ON THE

EPISTLE TO THE EPHESIANS.

BY

JUSTIN A. SMITH, D. D.

PHILADELPHIA:

AMERICAN BAPTIST PUBLICATION SOCIETY,

1420 CHESTNUT STREET.

Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1890, by the

AMERICAN BAPTIST PUBLICATION SOCIETY,

in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

INTRODUCTION TO THE EPISTLE TO THE EPHESIANS.

I. THE EPISTLES OF THE CAPTIVITY.

Four of the epistles of Paul, owing to the circumstances under which they were written, are sometimes grouped in a general mention of them, as" Epistles of the Captivity." These are the epistles to the Ephesians, the Colossians, the Philippians, and to Philemon. In three of these the writer speaks of himself, expressly, as being at the time of writing a prisoner: three times in that to the Ephesians (3: 1; 4:1; 5: 20), once to the Colossians (4 : 18), and once to Philemon. (11.) Allusions in the letter to the Philippians imply the same fact, as respects the condition of the writer. In one place (113), he speaks of his "bonds," as having become manifest in Christ throughout the whole Prætorian guard" (Revised Version, "Prætorium," in the margin); while in another (4:22) where he mentions "Cæsar's household," we are made to understand by his "bonds," not only imprisonment, but imprisonment where his influence was felt in the Imperial Court; in other words, at Rome. The four epistles afford evidence, also, of having been written so nearly at the same time as to have been sent, three of them at least, to those for whom they were intended by the same persons; to the Ephesians by Tychicus (6: 21, 22), to the Colossians by Tychicus and Onesimus (4: 7-9), to Philemon by Onesimus again. Although the Epistle to the Philippians was sent by another hand, that of Epaphroditus, still the evident condition of the writer is so much the same as in the other cases, that its composition under the same circumstances seems the only right conclusion.

That this imprisonment was at Rome is matter of general agreement among writers upon these epistles, although some attempt has been made to show that it was at Cesarea, and during the time of Paul's waiting in that city, pending the arrival of the new Procurator, Porcius Festus. The effort to establish this, however, is a forced one, and in the opinion of good judges, far from successful. One can hardly help sympathizing, indeed, with the "surprise" of Archdeacon Farrar ("Life and Work of St. Paul," p. 591, note), that such a critic as Meyer should accept this view. The mention of "Cæsar's household," from converts in which Paul sends greetings to the Philippians, and by which can in no way, though one German critic, Bottger, strangely argues for this, be intended the palace of Herod in Cesarea; the presence with him of such brethren as Tychicus, Onesimus, Marcus, Epaphras, and Jesus Justus, who are nowhere spoken of as with him at Cesarea, and very unlikely to have been so; the desire expressed by him in one place that he might have utterance given him so as to open his mouth boldly, to make known the mystery of the gospel (Eph. 6: 19), implying opportunity for such utterance like that allowed him at Rome, but not so far as appears in the city of his earlier imprisonment :-in fact, what may be termed "the local coloring" in all four of these epistles is such as to compel the conclusion that only a decided tendency toward what Farrar calls "hypercritical ingenuity" could make one satisfied with any other

theory of location for the imprisonment during which they were written than that which places it in the imperial city itself.

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Of the duration of this imprisonment, and of the occupation of the illustrious prisoner while it lasted, we learn from the concluding words of the "Acts": : And Paul dwelt two whole years in his own hired house, and received all that came unto him, preaching the kingdom of God, and teaching those things which concern the Lord Jesus Christ, no man forbidding him.” As to the date of his arrival in Rome, and so that at which his two years of captivity began, we are to note that his departure from Cesarea occurred upon the arrival in that city of Porcius Festus "in Felix's room as Procurator of Judea. This has been shown to be in the year A. D. 60 (Wieseler, quoted by Rev. G. Lloyd Davies). In the autumn of that year those who were to conduct Paul to Rome, as a prisoner, sailed with him from Cesarea. In the spring of the following year, A. D. 61, he arrived in Rome, and the two years of his imprisonment began, closing, it is thought, in the spring of the year A. D. 63. At this point, our certain knowledge of him ceases, save that mention is made by writers such as Clemens, "the disciple and companion of Paul," by the "Canon of Muratori," and by Eusebius, of his release from this imprisonment, his subsequent missionary journeys "to the boundary of the West," and his martyrdom under Nero. It was during this latter period, supposed to be within the dates A. D. 63 and A. D. 68, that the two epistles to Timothy and the Epistle to Titus were written; the second to Timothy being last of all these productions of the Great Apostle. (See Hackett's "Commentary on the Acts" in this series, p. 325.)

These four epistles of the Captivity, with the study of one of which we are to be occupied in the pages following this introduction, derive from the circumstances under which they were written an individuality quite as marked as one discovers in their contents. The author of them is not now, as in the case of so many other of these remarkable productions, actively pursuing his missionary journey from city to city, or amidst the activities and anxieties of his daily ministry at Corinth or Athens or Philippi. We picture him in the hired lodgings at Rome, which he had been permitted to occupy, instead of any one of the prisons there, such as that which tradition assigns to him in his second imprisonment, and from which he went forth to his death. He enjoys, it is true, a measure of freedom not commonly allowed to prisoners, yet is in one way never permitted, by night or by day, to forget the fact of his real condition. The hand with which these letters were written wore, during the whole two years of his captivity, a chain, the other end of which was fastened to the left hand of the soldier who guarded him. This unwelcome attendance was never under any circumstances intermitted, and the fact of it lends genuine pathos to those places in his letter to the Ephesians, where, in speaking of himself as the prisoner of Jesus Christ," or, prisoner in the Lord," he uses the Greek word déamos, which means, one bound with a chain."

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Apart from this, we find the tedium of his captivity relieved in ways which almost surprise us. The "Cæsar" to whom he had "appealed" was that Nero whose name in history is the synonym of brutal tyranny. This bad man had not yet arrived at that extreme in degrading personal vices and utterly heartless cruelty which he was soon to reach, but he was well on the way thither. He had recently put to death his own mother, Agrippina; he had become otherwise a terror and a horror to those nearest his person; he had dismissed from his counsels the only reputable men who had remained there, his teacher, the philosophical Seneca, and the Prætorian Prefect Burrus, and had surrendered himself wholly to the guidance of a man almost as despicable as himself, Tigil

linus.

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What Rome was under such a Cæsar' it is not difficult to imagine. That one like Paul should have passed these two years of his captivity there in such vicinity to the court as to win converts in the imperial household itself, and still with so little of molestation, and so much freedom of opportunity for "teaching the things which concern the Lord Jesus Christ," seems remarkable. And the more so as it was by command of this same emperor that, a few years later, he was to suffer a martyr's death.

However we account for it all, on the ground of Nero's preoccupation with other things, or want of knowledge of either the apostle or the causes of his imprisonment, or general indifference at the time to matters of religion, we can at least see in it a divine ordering of events so as that the church of later ages should not miss that treasure of spiritual instruction and stimulus and comfort which these Epistles of the Captivity supply. His own sense of something like this, the apostle intimates where he speaks of himself as "the prisoner of Jesus Christ' (3 : 1)—not Nero's, but Christ's; and with a mission even in this regard as distinct, as clear, as inspiring as when called into Macedonia, or when standing before his audience on Mars Hill at Athens.

Of this we become the more conscious as we study these epistles themselves, especially the two of them which so remarkably resemble each other, and which differ in some respects so widely from all other of Paul's writings-those to the Ephesians and the Colossians. With the former of these we are now to be concerned in the pages which follow.

II. EPHESUS AND THE CHURCH IN THAT CITY.

Next to Jerusalem and Antioch, Ephesus holds the most conspicuous place in the very earliest annals of Christianity. As the scene of Paul's labors during "the space of three years; as the site of the most important of those "seven churches of Asia," to which John wrote from Patmos; as the centre of Asian Christianity during all the early centuries, as it had long been for the same wide and populous region the centre of Pagan power, and culture, and corruption, Ephesus, after Jerusalem and Antioch had lost the prominence in Christian progress which they originally enjoyed, long held a place second only to Rome itself.

Of the city, as Paul found it, Farrar says ("Life and Work of St. Paul," p. 356) : "It was more Hellenic than Antioch, more Oriental than Corinth, more populous than Athens, more wealthy and more refined than Thessalonica, more skeptical and more superstitious than Ancyra or Pessinus." That temple of Diana, which was the chief ornament of the city, was also the chief centre of every manner of corruption. "Just as the mediæval sanctuaries," says Farrar, "attracted all the scum and villainy, all the cheats and debtors and murderers of the country round, and inevitably pauperized and degraded the entire vicinity-just as the squalor of the lower purlieus of Westminster to this day is accounted for by the direct affiliation to the crime and wretchedness which sheltered itself from punishment or persecution under the shadow of the Abbey-so the vicinity of the great temple of Diana reeked with the congregated pollutions of Asia." The temple enjoyed what was termed the right of asylum, where criminals of every class found shelter against arrest or punishment, a circumstance which, while it enhanced the fame of this celebrated shrine, was a source of active moral contagion of the worst kind.

Paul appears to have been drawn to this city as the centre of his own labors for a considerable period, partly by its leading position among the cities of Asia Minor, partly by the fact that he found " a great door and effectual open to" him there (1 Cor. 16:9),