Ephesus. Most important city of the Roman province of Asia, located on the western shore of Asia Minor (modern Turkey). Ephesus was built on a natural harbor whose waves, according to the Roman writer Pliny the Elder, “used to wash up to the temple of Diana.” Ephesus was described by Strabo, an early Greek geographer, as the largest commercial center west of the Taurus mountains. It was also well known as the “guardian” of the temple of Artemis or, as the Romans called her, Diana (Acts 19:35).
Christianity’s threat to that pagan temple and to the commerce it produced for the makers of idols almost cost the apostle Paul his life (Acts 19:24, 30, 31). Priscilla and Aquila were associated with the early preaching in Ephesus (Acts 18:18, 19), as were Timothy (1 Tm 1:3) and Erastus (Acts 19:22). According to Irenaeus, an early Christian writer, the apostle John, after his exile on the island of Patmos (Rv 1:9), returned to live in Ephesus until the time of the emperor Trajan (ad 98–117). The commendable practices of the Christian community described in the letter to the Ephesians had been largely abandoned by the time John wrote the Book of Revelation (Rv 2:4).
Ephesus was founded by Ionian Greeks at a location where the Cayster River emptied into a gulf of the Aegean Sea. It had been a city for about a thousand years when Paul arrived there on his third missionary journey. The worship of Artemis in Ephesus was as ancient as the city itself. The temple, built in the middle of the 6th century bc, was the largest edifice in the Hellenistic world and the first of monumental size ever to be constructed entirely of marble. Two excavated images of Artemis, magnificently sculpted in marble, date to the period of emperors Domitian and Hadrian (the lifetime of the apostle John). The temple of Diana, “mother of the gods,” was considered one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Although persistent effort by British archaeologist J. T. Wood resulted in the temple’s discovery in 1869, its great altar was not found until recently. Excavation has shown the altar to be larger than the later altar of Zeus at Pergamum. The original temple was partially destroyed in 356 bc but was later rebuilt on its original plan.
Excavations have also uncovered the theater mentioned in Acts 19:29. Situated next to the main shopping area (agora), it is known to have seated 24,000 people in three tiers. The theater was 495 feet in diameter with two doors opening to the most impressive street in Ephesus. That street, leading to the harbor, was about 35 feet wide and was flanked by tall columns. It passed through a magnificent monumental gateway on its western end. In the other direction the road continued around the theater and marketplace, making its way southeast between Mt Koressos and Mt Pion. It became narrower and was bordered by lovely fountains, civic buildings, houses, shops, a library, baths, and a small theater which probably doubled as a council chamber for city officials.
Ephesus was a wealthy city. The multi-storied residences of its upper-middle-class society rested on the north terraces of Mt Koressos. Some homes had mosaic floors and marble walls. Two were found with heated bathrooms. Many had running water. The moral status of the city can be partially ascertained from a centrally located house of prostitution and gambling tables; fertility motifs are evident in the exaggerated sexual features of the Diana statues.
The impact of Christianity was felt in Ephesus for centuries. The 3rd ecumenical council was held there in ad 431 (in the Church of Mary northwest of the theater), a council that established Mary’s place as the “Mother of God” in Western Catholic theology. By that time Diana, whose temple had been burned by the Goths in ad 262, was no longer influential among the Ephesians. The truth of Paul’s message that “gods made with hands are not gods” (Acts 19:26) had to some extent been realized.
Walter A. Elwell and Barry J. Beitzel, “Ephesus,” Baker Encyclopedia of the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1988), 710.
View down from the seats of the Grand Theater (seating about 25,000), the most spectacular monument of Ephesus. This is where the riot occurred and the crowd shouted, “Great is Diana of the Ephesians.
Introduction
Paul wrote Ephesians to a wide audience of Gentile Christians (2:11; 3:1). They lived in a world where evidence of the power that belonged to the “rulers,” “authorities,” “world rulers,” and “spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” was all too clear (6:12; cf. 2:2). They could see signs of its strength in the political statuary, friezes, and inscriptions in the markets and on the street corners of their cities. The gods, this propaganda proclaimed, had given Rome the eternal right to rule the universe. To the first readers of Ephesians, perhaps Paul’s own troubles were only a grim reminder of the complications the gospel had introduced into their attempts to live in such a world (3:13).
Paul wrote his letter to encourage them that as people who were “in Christ” they worshiped the Creator of the universe (1:4; 3:9). The Creator was their Father and had graciously included them within his family (1:2, 5; 2:18; 5:20), given them an important role in his eternal purposes (1:9–10; 3:10), and blessed them richly with a close relationship to himself (2:16–18; 3:12). Through his anointed king Jesus, he had already triumphed over all the “spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (1:20–22a) and had made available to his people the same power that brought Jesus to this victory (1:19–23; 3:14–19). Paul hoped God would use his letter to open the eyes of his readers to these spiritual truths (1:15–18; 3:14–19), to call them to live in unity with each other (4:1–6:9), and to encourage them in their battle with the forces of evil around them (6:10–20).
His interaction with the OT played an important role in accomplishing this purpose. He alluded to a range of texts in Psalms and Isaiah to remind his readers that if they were “in Christ,” they had joined God’s anointed king in the victory God had given to him over the enemies of his people. Because God had raised Christ from the dead, he was enthroned in heaven with his enemies conquered and beneath his feet (1:20–22; 4:8; cf. Ps. 110:1; 8:6; 68:18). These enemies were precisely the rulers, authorities, powers, and dominant forces that Paul’s readers might have been tempted to see as triumphing over them (1:21; cf. 2:2; 3:10; 6:11–12; cf. Arnold 1997: 41–69).
Not only had Christ conquered them so that they no longer held his people captive, but as a victorious king he had distributed largess to his people on the heels of this victory. He had given them gifts by which they were able to maintain their unity and guard against continuing danger (4:8; cf. Ps. 68:18). They were clothed in the armor and weaponry of God himself. They were able, therefore, to defend themselves against the dying efforts of the defeated enemy powers to make trouble for God’s people (6:10–17; Isa. 59:17; 11:5; 52:7).
Paul probably also tapped themes from Genesis, Isaiah, and possibly Psalms to remind his readers that God was in the process of restoring his creation to its original unity: a unity of peace between peoples and a unity of peace between all humanity and their Creator. The idea of a restored creation may already be present in 1:22 where Paul quotes a line from Ps. 8:6 to describe Christ’s defeat of his enemies. Paul may have been aware that, in its original context, the line was part of a couplet that itself recalled the dominion God gave Adam over all creation (Gen. 1:28). Paul clearly refers to the creation narrative in 5:31–32 when he applies Gen. 2:24 to the union of believers with Christ, and here too the idea of a new creation may lie in the background.
Similarly, Isa. 57:19, which Paul uses in 2:13–17, can be understood as a reference to the future peace of the nations and Israel with God, a common theme in Isaiah generally (2:2–4; 11:10; 19:24–25; 45:14, 22; 51:4–5; 52:10; 55:5; 56:6–7; 60:11; 66:18–23). Sometimes in Isaiah this theme is mingled with the motif of a future new creation (66:18–23). The same mixture of themes appears in 2:13–17 when Paul not only speaks of peace between Jews and Gentiles but then describes the union of the two peoples in Christ as fulfilling God’s intention to “create … one new human being” (2:15). The new creation theme is important in the letter generally (2:10; 3:9; 4:13, 22, 24), and this lends support to the idea that Paul chose his allusions to Ps. 8:6 and Isa. 57:19 because the wider contexts of these OT passages supported that theme.
We need to be cautious here. If these echoes of the creation narrative and Isaiah’s pilgrimage of the nations motif are intentional, they are very subtle. Two considerations, moreover, seem to weigh against seeing Ephesians as deeply indebted to major theological themes in the OT. First, where a quotation formula appears in the letter it introduces either a severely altered form of the OT text (4:8; cf. Ps. 68:18) or something that is not from the OT at all (5:14). This may mean that the OT itself was only one of several sources of tradition used in the letter and that the various passages alluded to did not themselves play a major role in forming the letter’s thought (Lincoln 1982: 44–45, 49). Second, according to 3:5, 9 the unity between Jewish and Gentile believers, a theme of critical importance in the letter, was utterly unknown before God revealed it to Paul and other apostles and prophets. This seems to preclude a major role for the OT in the letter’s thought (Lincoln 1982: 47).
These are important considerations, and they usefully remind us that the theology of Ephesians is not understandable solely in OT terms. The accent in a description of the letter’s use of the OT, however, needs to lie on continuity (cf. Moritz 1996). In particular, the twin themes of God’s triumph “in Christ” over the forces of evil and his restoration “in Christ” of creation seem to emerge from the very Scriptures whose language Paul uses.