
 Epistle, so that in the guise of Introduction we 
 shall in fact be brought in contact with a succession 
 of questions of Interpretation. 
 
 The supposed marks of a later time than St Paul's 
 lie partly in changed circumstances presupposed in 
 the Epistle, partly in changed doctrine as expressed 
 
 1 Lehrbuch der historisch-kritiker Einhiiung in das Neue Testament. 
 Freiburg, 1892 (3te Auflage). 
 
 " Der Paulinismus. Leipzig, 1890. 
 
 ' Der Brief an die Epheser. Gbttingen, 1891. 
 
 * In Holtzmann's Handcommeniar zum Neuen Testament, Band III., 
 Freiburg, 1891. 
 
MAY VARY WITH CIRCUMSTANCES 123 
 
 in the Epistle itself. The two cannot, however, be 
 kept apart ; for evidently a change of circumstances 
 might in itself quite naturally lead to a change in at 
 least the proportion and mode of expression of 
 doctrine. What then are the facts ? First, to speak 
 in quite general terms, no one who carefully reads the 
 Epistle to the Ephesians can doubt that its doctrinal 
 contents do differ considerably from those of any one 
 of St Paul's earlier Epistles, or of all of them taken 
 together. But that proves little. What we really 
 have to ask is whether the differences are morally 
 incompatible with identity of authorship. 
 
 Now it seems tolerably obvious that a great 
 theological teacher, such as St Paul confessedly was, 
 in writing to different Churches under different cir- 
 cumstances would naturally be led to lay stress on 
 different parts of the sum total of his belief; so that 
 at one time this, at one time that doctrine or aspect 
 of doctrine might be expected to fall into subor- 
 dination or to be altogether unnoticed. And we have 
 an additional assurance that it would be so in the fact 
 that in the Epistle to the Romans St Paul shows, 
 to say the least, how catholic-minded he was, how 
 little disposed to measure truth by a monotonous 
 partisan standard. 
 
 All this would hold good supposing his own 
 thoughts and beliefs to have remained stationary 
 from the time he went forth from Antioch till his 
 death. But that is most unlikely. A mind like his. 
 
124 OR WITH GROWTH OF EXPERIENCE. 
 
 in constant living contact with truth, needing and 
 receiving fresh enlightenment from day to day, for 
 dealing with new and changing needs of the Churches, 
 must assuredly have known growth. New experience 
 must have brought new light, giving comparatively 
 clear vision of truths hitherto imperfectly grasped or 
 even overlooked altogether, and often changing the 
 relative importance of truths already familiar. And, 
 supposing such a growth to have arisen, it would be 
 strange if it left no traces in the extant Epistles of 
 different dates. The supposition does no injury to 
 their authority as books of Scripture ; it only helps to 
 wean us from the delusively and unreally simple 
 habit of using them as detached oracles, and helps 
 us to understand better the manifoldness of truth 
 through their manifold adaptation in respect of time 
 and place and circumstance. 
 
 It would therefore be unreasonable to take the 
 presence of new doctrinal ideas, or a new proportion 
 among earlier doctrinal ideas, as evidence of different 
 authorship, unless there be a real want of harmony 
 between the later and the earlier teaching, and unless 
 the later way of thinking and speaking cannot be 
 easily conceived as a natural outgrowth of the earlier 
 in the case of a single man, and that such a 
 man as we know St Paul to have been. It is 
 agreed on both sides that this is a case of natural 
 outgrowth ; so that the question is simply whether it 
 is such a natural outgrowth as can be reasonably 
 
RELATION OF JEW TO GENTILE. 125 
 
 attributed to the apostle himself under changing 
 circumstances, or such as must be due to two different 
 minds, the younger being however united to the elder 
 by bonds of intimate and sympathetic discipleship, 
 doctrinal if not personal. 
 
 Let us now look a little at some of the chief 
 combinations of identity and difference between St 
 Paul's earlier recorded theology and that of the 
 Epistle to the Ephesians. Pfleiderer's chapter^ on 
 the Epistle will conveniently bring to our notice 
 the questions raised by a temperate and careful 
 opponent of its genuineness. We may begin with 
 the relation of Jews to Gentiles as Christians. In 
 the Epistles to the Galatians and Romans, and 
 especially in the former, we have records of St Paul's 
 efforts to maintain for Christian converts from hea- 
 thenism a place within the Christian fold wholly 
 equal with that held by converts of Jewish birth. 
 Here in the Epistle to the Ephesians the assured 
 position of the Gentile Christians is simply taken for 
 granted. Nay, while it is they that stand in the fore- 
 ground of the Epistle, they are taught to recognise and 
 revere the privileges granted by God to the old Israel 
 in the old time, and to cultivate brotherhood with the 
 living Christian heirs of those now superseded prero- 
 gatives. This union of complete rejection of exclusive 
 Jewish claims on behalf of Law or circumcision with 
 earnest insistence on the divine calling of Israel as 
 
 ' Der Paulinismus 11. c. 3. 
 
126 CATHOLICITY. 
 
 the foundation of the Christian calling for Jew and 
 Gentile alike, is entirely in the spirit of the Epistle 
 to the Romans. Only the stress, so to speak, is shifted, 
 because the circumstances have shifted, as Pfleiderer 
 fully allows. The difference, it is truly said, lies in 
 the clearness and emphasis with which the idea of 
 Catholicity, that is to say universality, is in this 
 Epistle for the first time put forward, in the spirit 
 of the Fourth Gospel. The duty of Jewish and Gentile 
 fellowship is here deduced from the eternal purpose 
 of God and the very idea of the Christian faith, not, 
 as in earlier Epistles, from arguments about the 
 Law and the Promise. Yet again this is only the 
 teaching of the Epistle to the Romans a little more 
 unfolded. Those arguments about Law and Promise 
 have their proper place in a refutation of Jewish 
 exclusive claims such as was in place in the early 
 chapters of that Epistle, but would have been out of 
 place in the Epistle to the Ephesians. Moreover St 
 Paul regards them as themselves part of the evidence 
 for the true nature of God's all-embracing purposes 
 for the whole human race which are set forth in the 
 Epistle to the Ephesians, but set forth also implicitly 
 in Rom. ix — xi. and in the final Doxology ; to say 
 nothing of the far-reaching, but often forgotten, sig- 
 nificance of the words Tra?, ■jravTe<;, which may 
 almost be called the keywords of that Epistle. 
 
 Once more, in both Epistles alike, though in 
 different language, the need for the universal salva- 
 
CIRCUMCISION. 127 
 
 tion is made to rest on the universality of the previous 
 corruption. In Eph. ii. i — 3 the reference to the 
 previous Gentile corruption is emphatically followed 
 up by an assertion of a corresponding Jewish corrup- 
 tion {jcaX v\ji,a<i ovTa<; veKpov^....iv ol? Kal r/fiel^ 
 TTcivTef avea-Tpd<fyr]fj,ev Trore and especially xal rj/xeda 
 TSKva ^va-ei 6pyrj<; w? koL 01 Xonrol). This exactly 
 answers to the way in which the terrible indictment 
 of heathendom in Rom. i. 18 — fin. is followed up by 
 the condemnation of the Jews in ii. 17 — fin., and both 
 are placed on a level in this respect in iii. 9 and else- 
 where. It is said indeed that the Epistle to the Ephe- 
 sians differs from the earlier Epistles by its language 
 about the Gentiles having been "far off." But the Eph. n. 13, 
 
 I 7. 
 
 phrase came in most naturally with the reminiscence 
 of the language of Isaiah Ivii. 19; Hi. 7, and was in 
 itself a natural way of expressing an obvious fact ; 
 which in like manner is in Rom. xi. for another 
 purpose expressed by the much less obvious image 
 of the wild olive tree. 
 
 Again it is said that, by a divergence in the op- 
 posite direction, the Epistle to the Ephesians speaks 
 of circumcision not simply as obsolete but as in itself 
 contemptible, in a way that St Paul's writings never 
 do. The passage is c. ii. 11, i/j,el<i ra edvr] iv aapKi, 
 ol Xeyo/ievot aKpo^vcrria vtto t^? Xeyo/j,evi]<i TrepiTOfirji; 
 ip aapKi ■x^eipoTTOirjTov. Here \eiyo/j,6vr}^, the word that 
 gives offence, is called forth in answer to the preceding 
 \ej6fievoi ; and its sense, ' so called circumcision,' so far 
 
128 THE IDEA OF THE ONE CHURCH 
 
 from being un-Pauline, is (taken by itself) a paradox, 
 which is at once explained when we remember the 
 language of Rom. ii. 28 f , where the circumcision 
 which is Iv ra) (f)avepw iv a-apKi is pronounced to be 
 not the true circumcision, which title belongs only to 
 circumcision of heart. 
 
 This view of the parallelism, so to speak, of Jew 
 and Gentile and the equal union of both in Christ 
 leads us to another great and prominent head of the 
 distinctive teaching of our Epistle, its teaching about 
 tke Church. Here for the first time, we hear Christians 
 throughout the world described as together making 
 up a single Ecclesia, i.e., assembly of God, or Church ; 
 and here for the first time we find the relation of 
 Christ to the or a Church conceived as that of a Head 
 to the Body. But these novelties of thought and 
 language stand in the closest connexion with what 
 preceded. The union of Jew and Gentile in a single 
 undivided society, on the basis of their one and iden- 
 tical standing before God and their one faith in the 
 one Lord, itself constituted a single universal people 
 of God ; and this, as we have seen, was just what was 
 involved in the teaching of the Epistle to the Romans. 
 Another impulse towards laying stress on the 
 unity of the society of Christians throughout the 
 world doubtless came from the position of St Paul 
 as writing from Rome. The eagerness with which, 
 as we see from the Acts of the Apostles and the 
 Epistle to the Romans, he had looked forward to 
 
A NATURAL DEVELOPMENT. 129 
 
 personal converse with the Roman Church after 
 carrying the Gentile collection as a token of brother- 
 hood to Jerusalem, arose out of a feeling that so a 
 completeness would be divinely given to his own 
 work as the herald of the Gospel to the Gentiles, by 
 his presence in the centre of the Gentile world. 
 That hope had been long delayed by imprisonment : 
 but now at last St Paul found himself at Rome, mani- 
 festly brought thither by the hand of God. With 
 everything there reminding him of the external unity 
 of the Empire, it could not be strange if his sur- 
 roundings added force to his thought of a still more 
 comprehensive unity resting on faith in the unseen 
 Lord. 
 
 Nor again would it be strange that he should use 
 the name Ecclesia in this new and extended sense, 
 although hitherto it had been applied only to the 
 Christian community of Jerusalem or Judea, or to in- 
 dividual local Christian communities outside the Holy 
 Land. That early Christian community of Palestine, 
 when as yet there were none in Gentile lands, had 
 rightly appropriated to themselves this name of 
 Israel, not improbably guided thereto by our Lord's 
 words to St Peter; and now, when there was living 
 in many lands such a varied multitude of those 
 who, in St Paul's own phrase addressed to the 
 Corinthians, " called upon the name of our Lord i Cor. i. 2. 
 Jesus Christ in every place," nothing was more 
 natural than that St Paul should gather them to- 
 H. R. 9 
 
I30 AN INVISIBLE UNION. 
 
 gether under that one ancient name Ecclesia, believing 
 as he did that they all were members of God's true 
 Israel. 
 
 As an argument against the Pauline origin of our 
 Epistle, it is urged by some that this insistence on the 
 unity of the Church is the mark of a much later time 
 when the churches of different lands were drawing 
 closer together in resistance to common dangers, and 
 binding themselves together by a single organisation. 
 This however is to misunderstand the Epistle alto- 
 gether. The unity of which it speaks has in itself 
 nothing to do with organisation, though no doubt a 
 sense of it might be expected to help towards the 
 growth of organisation. The units of the one Church 
 spoken of in the Epistle are not churches but individual 
 men. From the first, each Christian community as 
 soon as it was fprmed became as it were a school by 
 which its members were trained in the life of mutual 
 fellowship. Thus in St Paul's earlier Epistles, but 
 with greater distinctness in the Epistle to the Ephe- 
 sians, each Christian was taught to recognise the 
 bonds which joined him to every other Christian 
 throughout the world, and the debt of love and 
 helpfulness which he owed in some manner to each 
 and all. This teaching is entirely in St Paul's own 
 spirit ; and it has no trace of such words or thoughts 
 as must have inevitably accompanied the setting forth 
 of an external unity. The society was in this sense 
 external, that membership of it was constituted by 
 
CHRIST THE HEAD. 131 
 
 the external act of baptism and the accompanying 
 public profession of faith : but the unity of this society 
 was itself invisible, believed in by Christians but 
 hidden from all who did not worship the unseen 
 Lord. 
 
 Another new characteristic in the language used 
 about the Church in our Epistle is the representation 
 of Christ as the Head of the Body. The image of 
 a body as expressive of the relations between the 
 members of a society of men was old enough, being 
 found in Greek Stoics. St Paul not only gave special 
 force to it, but raised it into a higher sphere by con- 
 necting it with the relations of men to the Lord 
 Himself In the earlier Epistles, however, He is not 
 spoken of as the Head of the Body. In Rom. xii. 4, 5 
 we read "Even as we have many members in one 
 " body, and all the members have not the same office 
 " (or action), so we, who are many, are one body in 
 " Christ, and severally members one of another." Here 
 Christ appears as the bond or uniting element by 
 which the multitude of individual men became a 
 body: but the wide range of sense in which the 
 pregnant phrase "in Christ" is used by St Paul, 
 leaves it undetermined whether Christ Himself was 
 regarded as having, so to speak, a place within the 
 imagery of the body and its members. In i Cor. xii. 
 the language is apparently more definite but more 
 peculiar : " as the body is one, and hath many i Cor. xii. 
 members, and all the members of the body, being 
 
 Q— 2 
 
132 A NEW BUT PAULINE IMAGE. 
 
 many, are one body, so also is Christ : " — not " so are 
 we in Christ," but so "is Christ," i.e., He Himself is in 
 some sense identified with the Christian body as 
 made up of many members. Later on in the chapter 
 
 I Cor. xii. we have the more familiar language " Now ye 
 are a body of Christ, and severally members," where 
 still there is nothing to suggest that Christ's relation 
 to the body is that of head to the other members, and 
 
 ih. It. moreover in the words "Again the head [cannot say 
 to the feet] I have no need of you " the head appears 
 simply as one member among many. 
 
 But though the language of Eph. i. 22, iv. 15 f 
 (which is also the language of Col. i. 18) is thus new, 
 it was perfectly natural for St Paul himself to use. 
 He had already employed the image of a head in an 
 analogous though possibly not identical manner in a 
 
 I Cor. xi. very remarkable verse of his first Epistle to the 
 Corinthians, " Now I would have you know that 
 the head of every man (aj/Spo? — man as distinct 
 from woman) is Christ, and the head of a woman 
 is the man (her husband), and the head of Christ 
 is God." We must not stop to enquire into the 
 exact force of headship in each of these three 
 clauses, or in all. It is likely enough that the large 
 range of meaning attaching to the Hebrew rdsh 
 enabled St Paul to stretch as it were the meaning of 
 the Greek Ke^aXr). But the presence of the article 
 before Ke^aXr] in the first clause, together with the inser- 
 tion of Travro's before dpBp6<;, in contra.st to the absence 
 
THE CORNERSTONE. 133 
 
 of 17 in the second and third clauses, and of Trdar]'; 
 in the second, suggests that it is as one out of many, 
 as member of a body, that a man is spoken of as 
 having Christ for his Head. And again in the second 
 clause what is said of a husband as head of his wife 
 is a distinct anticipation of Eph. v. 23, where the two 
 headships are brought expressly together. 
 
 Another quite different antecedent of the, idea of 
 Christ's relation to the Church as Head, as we find it 
 in the Epistle to the Ephesians, may safely be 
 recognised in the association of the image of a 
 building with that of a body as together shadow- 
 ing forth the nature of the Christian fellowship, 
 each being as it were complementary to the other. 
 One who can look on Christ as the Cornerstone 
 of the Temple not made with hands, would almost 
 of necessity look upon Him likewise as the Head 
 of the Body, even if he did not find a connecting 
 link in the phrase 'Head of the Corner' by which 
 the fundamental Psalm, Ps. 118, described the Cor- 
 nerstone. Now it is true we have no direct evi- 
 dence from St Paul's earlier epistles that the image 
 of the Cornerstone was familiar to his mind. But 
 if we remember that this image came from Our 
 Lord's own implicit appropriation of the jvords 
 of the Psalm to Himself in the parable of the Mt. xxi. 
 Wicked Husbandmen recorded in all the first three t^' ^."^ "'■ 
 
 10, I 1 J 
 
 Gospels, not to speak of St Peter's reference to itLk.xx. 17. 
 before the Sanhedrim as well as afterwards in his Acts iv.n. 
 
134 THE PREEXISTENT HEAD 
 
 1Pet.ii.4f. epistle, it must be impossible for us to believe that 
 the idea was either unknown to St Paul from the day 
 that he became a Christian, or was rejected by him. 
 On these then, as on other grounds, the negative fact 
 that Christ is not called Head of the Church in the 
 earlier Epistles, has no force towards shewing that 
 this Epistle must have a different author. 
 
 We come next, by an easy transition, to the 
 differences of the Epistle to the Ephesians from 
 the earlier Epistles on the Person and Office of 
 the Lord Himself, i.e., in what is now commonly 
 known as Christology. Difficult as it may be to 
 determine precisely the range of St Paul's belief on 
 this central subject as implied in his earlier Epistles, 
 it is at least clear that to his mind our Lord's human 
 birth was no absolute beginning of existence, but, to 
 use the image supplied to us by St John's Gospel, a 
 descent from heaven. This is implied not only in the 
 great passage of Phil, ii., but in the corresponding 
 earlier language of 2 Cor. viii. 9 "how for your sakes 
 he became poor, when he was rich" (St' uyao? lirjm- 
 Xeva-ev irXovcTio'; wv). So also Gal. iv. 4 " God sent 
 forth His Son, born of a woman, born under law, &c." 
 and the similar Rom. viii. 3 " God sending His own 
 Son in the likeness of flesh of sin &c. " where the 
 accompanying words exclude the supposition that 
 St Paul meant a Sonship coming into existence only 
 with the sending. 
 
 But in the Epistle to the Ephesians and still 
 
OF THE UNIVERSE AND THE CHURCH. 135 
 
 more in that to the Colossians much more than 
 this is said. The Lordship of Christ is extended 
 from men to the whole created world, visible and 
 invisible, and carried back to the very beginning 
 of things. In Col. i. i6f. we are told explicitly 
 that " in Him were all things created in the heavens 
 ''and upon the earth, things visible and things in- 
 
 " visible, all things have been created through 
 
 " Him and unto Him ; and He is before all things 
 "and in Him all things consist." In the Epistle to 
 the Ephesians there is no clear reference to this pri- 
 mordial relation of Christ to the Universe ; but all 
 things in heaven as well as earth are represented as Eph. i. 10. 
 sharing in the reconciliation effected by His death. 
 In this Epistle the prominent subject is that Headship 
 to the Ecclesia which likewise not only has a place in 
 the Epistle to the Colossians, but stands there just 
 after the words quoted above "And He is the Head of Col. i. i8f. 
 "the Body, the Ecclesia, Who is the beginning, the first- 
 " born from the dead, that He might in all things be 
 " Himself the First." But in our Epistle the foundation 
 of this Headship of the Ecclesia is represented as laid 
 in the very beginning of things. Membership of the 
 Body is referred back to God's own election, and this 
 again is apparently made to rest on a corresponding 
 direction of the divine Will towards Christ Himself 
 before all human history. God's present blessing of Eph. iii. 
 Christians in all spiritual blessings in the heavenly ^''' 
 world in Christ is put in express parallelism with His 
 
136 THIS HEADSHIP IN EARLIER EPISTLES. 
 
 having chosen them from the first, — "even as He chose 
 us in Him before the foundation of the world." So also 
 the full force of the language of the sixth and ninth 
 verses of the first chapter implies that "in Christ," 
 " in the Father's Beloved," and in the Father's mind 
 towards Him, were implicitly involved, so to speak, 
 from before the Creation the many sons who after 
 long ages should by adoption be taken as it were 
 into Him. 
 
 But though language of this kind is absent from 
 the earlier epistles, they are not wanting in other 
 language which at least points in the same direction. 
 Both the primary relation of the universe to Christ 
 and specially the relation of the Ecclesia to Him are 
 involved in i Cor. viii. 6 ; "to us there is one God, 
 " the Father, from (or out of) Whom are all things, and 
 " we unto (or into) Him ; and one Lord, Jesus Christ, 
 " throngk whom, are all things, and we through Him." 
 The connecting link between these two Headships, 
 that of the universe and that of the Ecclesia, is the 
 Headship of mankind : and of this there are intima- 
 tions in the earlier Epistles, viz. in the replacement of 
 Adam by Christ as the last or second Adam, i.e. as 
 the true Head of the whole human race (so i Cor. xv. 
 45 — 45^ compare also 22 ; Rom. v. 14, 'ASo/n, o? e'crri 
 tJtto? toO /teXXoi'TO?). 
 
 Again it is undeniably true that in the Epistle 
 to the Ephesians Christ is spoken of as the agent 
 in certain Divine acts in which the earlier Epistles 
 
THE AGENCY OF THE SON 137 
 
 and that to the Colossians speak of God or the 
 Father as the agent. In Col. i. 19, He Whose good 
 pleasure it was that in Christ should all the 'ir\r]p(o\xa 
 dwell, i.e., the Father, is said to have through Him 
 reconciled all things into Him ; perhaps also it is the 
 Father that is said in the next clause to have made 
 peace by the blood of His Cross. This is the usual 
 and the prima facie interpretation, though a quite 
 possible punctuation would favour the alternative 
 view\ Still more uncertain is the subject of the 
 verb diroKaTijWa^ev (if that is the right reading) 
 in verse 21 ; and there is an analogous ambiguity in 
 Col. ii. 13 f^ preceded as this difficult passage is by 
 a sentence of which God is clearly the subject, and 
 followed by one in which Christ is clearly the subject. 
 But in 2 Cor. v. i8f. there can be no doubt that it 
 is God Himself who appears as the Reconciler of 
 men to Himself "through Christ." In Eph. ii. 16 on 
 the other hand it is Christ who appears as the 
 Reconciler, reconciling both Israel and the Gentiles 
 (toii? dfjL<f)OTepovv) in one body to God through the 
 Cross. No competent person probably would say 
 that the two modes of speech are contradictory : but, 
 
 ^ Put Sti iv avTi} — eh airbv into a parenthesis, so joining eiprjvo- 
 TTOiiiiras to the clause ending with irpoiTeiuv, this arrangement requires 
 the (quite possible) omission of the second 5i' airov, and the assignment 
 of a virtually transitive force to dprqvoiroi.i)(jai with a sense nearly 
 equivalent to that involved in AiroKaToKKa^ai. 
 
 ^ Put Kol i/xSts — (Till' airi} (or possibly irapaiTTiliiiaTa) into a paren- 
 thesis. 
 
138 AND THE AGENCY OF THE FATHER. 
 
 though not contradictory, are they so different in 
 conception as to suggest different authorship ? I 
 cannot think so. The language of the Second Epistle 
 to the Corinthians answers to what one may call 
 St Paul's normal theology, in which the Father is 
 set before us as the primary agent in all the economy 
 of salvation, the Son as the intermediate agent or 
 instrument [this thought is commonly expressed by 
 Sta with the genitive], through whom the Father's 
 action takes effect. But nowhere in St Paul's writings 
 are we led to think of Christ as a mere instrument: 
 He is always the living Son, gladly fulfilling the 
 living Father's Will. It is moreover worth notice 
 Col.iii. 13. that in the Epistle to the Colossians "the Lord" (v.l. 
 "the Christ": doubtless Christ is meant in either 
 case) appears as forgiving {k-^apl<Taro) men their 
 Eph. iv. offences, while in that to the Ephesians the forgive- 
 " ' ness (again i')(ap'iaaTo) is ascribed to "God in Christ": 
 
 i.e. the variation of language is inverted. We have no 
 reason therefore to think that another than St Paul 
 must be speaking to us when we read a passage in 
 which the ultimate agency of the Father is passed 
 over in silence, and the one agent named is Christ. 
 The motive for this less usual way of speaking is 
 easily seen if we read carefully the whole of Eph. ii. 
 II — 22 on the admission of the Gentiles to a share in 
 the Messiah of Israel. The middle sentence, vv. 14— 
 18, beginning "For Himself is our Peace," and ending 
 " because through Him we both have our access in 
 
THE SOURCE OF GIFTS. 139 
 
 one Spirit unto the Father,'' would most naturally 
 keep Him as its subject throughout, and lay the 
 stress on His share in the work of reconciliation, 
 unless to do so were felt to be a departure from 
 truth. 
 
 So again it is urged that while in i Cor. xii. 28 
 the various functions and gifts in the Church are 
 referred to God as their author, in Eph. iv. 11 a 
 similar office is assigned to Christ. Doubtless the 
 fact is so; but the difference of contexts at once 
 explains it. In i Cor. xii. St Paul is expounding the 
 relation of the body to its several members as a 
 divine ordinance (a part of creation, so to speak), the 
 special collocation and function of each being arranged 
 by Him (e^ero v. 18). And so, when in v. 28 he 
 comes down to the concrete functions and gifts of 
 actual Churches, he repeats that they too owe their 
 several places to the discriminating purpose of God 
 (again Wero o Qed<i). In Eph. iv. on the contrary 
 St Paul is speaking of the gifts which Christ sent 
 down when He had ascended up on high, the 
 historical fulfilment, as it were, of the original purpose. 
 His starting point is the quotation from Psalm Ixviii., Eph. iv. 8 
 or rather from a Christian adaptation of it, with is. 
 'given' substituted for 'received' ("when He ascended 
 on high. He led captivity captive, and gave gifts to 
 men "): and when, three verses further on, he proceeds 
 '"And Himself gave some apostles, some prophets &c.," 
 the word 'gave' (eScoKev) is caught up from the 'gave' 
 
HO THE SUBORDINATION OF THE SON. 
 
 in the modified Psalm, and thus brought into close 
 connexion with the results of the Ascension. But 
 there is nothing unnatural in supposing that the 
 same writer might, when writing from these two 
 different points of view, in the one case ascribe the 
 agency to God, in the other to Christ. 
 
 The high improbability that these various differ- 
 ences of language are due to difference of theology is 
 shewn by the emphasis with which the subordination 
 of the Son to the Father is implied in i. 17 ("the 
 God of our Lord Jesus Christ "), not to speak of the 
 various important passages in which God Himself 
 stands at the head as Himself the doer of deeds 
 Eph.i. 3— of blessing for men. The two sides of the truth 
 i'-^^!' with which we are now dealing are brought together 
 
 11.4—10; in strict conformity with St Paul's acknowledeed 
 
 111. 9 — II, ... 
 
 14— ii ; teaching, in iv. 32 — v. 2 (where the sense is 
 
 V. 20. ' obscured by making a new chapter or section), 
 
 " Forgiving each other, even as God also in Christ 
 
 forgave you. Be ye therefore imitators of God [not 
 
 of Christ], as beloved children ; and walk in love, as 
 
 Christ also loved you, and gave Himself up for you, 
 
 an offering and a sacrifice to God for an odour of a 
 
 cp. Rom. sweet smell." 
 V. 5— II ; 
 
 viii. 32 — 
 
 39- Another alleged indication of different authorship 
 
 for this Epistle is the prominence given to the Holy 
 Spirit. Doubtless the contrast with the Epistle to 
 the Colossians is great in this respect; but there is 
 
THE HOLY SPIRIT. 141 
 
 no similar contrast with the earlier epistles, especially 
 with the Epistle to the Romans and the First Epistle 
 to the Corinthians. The critic who dwells on the 
 supposed peculiarity himself rightly associates it with 
 the prominence given to the Ecclesia in the Epistle 
 to the Ephesians, and thus suggests the true answer. 
 In the First Epistle to the Corinthians and in that to 
 the Ephesians alike St Paul is anxiously insisting on 
 the mutual duties of members of the Christian 
 community, and therefore has need to go back to the 
 inner principle of its life, the one uniting Spirit. 
 Only in the First Epistle to the Corinthians he is 
 dealing with the Ecclesia of a single city, the members 
 of which were in constant converse with each other ; 
 in the Epistle to the Ephesians he is dealing with the 
 universal Ecclesia, the members of which were scat- 
 tered through many lands, so that the hidden bonds 
 of fellowship between them were only too liable to 
 be forgotten : and thus the language in which the 
 Spirit is set forth as an object for faith takes 
 naturally a higher flight in the latter case than in 
 the former. 
 
 A more really significant change perhaps than any 
 of these is a change in the tone of speaking about the 
 present and the future. The immediate imminence 
 of the Coming of the Lord has faded out of view ; the 
 anticipation of it seems now to include a sense of its 
 possible remoteness. No stress can rightly be laid on 
 
142 THE COMING OF THE LORD. 
 
 the passage chiefly cited to shew that the Epistle to 
 the Ephesians has the thought of Christian men as 
 
 Eph. ii. 6. already in heaven while here on earth («at ffvvrj'^eipev 
 Koi <TvveKd6t,a-ev iv rot? iirovpavioii; ev ^piaTW ^Irjaov), 
 the reference being to the Ascension as implicitly 
 involving for the members what was confessedly true 
 for the Head. But the sense of present blessedness 
 
 Eph. iv. does pervade the Epistle ; and moreover what is said 
 on the purposes of the bestowal of the gifts of Christ 
 from above suggests, to say the least, the image of a 
 long and gradual growth reaching far out into the 
 future from age to age, consisting partly in the per- 
 fecting of the Christian community and its members, 
 partly (I cannot but think, though this is not 
 explicitly written) in the gathering together of the 
 human race into this its true and proper community, 
 through knowledge of the Son of God in accordance 
 with the purpose of that Gospel to the nations of 
 which so much is said in the Epistle. But nothing 
 was more natural than that a change like this should 
 come over St Paul's mind, when year after year 
 passed away, and still there was no sign of the Lord's 
 coming, and when the spread of the faith through the 
 Roman Empire, and the results which it was pro- 
 ducing, would give force to all such ways of thinking 
 as are represented by the image of the leaven 
 leavening the lump. In the earlier Epistles them- 
 selves there is a certain gradation in this respect from 
 the earliest extant, the two to the Thessalonians, 
 
CHANGE OF VIEW GRADUAL. 143 
 
 onwards to that to the Romans. That reflexion on 
 God's ordering of the ages of the human past which 
 leaves so deep a mark on the last-named Epistle, 
 and which reappears in other language in that 
 to the Ephesians, might easily suggest the thought 
 that perhaps a long human future still remained, 
 to be drawn out and governed by the same divine 
 counsel. It is on the strength of an appeal in 
 chapter iii. to what God had purposed and done in 
 the ages of the past that at the end of the chapter 
 the doxology breaks forth, " To Him that is able to 
 do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or 
 think, according to the power that is made to work 
 in us, to Him be the glory in the Ecclesia and in 
 Christ Jesus unto all generations of the age of the 
 ages." 
 
 Another point, supposed to be unfavourable to 
 St Paul's authorship, is the manner in which "the 
 apostles'' are twice spoken of, "built upon the Eph.ii.20. 
 foundation of the apostles and prophets," and "re- 
 vealed to His holy apostles and prophets in [the] Eph. iii. 5. 
 Spirit." In so far as the incongruity is thought to 
 arise from a fundamental and permanent opposition 
 between St Paul and the Twelve, it would be 
 evidently impossible to discuss so vast a question 
 now. But it is worth while to notice how short- 
 sighted it would be to deduce the true nature of 
 St Paul's relations with the Twelve from certain well- 
 
144 ■ST PAUL AND THE TWELVE. 
 
 known language about the Twelve employed in the 
 Epistle to the Galatians and the Second Epistle to 
 the Corinthians. That language was wholly defen- 
 sive: its purpose was not to impugn the apostolic 
 authority of the Twelve, but to vindicate St Paul's 
 own against men who, by claiming for the Twelve 
 an exclusive apostolicity, were striving to undermine 
 St Paul's position and undo his work. But the 
 true apostolicity of the Twelve was not, and could 
 not be, doubted by St Paul : indeed it is assumed in 
 his vindication of his own title to call himself an 
 apostle, i.e. to be as one of them. 
 
 Nor again is there a word in his earlier epistles 
 which suggests that the Twelve even at that time 
 objected to the terms on which he preached the 
 Gospel to the Gentiles : nay, the contrary is implied 
 Gal. ii. in the verses that come between that very passage 
 from which we learn of the temporary hesitation of 
 some of the Twelve and that other passage which 
 records St Peter's equally temporary cowardice at 
 Antioch. This evidence too is independent of the 
 explicit account in Acts xv., the trustworthiness of 
 which is questioned by many, on plausible but quite 
 insufficient grounds. And if this was the attitude 
 of the Twelve to St Paul at the time of his second 
 missionary journey, still more was it likely that they 
 would recognise his Gospel to the Gentiles as in 
 a special manner owned by God at this later time 
 when Eastern Europe as well as Western Asia 
 
 -lo. 
 
"HOLY APOSTLES AND PROPHETS." 145 
 
 abounded in churches in large measure of heathen 
 origin. 
 
 We need not discuss now whether the ' prophets ' 
 here mentioned were or were not, wholly or in part, 
 identical with the ' apostles.' Thus much is certain, 
 that the two names represent the two types of 
 guidance specially given to that earliest age ; that of 
 apostles, as eyewitnesses of the Lord's own life, death, 
 and resurrection, and that of prophets, as receivers of 
 special present monitions from the Holy Spirit. We 
 learn from the Acts of the Apostles the part played 
 by these prophetic monitions in the recognition of 
 fresh steps in the expansion of church membership 
 as divinely ordained, the most striking example being 
 that of the original Antiochian mission of Paul and 
 Barnabas. Thus the phrase about its having been Acts xiii. 
 in that latest generation ' revealed to Christ's holy '^' 
 apostles and prophets in [the] Spirit that the Gentiles 
 are fellow-heirs ' does but sum up in a pregnant form 
 what had been the real course of things. 
 
 Nor is any additional difficulty created, as some 
 think, by the epithet 'holy,' which it is said would 
 naturally be used only by a writer of the next or a 
 later generation, to whom the apostles were venerated 
 figures of the past. Doubtless this would be a natural 
 origin for the epithet : but a not less natural one 
 would be St Paul's sense of the peculiarly consecrated 
 function which apostles and prophets had to discharge 
 for the whole body of a^i,oL (cp. Luke i. 70 toov dyicov 
 H. R. 10 
 
146 THE FOUNDATION OF THE BUILDING. 
 
 aiT alSivo<i TrpoiprjToov avrov). Such an usage would be 
 exactly like his use of /oXijtos for himself in association 
 Rom. i. I, with a church of kXtitoL Every one will feel how 
 j_ j' \_ °^' incongruous it would have been as a matter of lan- 
 guage for him to speak of himself directly and 
 individually as ' holy ' : but the incongruity vanishes 
 when he merges himself in the body of apostles, and 
 in his usage the conceptions of calledness (so to speak) 
 and holiness are nearly connected. 
 
 This passage which we have been examining, so 
 understood, shews in its turn how fitly in the twin 
 passage St Paul himself could speak of the Gentiles 
 now admitted to be of the household of God as 
 Eph.il. 20. "built upon the foundation of the Apostles and 
 prophets." He had in mind the historical order 
 of the actual structure and growth of the Ecclesia 
 itself, not any authority over the Ecclesia. The 
 foundation itself, the lowest course of living stones (as 
 St Peter would say), consisted of those who had been 
 chosen to look upon the Lord in His human manifes- 
 tation and bear witness of what they had beheld, and 
 of those who had been chosen to be the utterers of 
 special voices of the Spirit. To them were added, 
 and on them were built up as fresh members of their 
 community, the multitudes, first of Jews, then also of 
 Gentiles, who believed through their word. It matters 
 little that this precise conception is without parallel in 
 St Paul's earlier Epistles. Given that his purpose was 
 to bring out the various privileges to which Gentile 
 
GIFTS OF THE ASCENDED LORD. 147 
 
 Christians had been admitted, and that in connexion 
 with the general image of a building inhabited by 
 God, — an image of which he makes ample use else- 
 where, but which was of special value to him for the 
 purposes of this Epistle — then the special image of 
 the foundation would be at once a natural and a vivid 
 way of setting forth the true historic basis on which 
 Gentile no less than Jewish Christendom rested. Nor 
 would he by so using it, as some say, contradict as it 
 were the image employed by himself in i Cor. iii. 
 10 ff., where it is said that " other foundation can no 
 man lay but that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ," 
 for there he is not speaking of the Christian society, 
 but the Christian faith : what is there spoken of as 
 built on the foundation is not men but teachings 
 or ways of life. Nor in the Epistle to the Ephesians 
 is there reason to doubt that the cornerstone is 
 itself part of the foundation. 
 
 Once more, the prima facie singularity of that 
 twice repeated phrase about apostles and prophets 
 disappears when we observe that in this same chapter Eph. iv. 
 apostles and prophets stand first in the list of gifts "" 
 given to men by the ascended Christ, these two 
 and these alone having unique and exceptional func- 
 tions of direct divine origin, needed for the ex- 
 ceptional wants of the apostolic age. And this is 
 not all, for they stand in a precisely similar manner 
 at the head of that analogous list of representative 
 orderings by God of members of a body which came 
 
 10 — 2 
 
!48 ST PAULS CALLING. 
 
 before us a little while ago in i Cor. xii.' Thus the 
 prima facie peculiarity of the phrase as it occurs in 
 the two first passages is entirely removed. 
 
 From the language of the Epistle about the apostles 
 as a body we pass naturally to its language about 
 St Paul himself, which is in like manner said to be 
 Eph. iii. unfavourable to his authorship. It is thought strange 
 iv~i'- vi ^"'-' forced that St Paul should dwell thus emphatically 
 ^°- on the special charge received by him from God towards 
 
 the Gentiles. It would perhaps be enough to point in 
 reply to language implying the same charge, if less 
 elaborate in wording, in earlier Epistles, as Rom. 
 xi. 13; XV. 16, and several verses of the Epistle to 
 the Galatians. But there is still stronger, if less 
 obvious, justification, supposing that any justification 
 be needed, for such language as coming from St Paul 
 writing at Rome to the Christians of Western Asia 
 Minor. To two temptations in particular these mainly 
 Gentile churches would after a time be exposed, 
 first to sit loose to all fellowship with Jewish Chris- 
 tians and to the historic basis of the Christian 
 faith as laid in Israel ; and secondly to misuse the 
 freedom from the Jewish Law, making it into an 
 excuse for a free and easy kind of Christianity, 
 somewhat negligent, to say the least, of common 
 duties towards God and man, even towards the 
 brethren. A large part of the Epistle is virtually a 
 ' See page 139. 
 
HIS SELF-DEPRECIATION. 149 
 
 solemn exhortation on these two heads, and there was 
 every reason why St Paul in thus writing should appeal 
 to the special right which he had to give the warning, 
 he the divinely appointed champion of Gentile free- 
 dom, and now a prisoner owing to his labours in that 
 cause. 
 
 It is hardly credible that this language, vindicating 
 St Paul's claim to be listened to by Gentile Christians, 
 should have been thought to make unreal those other 
 words in iii. 8, " to me, who am less than the least of 
 all saints, was this grace given," words which are 
 accordingly treated as a clumsy exaggeration of what 
 the true St Paul had written to the Corinthians i Cor. xv. 
 about being 'the least of the apostles, not meet to 
 be called an apostle.' There the range of comparison 
 is limited by the context, here there was no ground 
 for stopping short of "all saints." In striving to 
 bring the Asiatic Christians to a true sense of the 
 greatness of the grace of God shewn to them, he 
 speaks in the power of his own deep sense of the 
 greatness of the grace of God shewn to himself The 
 individual unworthiness does but lift higher his calling 
 as the apostle of the Gentiles. Nay, the combination 
 and contrast of the individual unworthiness and the 
 divine calling are explicitly set forth in the most 
 obviously Pauline of the early Epistles, that to the Gal. i. 
 
 JO 1^ 
 
 Galatians. 
 
 More plausible is the appeal to Eph. iii. 2 — 4, a 
 difficult passage, at all events at first sight. The 
 
ISO ''READING''' 
 
 expression of an assurance that the recipients of the 
 letter, as they read it, would be able to appreciate the 
 writer's understanding in the mystery of the Christ is 
 said to be an awkward way of cultivating assent, un- 
 worthy (I suppose it is meant) of St Paul's dignified 
 directness. Nor is it to be denied that there is 
 something unusual and obscure in the language used 
 if, as is generally if not universally assumed, the 
 "reading" {dva'^ivaxTKovTe'i) anticipated for the reci- 
 pients of the Epistle means reading of the Epistle 
 itself, or of some part of it. Yet even so the evidence 
 against St Paul's authorship would be trivial and 
 untrustworthy, taken by itself: for nothing is more 
 characteristic of St Paul than to use language modified 
 by undercurrents of thought or feeling which are not 
 at all obvious to trace. My own impression, however, 
 is that the reading spoken of is not of the Epistle, but 
 of the prophetic parts of the Old Testament. Such, 
 I am convinced, is the meaning in that remarkable 
 phrase of Mat. xxiv. 15, || Mark xiii. 14, o avwr^i- 
 vcocTKcov voe'iTw^. There is no force in what is com- 
 monly said against this interpretation of our first 
 two Gospels, that in St Mark no mention is made of 
 Daniel, the prophet supposed to be read ; for even 
 without his name so remarkable a phrase as that 
 translated " the abomination of desolation " would at 
 
 ' We have the same combination here SivaaBe avayiviiiTKOVTes vinj<riu. 
 It occurs again in Origen de Principiis iv. quoted in Philocalia i. 8 t^s 
 avaydxTeas Kal vo'qcreas of the Scriptures. 
 
PROPHETIC SCRIPTURES. 151 
 
 once bring to mind the book from which it was taken. 
 But both in the Gospels and here the absolute use of 
 the word read in the sense of reading Scripture was 
 apparently in conformity with Jewish usage, as may 
 be seen by various examples given under X*np and 
 
 tIt 
 
 its derivatives in Levy and Fleischer's Lexicon \ 
 and that in the case of both reading aloud and 
 silent reading. This use is apparently confirmed by 
 the absolute use of t^ avwyvmaei in i Tim. iv. 13, 
 and the similar absolute use of avwyvcoafia in the 
 early Fathers (e.g. Origen Cels. iii. 50). This inter- 
 pretation of dvayivcoaKovTe'i in Eph. iii. 4 gives force 
 to the otherwise obscure tt/so? o which precedes. 
 The recipients of the Epistle were to perceive St 
 Paul's understanding in the mystery of Christ not 
 simply by reading his exposition, but by keeping 
 it in mind when they read ancient prophecy, com- 
 paring the one with the other. Thus the sense 
 answers exactly to the sense of the phrase "by 
 prophetic scriptures" (Bia ypacjiwv irpoj>7]TiKmv) in a 
 passage strikingly akin to our context here, occurring 
 in the great doxology which closes the Epistle to the 
 Romans, which in its turn is an echo of Rom. i. 2. Rom. xvi. 
 Upon this view Eph. iii. 4 loses even the semblance 
 of not being wholly worthy of St Paul. 
 
 One other department of evidence alleged to be 
 
 ^ Neuhebrdisches und chalddisclies Worterbuch iiher die Talviudim 
 luid Midraschim. Leipzig, 1876 — 89. 
 
152 PECULIARITIES OF STYLE. 
 
 unfavourable to St Paul's authorship remains to be 
 spoken of, that of language, which falls roughly under 
 three heads, style, phraseology, and vocabulary. As 
 regards style, much stress is laid on the unusually 
 long sentences which meet us in some parts of the 
 Epistle, made up of clauses linked on one to another, 
 often interspersed with more or less parenthetic 
 clauses, and sometimes running into irregular con- 
 structions. Thus much is true, and it would not be 
 easy to find exact parallels elsewhere in St Paul's 
 Epistles except in the similar passages of the Epistle 
 to the Colossians and, to a certain extent, in such 
 passages as Rom. i. i — 7; Phil. ii. 5 — 11 ; iii. 8 — 14. 
 But it is difficult to recognise any truth in the allega- 
 tion that the Epistle to the Ephesians is distinguished 
 by verbosity and unmeaning copiousness of language. 
 On the contrary, within each clause we find the 
 closest packing of concentrated language, yet all 
 fused together in one glowing stream. The latest 
 and not the least intelligent of recent critics who 
 have found the style of the Epistle un-Pauline 
 has conveniently summed up his impressions on 
 this matter in a single pair of contrasted epithets'. 
 The author of the Epistle to the Ephesians betrays, 
 he thinks, a wholly different temperament as a 
 writer from St Paul, a phlegmatic instead of a choleric 
 temperament. To any one who feels the presence of 
 a phlegmatic temperament in this Epistle, its style, 
 1 Von Soden, p. 88. 
 
SPECIAL CAUSES. 153 
 
 and a good deal else besides, may well present some 
 perplexities. The lofty calm which undeniably does 
 pervade it may in part be due to the mellowing effect 
 of years, but doubtless much more to the sense of 
 dangers surmounted, aspirations satisfied, and a van- 
 tage ground gained for the world-wide harmonious 
 action of the Christian community under the govern- 
 ment of God. But, though the vehement moods of the 
 earlier contests have subsided, many parts of the 
 Epistle glow with a steady white heat which has to 
 be taken account of as a considerable factor in the 
 production of the supposed peculiarities of style. 
 
 Another cause of difference is this, that all the 
 earlier epistles, that to the Romans in part excepted, 
 are, so to speak, occasional writings, called forth by 
 special conditions at special times. The Epistle to the 
 Ephesians, as we have already seen, has on the other 
 hand a more general character. Time and place are 
 indeed by no means unimportant as determining 
 what is to be written, but they are more in the 
 distance than before. Now for the first time St Paul 
 is free, as it were, to pour forth his own thoughts in 
 a positive form, instead of carrying on an argument, 
 and therefore being hampered by its necessary limita- 
 tions : and this great change could not but greatly 
 affect his style in some such manner as we find. It 
 is true that the Epistle to the Romans was likewise 
 to a considerable though less extent general in cha- 
 racter ; but a large proportion of what may be called 
 
154 THE EVIDENCE OF VOCABULARY 
 
 general in that Epistle was still either argumentative 
 or at least expository. When however, as in some 
 of its highest flights, it becomes simply affirmative 
 (see c. i. i — 6, and the last twelve verses of c. viii., 
 not to speak of the final Doxology), we are at 
 once reminded of the Epistle to the Ephesians, alike 
 by the matter and by the long drawn out style. 
 Doubtless in those verses of c. viii. the texture, as it 
 were, is different : the links of the chain are looser : 
 but essentially the concatenation is there. 
 
 The evidence of phraseology and vocabulary is 
 quite different from that of style, being made up of a 
 number of separate particulars, which evidently cannot 
 be dealt with in a complete manner within our 
 limits. But it is worth while to speak of some 
 considerations affecting this class of evidence. We 
 will begin with the vocabulary. 
 
 Various Introductions supply lists of words found 
 in Ephesians and not found elsewhere in the Bible, 
 or found in the LXX., but not elsewhere in the New 
 Testament. In these lists it is usual to omit the Pas- 
 toral Epistles, or to take account of them separately ; 
 and with good reason, for evidence derived from them 
 as to St Paul's own diction would be disputed by the 
 many critics who on undeniably plausible, though I 
 believe inadequate, grounds deny their Pauline author- 
 ship, such denial being moreover in part founded on 
 real differences of vocabulary. But it is an interesting 
 
WHEN A TEST OF GENUINENESS. 15; 
 
 fact, not without a bearing on the genuineness both 
 of the Epistle to the Ephesians, and of the Pastoral 
 Epistles, that the four have in common a certain 
 number of words not found in the earlier Epistles. 
 But this is by the way, for we must return to the 
 lists intended to illustrate the distinctness of the 
 vocabulary of our Epistle. Lists of this kind are 
 always delusive if taken in a crude numerical fashion. 
 He must be a very monotonous writer indeed who does 
 not use — for the most part unconsciously use — in each 
 of his books a certain number of words which he does 
 not use in his other books : and the same considera- 
 tion evidently holds good in the comparison with the 
 books of other writers, unless the comparison is made 
 with a considerable mass of writing, and that dealing 
 on the whole with the same class of subjects. Nor 
 again have we any right to expect that the proportion 
 of unique words (unique, I mean, in this limited sense) 
 would be even approximately equal in different works 
 of the same writer : and yet the causes of inequality 
 would be so various, and often so unknown, that we 
 could not expect to be able to account for more than 
 a part of such inequalities as may present themselves. 
 Hence, in such a case as this, the mere counting up 
 of unique words employed is of almost no value: 
 individual words must be looked at one by one. 
 
 It ought to be obvious that words occurring only in 
 quotations have no just place in any of these lists. 
 This simple test strikes away 9 out of the "jS words 
 
156 UNIQUE WORDS DUE TO QUOTATION, 
 
 occurring in one careful enumeration of the words of 
 this Epistle not used by St Paul elsewhere, the Pas- 
 toral Epistles being left out of account. Then a large 
 part of the list may safely be dismissed from con- 
 sideration at once because required, or at least 
 naturally suggested, by contexts which do not recur 
 
 Eph. vi. in other Epistles. Thus the unique passage on 
 II — 17. 
 
 putting on the panoply of God supplies a number of 
 
 words for which there is at least no obvious place in 
 the earlier Epistles, •KavotrXla, ^e\o<;, 6vpe6<;, irepi^mv- 
 vvjMai, virohovfiai, iraXr], and again two which have a 
 less obvious place there, KoafioKpdrcap, eToi/iaeria. A 
 few lines later we come to iv aXva-ei, which might at 
 Eph. vi. first sight be plausibly called a characteristic variation 
 from St Paul's usual iv Bea/ioif, till we notice the 
 combination with -Trpecr^eva) (7rpecr0evco iv aXva-ei,), 
 shewing that here the writer has in mind not the mere 
 general thought of being in bonds, but the visual 
 image of an ambassador standing up to plead his 
 sovereign's cause and wearing, strangest of contra- 
 dictions, a fetter by way of official adornment. Of 
 other words falling under the same head elsewhere 
 fiecroroi')(ov, (f)pa'yn6<;, Xovrpov, iiBcop, pvfl<;, airiKo'; may 
 serve as examples. Again the fact that the unity 
 of the Christian community is so largely dwelt 
 on accounts at once for a group of words com- 
 pounded with a-vv not found in the other Epistles, 
 or even in the New Testament, in addition to words 
 which are found in the other books. Of the former 
 
 20. 
 
CONTEXT, BREVITY OR ACCIDENT. 157 
 
 class are avvapfioXo'yoviiai, a-vvTroXiTii'i, ctvvoikoSo- 
 /jLovfiai, <Tvv<T(Ofi,o<;, avviJieTO'Xp'i- Somewhat analogous 
 perhaps are a few cases in which ideas not peculiar to 
 this Epistle are gathered up in a single unique and 
 expressive word, as e'x^api.Ttocrev, iKXrjpcudrj/jbev, ttoKv- 
 TTOwtXo? (rj TToXviroiKiXo'; aotjsia tov ©eoO). Nor can 
 any weight, as a rule, be attached to words found only 
 here when St Paul elsewhere uses words differing 
 only as different parts of speech, the fundamental 
 meaning being the same. Thus «aTapTto-/xo9 stands 
 here alone, but elsewhere we find KaTapTi^co and 
 KwrapTbO'L'; ; so Trpoa/capTeprjo'i,';, but in other Epistles 
 ■n-poa-Kaprepito, and conversely in reference to the 
 same subject, prayer, aypvirvico, but in the Second 
 Epistle to the Corinthians dypvirvia; oawTris, but 
 elsewhere oaica'i ; and dvoi^i'i followed by tov crro/LiaTo?, 
 but in 2 Cor. vi. 1 1 the verb dvoiyco with to a-TOfia. 
 There remain a considerable number of words for the 
 most part common in all ordinary Greek, the distri- 
 bution of which in the Epistle to the Ephesians, in 
 other Epistles of St Paul, in the New Testament, and 
 in the Septuagint was likely, so far as we can see, to 
 depend on all kinds of special and accidental causes, 
 and therefore affords no evidence on the point which 
 we are considering. One example must be noticed, 
 because it has attracted an inordinate amount of 
 attention. In the Epistle to the Ephesians Sid^o\o<; 
 occurs twice, o 'taTuvas not at all ; whereas St Paul's 
 earlier Epistles are without Sid^oXo'i, but have 6 
 
is8 THE VOCABULARV PAULINE. 
 
 %arava<; seven times. But in truth this alternative 
 use of the Greek or the Hebrew form is exactly like 
 the alternative use of the Greek or the Hebrew form 
 of St Peter's name within the one Epistle to the 
 Galatians, which has 11 erpos twice and Krj^a^ four 
 times. Moreover no less than six books of the New 
 Testament, written by four different authors, have 
 both o SidfioXo^ and 6 Sarai/a? ; viz. St Matthew, 
 St Luke, St John, Acts of the Apostles, First Epistle 
 to Timothy, Apocalypse. 
 
 On the other hand no one doubts that the great 
 bulk of the vocabulary of this Epistle is in accord- 
 ance with Pauline usage, the question at issue being 
 whether its distinctive elements point to a disciple 
 rather than to the master himself There are a few 
 common words which it is a little surprising to find 
 among the words peculiar to the Epistle to the 
 Ephesians ; as ayvoia, airarao), Saipov, fih^eOot;, irpo- 
 T6/309 (adjective), ^povrjffiq : that is, it is a little 
 surprising that St Paul should not have used them 
 elsewhere. But the bare fact that each of these words 
 stands there but once is enough to disqualify them 
 from being taken as marking the style or usage of a 
 different writer. Indeed all this evidence drawn from 
 the mere presence or absence of words on comparison 
 with other books of the same author, or of other 
 authors, can never have much value unless it be 
 copious or very peculiar, — much more so than is the 
 case with respect to this Epistle. 
 
CHANGES OF MEANING. 159 
 
 In one small class of words, however, we escape 
 these usually barren calculations and speculations, 
 viz. those words which do occur both in the Epistle to 
 the Ephesians and in earlier Epistles of St Paul, but 
 which are said to be used in a different sense here. 
 Thus it is said that olKovofiLa elsewhere in St Paul's 
 writings (viz. once in i Cor. ix. 17 ; for Col. i. 25 is 
 different) denotes St Paul's own stewardship, in this 
 Epistle an ordering of the fulness of the times, 
 or of the grace of God, or of the mystery that 
 had been kept secret. But can there be anything 
 more Pauline than by this use of the same word to 
 point back from the human stewardship to its source 
 and pattern in the divine stewardship ? Again 
 
 irepiTroirjo-ti; in i. 14 is said to be concrete, a special 
 possession, that is to say, a thing specially possessed, 
 whereas elsewhere (viz. once in each epistle to the 
 Thessalonians) it is abstract, 'gaining' or ' acquisition.' 
 The phrase here being confessedly an echo, though 
 not an exact copy, of Old Testament language, the 
 difference at best could weigh little. But in truth 
 there is no difficulty in taking irepnroirfaeoit; in its 
 prima facie abstract sense, " unto God's redemption 
 (buying back) of His own special ownership." It 
 
 would take too long now to discuss the shades of 
 meaning of that extremely difficult word liKripafLa. 
 For the present it must be enough to say that what 
 seems the most peculiar use of it in this Epistle is, 
 to the best of my belief, a natural extension or 
 
i6o VARIATIONS OF MEANING 
 
 application of a familiar sense of the word not 
 without example in St Paul, and that the seeming 
 peculiarity arises from the high and mysterious 
 nature of the subject to which it is applied. The 
 
 supposed peculiarity in the use of fiva-Trjpi,ov in one 
 Eph. V. 32. passage of the Epistle to the Ephesians is of a 
 different kind. Elsewhere (five times) in this Epistle, 
 as also in that to the Colossians, it is used for God's 
 hidden purpose, now at last revealed, to make Himself 
 known to the Gentiles by the Gospel ; this being 
 merely a natural application of the common meaning 
 'secret' or 'secret purpose.' If therefore the sense in 
 Eph. V. 32 is quite different, there is a difference of 
 sense within the Epistle itself; and we need not be 
 greatly surprised if we find that the meaning attached 
 to the word in this passage dififers again from that in 
 other Epistles of St Paul: particularly as they contain 
 much variety of application of at least its fundamental 
 sense. But in reality the passage gains in force by 
 the retention of the familiar Pauline sense : the law of 
 marriage laid down in Genesis as given to Adam was 
 for St Paul a preliminary indication of a hidden Divine 
 purpose or ordinance, the full meaning of which was 
 to be revealed only by the revealing of Christ as the 
 Head of His spouse the Church. It would be 
 
 only wasting time to consider now half a dozen other 
 words which on the flimsiest grounds have been added 
 to those of which I have spoken : they are '^evea, 
 irot/i'^v, irpdaao), a^evvvfjbi, and the perfect passive of 
 
WITHIN THE EPISTLE ITSELF. i6i 
 
 aw^m ; this last being rather a case of supposed 
 doctrinal discrepancy. There remains one word, 
 
 the use of which is really in a manner unique, 
 iirovpdvio<i, always in the phrase, five times repeated, 
 iv Tots iirovpavlob^. Strictly speaking, however, it is 
 only the phrase that is unique, for there is no definite 
 change of sense in the word itself from i Cor. xv. 40, 
 48, 49 to the first four occurrences of the phrase in 
 the Epistle to the Ephesians. In each of them the Eph. i. 3, 
 association of "the heavenly regions" with the present iu.'jo! 
 course of things comes naturally as part of that 
 expansion of the thought of a future world of bles- 
 sedness into that of a present higher world of 
 blessedness, which we have already had to recognise 
 in this Epistle. What is undeniably perplexing is 
 the use of the same phrase in vi. 12 for the sphere of 
 evil powers ; involving the very difficult identification 
 of it with the dr/p spoken of in ii. 2, the earthly 
 atmosphere, and giving interest to the fact that the 
 Syriac Version, though probably only by a virtual 
 conjecture, translates as though the reading were 
 iv Tot? inrovpavloK. But this difficulty is irrelevant 
 for our present purpose, the contrasted use of the 
 phrase being in the Epistle itself, not in the earlier 
 Epistles. 
 
 The only remaining point to be spoken of in 
 respect of language is the uniqueness of a certain 
 number of phrases, consisting of several words. The 
 H. R. II 
 
1 62 UNIQUE PHRASES. 
 
 passage we have just been looking at supplies such 
 Eph.vi. li. a phrase, to. ■Kvevyi.aTiKa rfj^ Trovqpia';, and the passage 
 Eph. ii. 2. referred to just before supplies another, rov dp^y^ovra 
 Eph. i. 17. TTj? e'foucrta? rov depo<; ; so also we have Trarrfp t^? 
 Eph. iii. ^o^Vi > '''ov irarepa, i^ ov iraaa irarpia iv ovpavoK koX 
 L?- . eVt 717? ovofia^eTai ; to3 Trvevfiari, tov voo^ vfxwv ; and 
 23. the list might easily be enlarged. With regard to all 
 
 these uniquenesses nothing more need be said than 
 has been said candidly already by Holtzmann, one of 
 the most competent of the critics who deny the 
 genuineness of the Epistle'; "all these facts (i.e. such 
 as we have been now taking note of) "have to be 
 "recognised, though we may form different judge- 
 " ments as to their force for purposes of proof. They 
 " never stand opposed in direct hostility to St Paul's 
 "doctrinal views as known from other sources, and 
 " what occurs for instance in i Cor. vi. 3 {ovk ol^are 
 " OTi ayyeXov<; Kpivov/xev, /j.ijTi'ye ^kotiko, ;) is not less 
 "unique." The fact is that all the evidence from 
 language supposed to be unfavourable to St Paul's 
 authorship is pretty generally acknowledged to be 
 merely accessory and secondary, except that which is 
 said to be furnished by style, which we have suffi- 
 ciently examined already. 
 
 But it is impossible to leave this part of our 
 
 ' JCriiik der Epheser und Kolosser Briefe (Leipzig, 1872), p. 6. 
 
RELATION TO EPISTLE TO THE COLOSSIANS. 163 
 
 subject without giving some attention to the special 
 relations between the two Epistles to the Ephesians 
 and to the Colossians, as they play a considerable 
 part in the discussions which have taken place on 
 the genuineness of the former Epistle. The com- 
 plexity of the problem is attested by the variety 
 of the views held by competent critics. While many 
 accept and many deny the genuineness of both Epis- 
 tles, others accept that to the Colossians but not that 
 to the Ephesians, and others again hold the Epistle 
 to the Colossians to be partly genuine, partly not. 
 
 We have already seen how great likeness there is 
 between the two Epistles, and also how great unlike- 
 ness. Much of both the theological and the religious 
 teaching of the Epistle to the Ephesians recurs in 
 that to the Colossians, sometimes in the same or 
 analogous positions, sometimes in different combina- 
 tions : while on the other hand the latter differs 
 essentially from the former in having a large part of 
 its contents controversial, the points of controversy 
 being specially connected with Judaism though not 
 with the bindingness of the Mosaic Law; and it 
 further differs from our Epistle, as we have already 
 had ample occasion to notice, in the presence of 
 much personal matter in the last twelve verses, not 
 to speak of the opening salutation. But these are 
 only the broader differences. Others not less in- 
 teresting occur in many of the passages which shew 
 most resemblance. 
 
 II — 2 
 
i64 THE THEORY OF DERIVATION. 
 
 The problem being how best to account for the 
 combination of the resemblances and the differences, we 
 may put aside for the moment the solution involved 
 in the supposition that both Epistles are genuine, viz. 
 that they proceeded from the same mind at virtually 
 the same time, and that the intended recipients of the 
 one, while partly surrounded by the same circum- 
 stances as the recipients of the other, were also 
 subjected to different influences of which the Apostle 
 took account in writing to them. Nor need we discuss 
 the abstract possibility that the resemblances might 
 be due to use of a common original, dating from a 
 later time than St Paul's life ; for that no one, I 
 believe, supposes. If the Epistle to the Ephesians 
 be not genuine, the most obvious suggestion is that 
 it was derived from the Epistle to the Colossians, 
 whether that itself be genuine or not. The generality 
 of the language of the Epistle to the Ephesians gives 
 it an unusual look ; while that to the Colossians in 
 form is more like St Paul's other epistles ; and the 
 concrete shape taken by its controversial matter has 
 a more obviously historical appearance than any- 
 thing in the Epistle to the Ephesians. 
 
 But when critics have tried to work out the 
 problem in detail, they have found it by no means so 
 simple as it appeared at first : for if on a broad view 
 the Epistle to the Colossians has the look of greater 
 originality, a closer study sometimes suggests the 
 opposite conclusion. When Holtzmann had worked 
 
HOLTZMANN. 165 
 
 out the comparison with endless pains, the result he 
 arrived at was that the Epistle to the Ephesians was 
 written near the end of the first century, with various 
 borrowings from an Epistle to Colossians, not how- 
 ever from our Epistle to the Colossians at full length 
 as it stands, but from a much shorter Epistle now 
 imbedded in ours, and then that this shorter Epistle 
 was lengthened out by the author of the Epistle to the 
 Ephesians, with interpolations in imitation of his own 
 work. Truly an extraordinary process, not to be 
 thought credible without very clear evidence indeed, 
 and leaving inexplicable the most characteristic 
 differences between the two Epistles in those doc- 
 trinal passages which they have in common. 
 
 The only key to the intricacies of this variously 
 reciprocal appearance of originality is the ordinary 
 supposition that both Epistles have throughout one 
 author, who in the corresponding parts of both was 
 setting forth the same leading ideas, needing to be 
 modified in range and proportion in accordance with 
 special circumstances, and to be variously clothed 
 in language accordingly. In such a case we can 
 hardly speak of one being prior to the other : both 
 would or might be products of the same short space 
 of time and the same state of mind. If the needs of 
 the Colossians called for controversial or negative 
 warnings against special dangers, yet these warnings 
 equally needed as a positive base some kind of 
 repetition of the doctrinal matter so prominent in the 
 
1 66 VARIATIONS OF TREATMENT 
 
 Epistle to the Ephesians. An excellent example for 
 study may be borrowed from Holtzmann'. If we put 
 together Eph. iii. 8f and i6f, and then again Eph. i. 
 9 and i8; and then compare these two combinations 
 of passages together, and each with Col. i. 27, we 
 shall find a striking series of coincidences with 
 different surroundings. The several passages of the 
 Epistle to the Ephesians might be described as in one 
 sense expansions of parts of the single longer passage 
 of that to the Colossians in different directions : but 
 the coincident phrases in the two Epistles are as much 
 at home, as it were, in their respective contexts in the 
 one Epistle as in the other. 
 
 Attention has been called to the undeniable fact 
 that the prayer in Eph. i. 1 8 ff. is for knowledge, 
 that the recipients of the Epistle may " know what is 
 the hope of God's calling, and what the riches of the 
 glory of His inheritance among the Saints"; while 
 the corresponding prayer in Col. i. 10 is for godly 
 living, that the Colossians may " walk worthily of the 
 Lord unto all pleasing, in every good work bearing 
 fruit." But this apparent contrast, when closely 
 examined, will be found to be only a matter of local 
 proportion. The prayer in the former Epistle has a 
 no less practical goal in view than the prayer in the 
 latter. Besides Eph. ii. i — 3 and the last half of the 
 Epistle, it is well to note ii. 10, in which God's purpose 
 
 ^ Einleitung in das Neiie Testament, 3'' Auflage (Freiburg i. B., 
 1892), p. 263. 
 
NOT INCONSISTENCIES. 167 
 
 in making and redeeming man is expressly described, 
 " for we are His workmanship (Trourifxa), created in 
 "Christ Jesus for good works which God afore pre- 
 " pared that we should walk in them." And again 
 conversely the prayer for the Colossians begins 
 almost in the same terms as the other prayer, " that Col. i. 9. 
 ye may be filled with the knowledge of His will in all 
 wisdom and spiritual understanding"; and in the 
 next verse continues thus the words just cited above, 
 " in every good work bearing fruit and growing dy 
 the knowledge of God." 
 
 Again the idea of the Church as the Body of 
 which the Christ is the Head is practically the same in 
 Col. ii. 19 as it is in Eph. iv. 15 f But the idea of 
 membership, which in the Epistle to the Colossians 
 is only implied, is worked out fully for the Ephesians, 
 and thus gives rise to an important section of our 
 Epistle. Every one must feel how fit the exposition 
 of this membership would be for an epistle to the 
 churches of Proconsular Asia, in which high morality 
 and religion were to be set forth in their true relation 
 to high theology. 
 
 The more closely we scrutinise those parts of both 
 Epistles which most nearly resemble each other, — 
 scrutinise them comparatively and scrutinise them in 
 their respective contexts, — the less possible it becomes 
 to find traces of a second-hand imitative character 
 about the language of either. The stamp of freshness 
 and originality is on both ; and thus the subtle 
 
i68 ST PAUL AUTHOR OF BOTH EPISTLES. 
 
 intricacies of likeness and unlikeness of language are 
 a peculiarly strong kind of evidence for identical 
 authorship, whether the author be St Paul or another. 
 Whatever therefore supports the genuineness or the 
 lateness of either Epistle does the same for the other. 
 Hence the evidence for the Epistle to the Colossians 
 becomes indirect evidence for the Epistle to the 
 Ephesians. It would take us too long to examine 
 separately the evidence respecting the former Epistle, 
 beyond what we have already had occasion to con- 
 sider in respect of personal and geographical details. 
 In the latter we have found no tangible evidence 
 against St Paul's authorship, and so it would be 
 also if we examined the Epistle to the Colossians in 
 the same manner. In both we have not merely the 
 prima facie evidence of his name in the text and in 
 unanimous ancient tradition, but close and yet for the 
 most part not superficial connexion in language with 
 his other Epistles, and that not such a connexion as 
 can with any reasonable probability be explained by 
 the supposition of borrowing. Above all, we find 
 in both the impress of that wondrous heart and 
 mind. 
 
 A few words must suffice on the relation of 
 the Epistle to the Ephesians to the First Epistle of 
 St Peter. Their affinity has been often noticed of 
 
THE FIRST EPISTLE OF ST PETER. 169 
 
 late years, and comes the more clearly to light the 
 more attentively each is studied. Opinion is much 
 divided as to relative priority. One ingenious critic, 
 Seufert', who has traced out many not obvious 
 coincidences, besides imagining others, comes to the 
 conclusion that both Epistles vs^ere written by the 
 same author, and that he lived in the second century. 
 The truth is that in the First Epistle of St Peter 
 many thoughts are derived from the Epistle to the 
 Ephesians, as others are from that to the Romans: 
 but St Peter makes them fully his own by the form 
 into which he casts them, a form for the most part 
 unlike what we find in any epistle of St Paul's. 
 
 ^ In Hilgenfeld's Zeitschrift fiir wissenschaftliche Theologie, Leipzig, 
 1881, pp. 178, 332. 
 
IV. 
 
 THE PURPOSE OF THE EPISTLE. 
 
 We come now to the purpose of the Epistle as 
 related to St Paul's own life and work. On this 
 subject it will not be possible for me to avoid some 
 repetitions (in other words) of what I have had to say 
 more than once before in connexion with different 
 epistles or different aspects of the apostolic age. 
 Our Epistle is the worthy fruit of the culmination of 
 St Paul's career ; but to understand it in this light, 
 we must have some perception of the steps which led 
 up to it. 
 
 Every one knows that St Paul's career as an 
 apostle was determined by the part which he took 
 with reference to the great question of his day, the 
 relation of Jew to Gentile within the Church. But 
 it needs some reflexion to gain a clear sense of the 
 variety of the issues which were included within that 
 one comprehensive question, and which had to be 
 dealt with in one way or another by this Jewish 
 Apostle to the Gentiles. The Bible gives no support 
 
ST PA Urs RELA TION TO JEW AND GENTILE. 1 7 1 
 
 to the common notion that there were two true " re- 
 ligions," as they are conventionally called, the Jewish 
 and the Christian, the one ending at the moment 
 when the other began. The fundamental change 
 brought by the coming of Christ was a deepening and 
 enlargement of the one imperishable faith in the Lord 
 God of Israel, and this change included gradations in 
 its own accomplishment, and also in the manner in 
 which it affected different classes of men. The 
 interval between the Resurrection and the Fall of 
 Jerusalem was for Jewish Christians subject to wholly 
 different conditions from the later time when the holy 
 place was visibly forsaken. Then again the differ- 
 ences of conditions affecting Jews of the Dispersion 
 on the one hand and Jews of Palestine on the other, 
 would naturally affect Jewish Christians of the Dis- 
 persion and of Palestine in the same manner; while 
 Gentile Christians would of course be differently 
 situated from both. St Paul himself shared the con- 
 ditions of both the first two of these three classes. 
 He was born a Jew of the Cilician Dispersion : he 
 was brought up a Jew of the strictest Palestinian 
 education. Then, having become above all men 
 identified with the third class, having been Divinely 
 appointed to be the foremost herald of the Gospel to 
 the Gentiles, and constrained by Jewish and Judaistic 
 exclusiveness to become the champion of the freedom 
 of Gentile Christians from Jewish law, he had to steer 
 a difficult way in his own person and in his teaching 
 
172 HIS POLICY NOT CONTROVERSIAL ONLY 
 
 and administration ; resisting sternly where resistance 
 was needed, but in all things striving to build up, and 
 to avoid whatsoever might have the effect of pulling 
 down. 
 
 So far as we form our impression of St Paul from 
 his own writings, we naturally form it predominantly 
 from those writings which are fullest of personal 
 action, and openly displayed feeling, and eager main- 
 tenance of a cause. These are the four Epistles of the 
 second group, belonging to the time when the contest 
 with the Judaizers had still to be carried on in Asia 
 Minor and Greece, to say the least. Holding as he 
 did that the true nature of the Gospel would be 
 incurably falsified if once it were to be allowed that 
 Gentile converts must be circumcised and keep other 
 precepts of the Jewish ceremonial law in order to 
 be admitted to full fellowship as Christians, it was 
 impossible that his writings of this period should not 
 bear that particular colour. This is of course specially 
 true of the Epistle to the Galatians, which had this 
 contention for its primary subject. But it is a great 
 mistake to suppose that the particular battle which 
 had just then to be fought is by itself a sufficient 
 key to all his policy, if we may so call it, and all his 
 aspiration. A baseless assumption to this effect is the 
 main cause of the suspicion which rises in the minds 
 of many critics when they read in the Acts various 
 sayings and doings ascribed to him, which shew a 
 conciliatory and more than conciliatory behaviour 
 
BUT CONSTRUCTIVE. 173 
 
 towards Jewish Christianity in Jewish Christians. 
 But the fact is, that conciliatory behaviour finds 
 ample justification in the mental attitude implied 
 in much of the Epistle to the Romans, and con- 
 tradicted by nothing even in the Epistle to the 
 Galatians or in the second to the Corinthians. The 
 clear and decided manner in which in writing to the 
 Romans he upholds the unique positions assigned by 
 the Lord of the Ages to the ancient Israel in the 
 revelation and the salvation which He prepared for all 
 mankind in His Son Jesus, is in entire accordance 
 with the sleepless anxiety with which he laboured to 
 avert a severance between the original Palestinian 
 Church of Jewish Christians, and the daily multi- 
 plying and expanding churches of Gentile Christians. 
 The anxiously devised external expression of this 
 desire was (i) that collection made in Gentile churches 
 for the poor Christians of Palestine which so puzzles 
 and perhaps wearies modern readers, for it fills a 
 considerable place in the Acts and Epistles ; and 
 (2) the carrying of this collection to Jerusalem by 
 himself in person as the recognised head of Gentile 
 Christianity. Nor was this a mere piece of cere- 
 monious ambassadorship. The carrying of that 
 offering to Jerusalem meant the carrying of his own 
 life ready to be offered as the most sacred oblation of 
 all. He knew with what deadly hatred the un- 
 believing Jews hated him, how eagerly they would 
 seize on the opportunity of wreaking it upon him if 
 
174 THE LAST VISIT TO JERUSALEM. 
 
 he shewed himself in Jerusalem, and how small his 
 chance of escape would be. The deliberate way 
 in which he faced this prospect shews the transcendent 
 importance which he attached to the act, an act 
 which would, he trusted, bear its desired fruit whether 
 he lived or died, for his death in such a cause would 
 be the mightiest of influences to bind together the 
 Jewish and Gentile churches. 
 
 But he knew also that it might be God's good 
 pleasure to preserve him from imminent death once 
 more, and in that case he looked forward to being 
 the instrument for the further carrying out of the 
 purpose of his perilous mission in another way, viz. 
 by pausing on his westward journey back from 
 Jerusalem to make a stay at Rome. The purpose 
 is expressed in Acts xix. 21, at the very beginning of 
 the circuitous journey by which he was to reach 
 Jerusalem, at the end of the long stay at Ephesus. 
 How much all this meant to him we may gather 
 by a little reading between the lines in the last twenty 
 verses of Rom. xv., written not long after, full as they 
 are of reticences and half-utterances. He was not 
 going to Rome to found a church : the Roman Church 
 had long been there already, founded by we know not 
 whom, or rather more probably of half-spontaneous 
 growth. He wrote to the Roman Christians with 
 Rom. XV. careful avoidance of an authoritative tone, yet some- 
 what boldly, he says, in part as by way of reminding 
 them of truths in some sense already known, on 
 
THE VISIT TO ROME. 175 
 
 the strength of the special "grace" (divine office) 
 divinely assigned to him in relation to the Gentiles. 
 It was a delicate and peculiar position, anxious as 
 he was to hold rigorously to his principle of not 
 building on a foundation laid by other men; but 
 he evidently felt that, if he lived, it was of great 
 consequence for unity that he should set foot himself 
 in Rome, and thus establish in his own person a living 
 bond of fellowship between the churches of his own 
 founding and the remote churches of Judea on the 
 one hand, and on the other this independently 
 founded church, which was also the church of the 
 capital of the empire or civilised world. Such 
 thoughts probably had had a share in his long- 
 standing desire to visit Rome, but now they received 
 a double consecration by his purposed carrying of the 
 Gentile offering to Jerusalem. If he were permitted 
 to accomplish this, and thus set the seal for the 
 
 Gentile Christians on this fruit of his labour and of Rom. xv. 
 
 28. 
 their love, he knew that in coming to the Romans 
 
 he would be coming with what he calls a fulfil- 
 ment of blessing from Christ. The victory of peace Rom. xv. 
 won in Jerusalem would be celebrated with restful ^^' 
 fellowship {a-vvavavavawfijai vfilv) in central Rome Rom. xv. 
 itself; and this concurrence of circumstances would '^' 
 be of bright omen for the future. 
 
 We have already seen, in part, how much there is 
 in the Epistle to the Romans itself in harmony with 
 this aspiration. Its first chapters place Jew and 
 
176 THE EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 
 
 Gentile on a level as regards their failure in the 
 past, and their admission to Christian faith in the 
 present; — on a level, yet two or three times with 
 indication of a certain priority though not superiority 
 of the Jew ('Iou8a^ft) re irpwrov koI "YiXKrjvC). In 
 the ninth, tenth, and eleventh chapters, starting 
 from his own anguish at the thought of God's seem- 
 ing rejection of His own people, he carries back 
 their very unbelief to the purpose of God ; refuses 
 to allow that the admission of the Gentiles involves 
 God's casting away of His people whom He foreknew ; 
 treats the admission of the Gentiles, on the ground 
 of mercy, simply as a grafting into the one ancient 
 olive tree, at the same time warning them against 
 contempt for the natural branches ; and sets forth the 
 future triumph of mercy in the recovery of unbelieving 
 Israel out of unbelief. Again the peace and unity of 
 Jew and Gentile is evidently the leading thought in 
 that exhortation to being of the same mind one with 
 another and with one accord glorifying God with one 
 mouth, which winds up the elaborate inculcation 
 of mutual forbearance in matters of conscience in 
 the fourteenth chapter ; ending with fresh quotations 
 from the Old Testament, all in various ways suggest- 
 ing the idea, which in one of them is clearly expressed, 
 " Rejoice, ye nations, with His people." 
 
 These were St Paul's thoughts when he was writing 
 to Rome, with hope and desire to visit Rome at the 
 end of his perilous mission undertaken in the same 
 
THE EPISTLE FROM ROME TO THE GENTILES 177 
 
 cause, if only he should return from it alive. The 
 Epistle to the Ephesians springs mainly from the 
 same thoughts at a later point in the marvellous 
 drama, itself written from Rome to those churches of 
 Western Asia Minor in which he had been spending 
 the years preceding his start for Jerusalem by way of 
 Greece. Nothing was more natural than that under 
 these circumstances, in sending Tychicus to commu- 
 nicate in person with these churches, he should send 
 by his hand a written epistle, which should combine at 
 once the lessons most needed to be spoken to them 
 at that time and the long cherished thoughts of his own 
 meditation. In so writing to these churches he may 
 well have felt at the same time that he was virtually 
 speaking through them to all Gentile Christendom, and 
 leaving in this Epistle the true and sufficient comple- 
 tion, as it were, of his earlier teaching of the Gentiles. 
 Anticipation had now been turned into fulfilment. He 
 had borne the Gentile offering to Jerusalem, seen it 
 accepted by James and the Jewish Church, escaped 
 the clearly foreseen peril of death only by the Roman 
 governor's interference. Not as a free traveller, but 
 as a Roman prisoner, having appealed to Caesar as 
 a Roman citizen, he had reached Rome more than 
 two years later than he hoped, and had a singular 
 opportunity to preach in his own person in the capital 
 of the world. He had proposed to himself to pay 
 the Christian community of Rome a passing visit 
 for mutual encouragement : but now the hand of God 
 H. R. 12 
 
178 ON THE UNION OF BOTH IN CHRIST AS 
 
 had manifestly set him down in Rome as a new home, 
 such as first Antioch and then Ephesus had been, 
 and, lying chained in the hired lodging which served 
 as his prison, he was free to exhort and instruct every 
 one who came in to him. To what cities or lands 
 the Gospel had been carried during his imprisonment, 
 we do not know; but that matters little. The uni- 
 versality designed by God for the Gospel and for 
 the society of believers in the Gospel must have come 
 home to him with quite new power and with a new 
 pledge of assured victory, when after a long series of 
 labours from province to province he found himself 
 thus wonderfully placed in the earthly centre of 
 earthly universality among men. Some find the sign 
 of another authorship than St Paul's in the sense 
 of accomplished progress looked back upon, which 
 breathes in our Epistle. But this is just the sense 
 which would now at last be naturally justified in a 
 way that it could not be when any of the earlier 
 Epistles were written. Thus at once the course 
 of outward events, and the ripening of the thoughts 
 which we know to have been in his mind when his 
 long stay at Ephesus had come to an end, will fully 
 account both for the universality which is the special 
 note of the Epistle, and for the practical purpose in 
 which the universality of Christian fellowship is 
 embodied, the unity and peace of Jew and Gentile 
 as Christians. In an earlier lecture' we had occasion 
 ' See pages 125 ff. 
 
A l^ATURAL AND NECESSARY TEACHING, i 
 
 79 
 
 for other purposes to consider the three principal 
 passages in which the two elements of the one society 
 are most clearly distinguished for this purpose, i. 12, 
 13; ii. I — 6; and the whole section ii. 11 — 22. The 
 last clause of ii. 1 5 especially deserves notice, " that 
 He may create (found) in Himself the two into one 
 new man, making peace." It conducts us from the 
 two peoples who are so prominent in the Epistle to 
 the Romans to the one people, or one man, which 
 in that Epistle is nowhere explicitly set forth, though 
 it is implied in its teachings and aspirations, and 
 indeed in that image of the olive tree, but now 
 in the Epistle to the Ephesians is to be brought into 
 clear prominence. 
 
 This idea then of the unity of Christians as 
 forming a single society with Christ for its invisible 
 Head, which in different forms dominates the whole 
 Epistle, was the natural outflow of the Apostle's mind 
 at this time, as determined by the course of outward 
 and inward history on the basis of his primary faith. 
 It was needed to be set forth for the completion of 
 his Gospel. On the other hand it was equally needed 
 for the instruction of the no longer infant churches 
 of Western Asia Minor, in whom the Greek spirit of 
 separateness and independence was doubtless working 
 with dangerous vigour. 
 
 We have already had occasion to trace some of 
 the anticipations of the more fully developed doctrinal 
 contents of our Epistle which may be discerned in the 
 
 12^2 
 
i8o WISDOM FOR THE PERFECT RESTS 
 
 earlier Epistles. But, apart from details, the mere 
 fact that it carries us (and that in common with 
 the Epistle to the Colossians) to heights and depths 
 of theology before unvisited deserves special attention 
 in connexion both with St Paul's own life and with 
 the needs of those for whom he wrote. One clause 
 of that Epistle puts before us his leading thought in 
 
 Col. ii. 3. this matter, " Christ, in whom are all the treasures of 
 wisdom and knowledge hidden." The first two or 
 three chapters of the First Epistle to the Corinthians 
 are very instructive here. While thanking God that 
 those keen-witted Greek Christians of Corinth had 
 
 I Cor. i. 5. been " enriched in Christ Jesus, in all speech and all 
 knowledge," he is careful to rebuke their pride of 
 wisdom and to let them know how little capable of 
 the highest wisdom he thought them as yet. In 
 teaching them he had rigorously limited himself to 
 
 I Cor. ii. the simplest form of the Gospel, "Jesus Christ and 
 
 1, in. 1, 2. j^jj^ crucified," because they had been, nay and were 
 still, but babes in Christ, fit to be fed with milk only, 
 not with the food of full-grown men. While, how- 
 ever, he had thus abstained in his preaching to them 
 from setting forth wisdom, he desired them to know 
 that he possessed a wisdom which he spoke among 
 
 I Cor. ii. the perfect, the full-grown {jol'^ TeX€t,oi,<;), " a wisdom 
 
 ' ^" of God in a mystery, the hidden wisdom, which God 
 
 foreordained before the ages unto our glory." Here 
 
 then, and elsewhere in the passage, we have clear 
 
 evidence that Paul had already in his own mind 
 
ON THE REVEALED WISDOM OF GOD. i8i 
 
 what he called a wisdom, which as yet he dared 
 not impart to his still immature converts. But if 
 so, it was but natural that he should desire in due 
 time to iind a right opportunity for making known 
 what he believed to have been thus revealed to him. 
 Various signs shew that this wisdom, as he understood 
 it, was founded on the recognition of the wisdom of 
 God Himself, and that the wisdom of God Himself 
 was in St Paul's mind mainly associated with what 
 he called the "mystery," the mighty plan of God 
 running through the ages, according to which He 
 used unbelief and rejection of Himself for His own 
 purposes till the appointed time was come and Jesus 
 Christ was born. Accordingly in the burst of praise cp. i Cor. 
 which crowns his setting forth of the universality '' ^'' 
 of God's mercy in the future, at the end of Rom. xi., 
 (" For God shut up all [toi)? Travra';, Jews and Gentiles 
 alike] into disobedience that He might have mercy 
 upon all "), he dwells on the depth of the riches (i.e. 
 resourcefulness) and wisdom and knowledge of God ; 
 and in the same sense the doxology which ends 
 the Epistle to the Romans is addressed to the only 
 wise God. And precisely the same thought recurs 
 in that phrase of the Epistle to the Ephesians 
 which has already come before us " the ttoXkttowiXo? Eph. Hi. 
 wisdom of God." '°" 
 
 But the Christian wisdom, which thus rested on a 
 true perception of God's own wisdom in His ordering 
 of the ages, carried with it those high thoughts 
 
1 82 KNOWLEDGE OF CHRIST. 
 
 respecting Christ which are set forth in the Epistles 
 to the Ephesians and the Colossians. It was an in- 
 terpretation of human history and experience in the 
 light of the Cross and the Resurrection: but what 
 gave the interpretation its force for men whose re- 
 flexions went deeper than the elements of simple 
 faith was the perception of Christ's Headship as 
 universal in all worlds and as coeval with creation, 
 and of all His work in those last days as being a 
 fulfilment of what had in some sense been from the 
 beginning. 
 
 This was the Christian wisdom and knowledge at 
 its highest. But no less characteristic of our Epistle 
 and that to the Colossians is the stress laid on wisdom 
 and knowledge in a wider sense, as needed for Christian 
 life and progress. In the earliest years of Christian 
 communities other requirements must naturally take 
 precedence. But when the first fervour had begun to 
 chill, and at the same time increasing numbers and 
 increasing complexity of community life had raised 
 new questions, practical and theoretical, it became 
 specially needful to dwell on the need of wisdom, first 
 for fresher and fuller knowledge of what was contained 
 in the Christian faith itself, and then for discernment 
 of what it involved for the guidance of social and 
 personal life. The new Christian faith stood alone in 
 the absoluteness of its requirement of wisdom, though 
 the religious importance of wisdom was not unknown 
 to either the later Jews or the later Greeks and 
 
WISDOM IN CONDUCT. 183 
 
 Romans. But neither Christ nor the Apostles gave a 
 Law to replace for Gentile Christians the Mosaic 
 Law, much less any substitute for the traditions of 
 the elders. In its place were given the historical 
 Gospel and the ever-living Spirit to draw out the 
 significance of its teaching, as need after need should 
 arise : and the preparation on the human side for the 
 apprehension of such teaching of the Spirit was wisdom. 
 Well then might St Paul's language, when he was 
 writing to these Churches, overflow with his sense of 
 the peculiar necessity of wisdom to make all other 
 gifts available for them even now, and much more in 
 the future, when even his remote guidance should 
 have passed away. 
 
 The only other point which it is now needful to 
 mention with regard to the Purpose of the Epistle 
 is one to which I had to refer in speaking of St Paul's 
 special motive for his repeated and emphatic refer- 
 ences to his own divine mission to the Gentiles, and 
 the imprisonments and other sufferings which he had 
 undergone on this account. It was to give weight to 
 his warnings against lowering the Christian standard 
 of morals and religion by acquiescence in traditional 
 heathen maxims and ways. It is easy to see how, 
 when the first fresh ardour of Christian discipleship 
 had passed away, the inherited and ingrained habits 
 and instincts would unawares resume a partial sway, PPj ^^f^ 
 and by the help of plausible excuses a baser type of 22; ii. i— 
 Christianity would insensibly arise. This lowering of iv. 3.' 
 
i84 MORAL DANGERS. 
 
 standard would chiefly take two forms, (i) a self- 
 asserting individualism, injurious to love, fellowship 
 and subjection ; and (2) a dangerous indulgence 
 towards breaches of purity. 
 
 These indications must suffice respecting the 
 general purpose of the Epistle. 
 
ABSTRACT OF LECTURES. 
 
 [BEGUN MICHAELMAS TERM, 1890.] 
 
 PAOE 
 65 
 
 66 
 68 
 68 
 70 
 
 Ephesians, its value and difficulties 
 Lectures and their purpose and limitations 
 Text, Interpretation, Introduction 
 Books on Introduction .... 
 
 „ Interpretation: Commentaries 
 
 „ „ Grammars, Lexicons, Concordances 71 
 
 Three heads of Introduction, (i) Recipients, (2) Authorship, 
 
 (3) Circumstances and Purpose ..... 72 
 
 Context of historical circumstances 73 
 
 Peculiarities affecting Introduction to the Epistle to Ephesians . 73 
 
 /. RECIPIENTS. 
 
 Ephesians by title and common text of i. i . . -75 
 
 Omission by x*B67** Origen and Jerome cf. Basil . . 75 
 Title Trfi)s% AaoBiK^as (not text h AaodiK((}) Marcion ap. 
 
 Tertulhan 76 
 
 The direct evidence for omission : the interpretation of Marcion 77 
 His ir/)4s AaodiKeas must be connected with St Paul's riiv iK 
 
 AaoSiKias ......... 78 
 
 Theory that Laodicea was the one proper destination of 
 
 Ephesians ......... 78 
 
 Distinctness of two points, identity with Ephesians, and 
 
 exclusive destination for Laodicea 78 
 
 Laodicea probably inserted in title by Marcion by criticism 
 
 from Colossians, not on any authority, and so he attests 
 
 only the omission of iv ''&((ii(xtf 79 
 
i86 ABSTRACT OF LECTURES. 
 
 But is ip '"Ei^laif really genuine or not? .... 80 
 
 Internal Evidence. (i) Absence of local and personal 
 
 allusions . . . .80 
 
 (ii) Absence of definite false teaching 
 
 assailed ..... 81 
 
 Digression on PauVs past relation to Ephesus. 
 On ist Journey Ephesus not touched, on ^nd only on return 
 
 (hastily), as representative preparation for long stay . 82 
 Apollos, and John's Baptism, preludes to the long stay, 
 
 (Ephesus now the centre of Gentile Christianity) . . 83 
 On return from Macedonian journey and Corinth, craves con- 
 tact vfith Ephesians by elders at Miletus ... 85 
 Summary of past relations ....... 85 
 
 Incompatible with Ephesians if addressed to Ephesians alone, 
 
 not if to other Churches also 85 
 
 Return to question of reading . . 86 
 
 Given omission, the transcendental sense impossible . . 86 
 Not so "who are also," but very improbable ... 86 
 But either blank space or alternative names quite natural . 87 
 Beza's suggestion of Ephesus + other cities of Asia, to which 
 
 Ussher adds a blank space and term 'encyclical' . . 88 
 To this should be added evidence of contents and analogy of 
 
 I Peter (Epistles to Seven Churches) .... 88 
 
 But was Ephesians = T^;/ Ik AaoSiKlas? ..... 89 
 
 Identity with Ephesians combined with exclusive address to 
 
 Laodicea being excluded, two possibilities remain . . 89 
 (i) TTji' ix AaoSiKlas a lost letter thus exclusively addressed, 
 (2) tV iic Aao5i(cias= Ephesians, but Laodicea only one 
 of many addresses ........ 89 
 
 The former rendered improbable (r) by the special greetings 
 to Laodicea, (2) by iK, which rather implies forwarding 
 
 on, i.e. encyclical 89 
 
 Encyclical carried by Tychicus, probably through Asia, his 
 
 own province go 
 
 Position of Hierapolis, Laodicea, and Colossae . . -91 
 Probably not a plurality of copies with different names, but 
 a single copy with a blank which each city could fill up 
 
 in its own transcript g2 
 
 But was Ephesus included, as we should expect? . . 93 
 
ABSTRACT OF LECTURES. 187 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Passages alleged to prove recipients to have had no personal 
 
 knowledge of Paul q, 
 
 (i) i. IS 'hearing of the faith in you' gj 
 
 (2) iii. i 'if so be that ye heard of the stewardship &c.' . 94 
 {3) iv. 21 'if so be that ye heard Him, and were taught in 
 
 Him' 96 
 
 (2) and {3) prove too much g6 
 
 No reason to doubt the tradition, universal except as regards 
 
 Marcion's independent criticism gy 
 
 The question of Authorship to stand over for the present . 99 
 
 //. TIME AND PLACE ... 99 
 
 Language about imprisonment the most obvious mark of 
 
 external circumstances 99 
 
 Which imprisonment, Csesarean or Roman? . . .100 
 
 Slightness of evidence loi 
 
 Philippians allowed to be written in Roman captivity, and 
 
 this decisive for Ephesians, Colossians, Philemon if 
 
 Lightfoot is right (as he is) in making Philippians 
 
 precede them on account of language . . . . loi 
 
 But, this being not generally accepted, their time must be 
 
 fixed independently 102 
 
 Weiss's arguments for CiESarea. (i) Difference of destination 
 
 between Philippians ii. 14 and Philemon 22 . . 103 
 
 (2) Colossae nearer to Caesarea than to Rome . . 104 
 
 (3) Comparative hopes of speedy release . . . 104 
 The more plausible argument from earthquakes . . . 105 
 The argument from iva de elBiJTe Kai i/xeis (Eph. vi. 21) as 
 
 implying Colossians to have preceded, and so a westward 
 
 journey io7 
 
 Other trivial arguments 107 
 
 Comparative opportunities for conversion of Onesimus . 107 
 
 Probable date about 63 no 
 
i88 ABSTRACT OF LECTURES. 
 
 in. AUTHORSHIP. 
 i. External Evidence. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Evidence of early writers, though chiefly attesting date 
 
 rather than authorship iii 
 
 Clement of Rome 112 
 
 Ignatius . . • • ■ ■ ■ • • • "3 
 
 Polycarp • "S 
 
 Hermas . . . . ■ ■ • • • • "S 
 
 Didache = Barnabas 116 
 
 Heretical writers ii7 
 
 Results of evidence of early vpriters ri8 
 
 ii. Internal Evidence on Date and Authorship . iig 
 Former theory of Montanist influence (The Holy Spirit, 
 
 Prophets, ripe age of the Church, Monogamous teaching) 1 19 
 Rather more lasting theory of Pseudo-Onoi'ac influence 
 
 (TrXi^P^M^) alwveSj [7roXu7ro//ftXos] ffocfiia, yvuffLs) . . 120 
 Strongly maintained theory of advanced Pauline discipleship, 
 with supposed evidence of (simple) difference of author- 
 ship .......... 121 
 
 Proposal to spend some time on select points under this 
 head, thereby forestalling Interpretation under guise of 
 Introduction . . . . . . . . .122 
 
 Supposed marks of later time partly in changed circum- 
 stances, partly in changed doctrine, but these insepar- 
 able 122 
 
 Doctrinal differences from earlier Epistles undeniable, but 
 
 are they such as suggest difference of authorship? . 123 
 Antecedent probability that difference of circumstances would 
 
 affect proportion &c. of teaching ..... 123 
 But also that there would be actual growth in his own 
 
 thoughts, and that this would leave traces of itself . 124 
 Hence the growth exhibited must be such as could not 
 naturally be found in a single man, if it is to be taken 
 as evidence of different authorship . . . .124 
 
Abstract of lectures. 189 
 
 (a) Doctrinal Changes. 
 i. Relation of yews to Gentiles as Christians . 125-128 
 
 In earlier Epistles Paul vindicates Gentiles, here Jews, in 
 each case appropriately. Romans equally catholic, 
 though with another purpose (there the Law and the 
 Promise, here the Universal Purpose) .... 125 
 
 In both Epistles need of universal salvation rests on uni- 
 versality of corruption . . . . . . .126 
 
 Language of Ephesians on circumcision again like that of the 
 
 Romans .......... 127 
 
 ii. The Church .... 128—134 
 
 In Ephesians, for the first time, unity of whole Church and 
 Christ a Head to the Body, but former involved in union 
 of Jew and Gentile as in Romans . . . . 128 
 
 Another impulse from Paul's position at Rome after his 
 
 anxieties about disruption . . . . . .128 
 
 His use of iKKXTi<rta for the whole Church natural, as arising 
 out of the early Palestinian use, and answering to the 
 conception of the new Israel . . . . .129 
 
 Paul's unity of the Church not deducible from the unity of 
 organization, as conceived in the Secmtd Century ; its units 
 are not Churches but individuals, and the unity itself 
 is invisible . . . . . . . . .130 
 
 Christ as the Head of the Body a new idea, but prepared 
 for by the "One Body in Christ" of Romans and "so 
 
 also is Christ" of i Cor. xii. 12 131 
 
 by Paul's free use of the image of a Head . . 132 
 and by association with the Cornerstone (Head of the 
 
 Corner) of the Temple . . . . . -133 
 
 iii. Person and Office of Christ . . 134-140 
 
 Earlier Epistles imply His Pre-existence . . . .134 
 
 Colossians carries back His Lordship to the beginning of 
 things. Ephesians makes this reconciliation include all 
 things and carries back His Headship of the Ecclesia 
 to a primordial choosing of its members "in Him" . 13S 
 
 Anticipation of this earlier in "through Whom are all things, 
 and we through Him" (i Cor. viii. 6) and in the Second 
 Adam (i Cor. xv.) 136 
 
igo Abstract of lectures. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 In Ephesians Christ is agent of certain Divine acts elsewhere 
 
 ascribed to God 136 
 
 So Reconciliation (Colossians punctuation doubtful but 2 Cor. 
 clear) but the two forms of language consistent, and 
 the relation inherited in exaplaaro. Language of Ephesians 
 due to context .... ... 137 
 
 Also Authorship of Gifts (i Cor.) : but variation explained 
 
 by context 139 
 
 Real difference made improbable by the emphasis on sub- 
 ordination of the Son in Ephesians .... 140 
 iv. Prominence of Holy Spirit . . 140 
 
 True towards Colossians, but not Romans, i Cor. . . 140 
 
 Due, in Ephesians, to connexion with Ecclesia . . . 141 
 
 V. T/ie Present and the Future . . 141-143 
 
 Immediate Parousia has faded out of sight, a sense of present 
 
 blessedness arisen, and of a long future . . . 141 
 
 Gradation in earlier Epistles : Romans suggests the ordering 
 
 of the ages 142 
 
 vi. " The Apostles" . . . 143-148 
 
 "Apostles and Prophets" in the two passages . . . 143 
 
 Irrelevance of language of Galatians and 2 Corinthians as 
 
 defensive ......... 144 
 
 No evidence or likelihood that Paul questioned apostleship 
 of the Twelve, or they his terms of preaching to heathen, 
 at the critical time (Galatians as well as Acts), much less 
 later 144 
 
 Apostles and Prophets the two special types of guidance. 
 
 The part of prophetic admonition in recognising progress 145 
 
 Naturalness of ' holy ' in relation to a body of 07101 : analogy 
 
 of KKtyrol ......... 145 
 
 Naturalness of the word ' foundation ' as applied to the actual 
 witnesses and inspired persons through whom others were 
 added to the building 146 
 
 Consistency with ' Other foundation &c.' .... 147 
 
 Also Apostles and Prophets stand at head of list of gifts 
 
 here in same Epistle, and of analogous list in i Cor. . 147 
 
 vii. St Paul himself . . . 148-151 
 
 Language about his special charge called forced, but partly 
 
ABSTRACT OF LECTURES. 191 
 
 PAGE 
 anticipated before, and specially needed to back his 
 charges to these Gentile Christians against contemning 
 Jewish Christians or turning freedom into moral in- 
 dulgence 1^8 
 
 Consistency of this with ' less than the least of all saints,' the 
 difference of which from ' least of the Apostles ' (i Cor. xv) 
 is explained by context i^o 
 
 Difficulty of ' whereby when ye read &c. ' not explicable on 
 common interpretation but might be due to hidden 
 current of thought ....... 140 
 
 But the moral difficulty disappears if the reading is the 
 
 reading of The Prophets as in 6 ivayiviicrKoiv voelroi . 150 
 
 (iJ) Evidence 0/ Language. Style . . 151-154 
 
 Style much dwelt on for long sentences &c. (wrongly called 
 
 copiousness), really close packed 152 
 
 Its calm not 'phlegmatic' but full of white heat . . 153 
 
 Also pouring forth thoughts in a positive form in place of 
 argument or exposition naturally changes the style, as 
 in analogous parts of Romans . . . . ■ 153 
 (c) Vocabulary . . . . 154 
 
 Lists of distinctive words (Pastoral Epistles of course omitted 
 here from comparison) always delusive when used nu- 
 merically only. Variation of vocabulary in the various 
 words, and of proportion of them 155 
 
 Deduct words from quotations ; words due to special con- 
 texts 155 
 
 Compounds of aiv due to subject of Epistle and words that 
 sum up ideas found also elsewhere ; words unique in 
 termination only . . . . . . . .156 
 
 Many common words of fortuitous distribution (cf. 6 Sid- 
 
 jSoXos) 157 
 
 Vocabulary of Ephesians confessedly mainly Pauline, which 
 
 much limits the issue 158 
 
 A few common words here which it is strange Paul has not 
 
 used elsewhere : but here too they occur only once . 158 
 
 More tangible cases of words used in different sense as 
 oUovo/ila, wcpnrolri<ns, irK-fipoina, /ivaTripiov, all really 
 connected with sense elsewhere 159 
 
igz ABSTRACT OF LECTURES. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Words frivolously classed with these i6o 
 
 The strongest case h t. iirovpavloLS, but the most perplexing 
 point, the use in vi. 12, a difference within Ephesians 
 
 itself iSi 
 
 (</) Phrases. 
 
 Unique phrases prove little, being common elsewhere in 
 
 Paul 16' 
 
 («) Relation of Ephesians to Colossians. 
 
 Variety of views '"3 
 
 Likeness and unlikeness. Much common doctrinal matter : 
 Colossians differs as being controversial, specially anti- 
 Judaistic, and in having personal matter . . -163 
 
 No need to discuss various theories possible. If Ephesians 
 is not genuine, it must come from Colossians, whether 
 Colossians be genuine or not 164 
 
 Holtzmann's reciprocal theory 165 
 
 The intricacies explicable only by identical authorship with 
 
 partial difference of purpose. Examples from Holtzmann 165 
 
 In Ephesians prayer for knowledge leads up to good works : 
 in Colossians prayer for worthy walking &c. stands 
 between prayers for knowledge 166 
 
 In Colossians the Body, in Ephesians the Body and Member- 
 ship as needed for the special moral teaching of 
 Ephesians 167 
 
 Cambridge: printed by j. and c. f. clay, at the university press. 
 
January 1895. 
 
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 Hymnology ... .9 
 
 Sermons, Lectures, Addresses, and Theological 
 
 Essays 10 
 
January 1895. 
 
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