Ephesians

6 Episodes

Ephesians is a rhetorically elevated and probably later New Testament letter that presents a more developed ecclesial and cosmic vision than the undisputed Pauline letters. Many scholars regard it as pseudonymous or at least disputed, and its synthesis of church order, Christology, and household ethics has made it one of the most consequential texts for later Christian institution-building.

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Why this book matters

Ephesians returns on the show as one of the New Testament texts most responsible for turning scattered Jesus-movement ideas into something more institutional and programmatic. The hosts keep coming back to it for its household codes, its developed account of church offices, and the way it rationalizes social hierarchy in explicitly theological terms. It matters because it gives later Christians a language for order, authority, and communal structure that feels more settled than what we see in the undisputed Pauline letters.

That is also why Ephesians is a recurring site of criticism on the show. Discussions regularly focus on whether it is actually Pauline, how Ephesians 5 borrows Greco-Roman household ideology and dresses it in Christian language, and how Ephesians 4 gets used to back-project later church offices into the earliest movement. The letter comes up whenever the hosts want to show how Christian institutions and patriarchy were not just inherited from the Bible, but actively built through later interpretive and compositional choices inside the New Testament itself.

Where to start

Start here for the strongest listening on Ephesians.

Quotes from the Data

“"Wives, be subject to your husbands as to the Lord." ... A lot of translations of the Bible present verse 22 as the beginning of a new section. It's not even its own sentence. In fact, it doesn't have a verb in it. The verb is actually a participle that is in the previous verse.”

Dan McClellan Episode 135

“This is probably not Paul anyway. ... The majority of, or a good number of scholars don't think that Paul was responsible for Ephesians, okay, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians. ... What the author is doing here with this pivot— verse 21 is kind of a pivot point. ... then becomes the hinge on which we pivot to what's called household codes.”

Dan McClellan Episode 135

“Christianity leaned heavily into the influence of Greco-Roman social conventions. And Ephesians, you have it elsewhere, the Pastoral Epistles as well, appeal to these household code ideas. And really what it is, is it is the authors saying, we like this social convention, we're taking it, this is ours now, and we're going to come up with a gospel rationalization for it.”

Dan Beecher Episode 135

“Pastor is only mentioned once in all of the New Testament, and that is in Ephesians 4. ... Ephesians, also probably not Paul. That's not one of the, uh, outright spurious epistles, but one of the disputed epistles.”

Dan McClellan Episode 139

All episodes

Every episode currently tagged with Ephesians.