464 EPHESIANS church in its unity. 1 It is the one body of Christ, and the Gentiles must be a constituent part of the body if the body is to be complete, a part of the fulness, of the pleroma, of Christ, if that pleroma is to be reached. They are not therefore to suppose that, because they were once far off, they are not now nigh, as nigh as those who claimed, and might appear, to have been always nigh in a sense peculiar to themselves. Ephe- -^ w iH- thus be observed that the two epistles of which sians and we speak are in the strictest sense complementary to one Colos- another ; and we thus better understand how it was that sians g fc p au | directed t] ia fc the two should be read together mentary (Col. iv. 16). Without the other each was incomplete. But together they make up the complex thought, " I am the vino, ye are the branches ; " " Abide in me, and I in you." Nor is it without interest to notice that this is not a solitary instance of such a relation between two different books of the New Testament written by the same pen. A similar relation exists between the gospel of St Luke and the Acts of the Apostles, and between the gospel of St John and the Apocalypse. In the first of each of the three pairs we have Christ the head, in the second His body which is the church. It will thus be seen, too, that, in the absence of direct historical evidence we may be spared the inquiry as to which of the two epistles was written first. All inquirers allow that the interval between them was extremely short. The chief point of interest is that in this short interval the epistle to the Colossians is first in order of thought, though not necessarily in order of time. The inference of Harless from iv. 16 (Eph. Brief, Einl., p, 51) that, supposing the Ephesian epistle to be " that from Laodicea, " it must have been written before the epistle to the Colossians, an order of writing which he rejects, may be weakly founded, but it may also be correct. There is nothing to hinder the supposition that with two aspects of the truth in his mind, one of which is logically prior to the other, the apostle might first transfer to paper the last of the two. The circumstances calling for it might at the moment seem to be the most urgent. The priority of the Colossian epistle in every respect worth speaking of will still remain, although we allow the correctness of the inference drawn by Harless from the verse referred to, and the argument for the identity of the epistle to the Ephesians with that " from Laodicea " will be unaffected by the admission. Authen- IV. Antlienticity of the Epistle. It is only in compara- ticity. tively recent times that doubts have been entertained upon this point. Usteri, in his Paul. Lfhrb., 1824, appears to have been the first to express them, although he did not hesitate to use the epistle for the purpose of his book. The same doubts were afterwards more fully expressed by Schleiermacher, in his Einleitung ins N.T., from whose oral lectures, according to Bleek (Introd. Clark s Transla tion, ii. p. 39), Usteri had received his views. De Wette followed in successive editions of his Einleilung, from 1843 onwards, not, however, deciding against the epistle, but only questioning its authenticity on the ground of its want of specific purpose, its dependence on the epistle to the Colossians, its poverty of thought, and its divergence both in teaching and style from the genuine epistles of St Paul. He was followed by Baur in his Pauliis, 1845, and by Schwegler in his Nachap. Zeitalt., 1845, these two critics connecting the language of the epistle with the Gnostic and Montanist heresies of the 2d century, and for the first time unhesitatingly rejecting it. Ewald agrees with Baur and Schwegler in denying the Pauline authorship of the epistle, 1 A distinct intimation of the arrogance with which the Jewish looked down upon the Gentile Christians and of the contemptuous language which they used concerning them, is afforded by Eph. ii. 1] (eotnp. Meyer in loc.). but takes the date of its composition further back, ascribing it to " an unnamed disciple and friend of the apostle " desirous to speak in his spirit and name truths which St Paul himself bad been too much occupied with other things to utter (GeschichtS d. V. /., 1859, vii. p. 246-7). Lastly, Hilgenfeld may be mentioned, who in his Einleilung, p. 669, &c., 1875, gathering together the objections of his predecessors, and adding one or two minor ones of his own, assigns the epistle to the Gnostic times of the 2d century, and supposes it to have been written by a Christian of Asia belonging to the Pauline school, who was desirous at once to regain for the apostle the alienated affections of the Asiatic Christians, and to compose the differences between the Jewish and Gentile sections of the church. Such being the state of the argument against the ov authenticity of the epistle, it will be seen that the more tioi important objections have been already, by anticipation, 8Wf met in the previous positive statements of the article. (1.) In particular, it ought to be necessary to say little more Wa upon what has been generally felt to lie the most powerful of these, spe the want of specific aim betrayed by the epistle, and its dependence pur upon the epistle to the Colossians. A specific aim, however erroneously conceived, is distinctly attributed to it by its later opponents ; and we have only to compare it a little more closely with the epistle to the Colossians in order to see that, so far from merely containing the teaching of that epistle in an extended form, it exhibits thorough independence. Its very resemblance to the Colossian epistle makes this the more striking, because it shows us not something entirely new, but that new ise of old truths which is often more difficult to produce than what is wholly new. It is not thus that the imitator or forger discovers himself. To be able to wield a great doctrine in this way, to present it to one s self and others in diiFerent lights, to apply it to varying circumstances, in dicates a full and original possession of it. An imitator would of necessity have repeated what had been said before. He would have shown no originality or power in his treatment of the doctrine, and we should have received at his hands nothing but broken and imperfect fragments of what he had not himself assimilated. No traces of such weakness meet ns here. We are in the presence of a master who has felt the fulness of the truth proclaimed by him, and who can see with his own eyes the different applications of which it is susceptible. Careful attention, again, to the passages quoted in support of the assertion that the Ephesian is not merely a reproduction of the Colossian epistle, but one indicating comparative poverty both, in ideas and words (such, as Eph. iii. 15 compared with Col. ii. 19 ; Eph. i. 17, 18 compared with Col. i. 9) will show that the richness of thought and language is often on the side of the former of the two. But the true answer to the objection is to be found not in any attempt to exalt either epistle at the expense of the other so much as in marking the independent handling by both of the closely related truths with which they deal. Both will then appear in the light in which even Baur was disposed to regard them, " twin brothers coming together into the world " (Paulus, p. 455) ; and the question will no longer be one of copying, but of authorship later than the apostolic age. (2.) This, accordingly, is the objection that next meets us. It Rela is urged that the epistle to the Ephesians bears evident marks of to having sprung up in the midst of the Gnostic heresies of the Gnos second century. The peculiar phraseology of many parts of the ism. epistle is supposed to confirm this. Thus we are prepared by the words of iv. 14 to suppose that the writer has false teachings in his eye ; and when we find him speaking as he does of " the mystery of God s-will (i. 9, comp. iii. .4, 9, v. 32, vi. 19), of the "pleroma," that favourite term of the Gnostic systems (i. 23, iii. 19, iv. 13 ; comp. iv. 10, v. 18), of the " eon " of this world (ii. 2), the "aeons" (ii. 7, iii. 9, 11), the "aeon of the feons" (iii. 21), of " the prince of the power of the air " (ii. 2), of " the principalities and the authorities in the heavenly places" (iii. 10, comp. i. 21, vi. 12), of the "knowledge" (iii. 19) and the "full knowledge " (i. 17, iv. 13) to which Christians are to come, and of the " manifold wisdom of God" (iii. 21), the conclusion is considered irresistible, that we have in all this an opposition to Gnosticism, and a date later than the first century. We shall not attempt to deny the probability that there is a reference to Gnostic errors in expressions such as these. To say that they were originally employed by the apostle in order to unfold after his own manner the truth that he had to proclaim, and that they were then, in speculative abuse, made the foundation of, or essential elements in, Gnostic systems is unnatural. They are too peculiar, too different from the language of St Paul in his earlier epistles, to permit such an explanation.
Ifcfercnce to what is known to us as Gnostic error there must be in