Ephesians

by PSacramento 17 Replies latest watchtower bible

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  PSacramento

  Thomas,

  Not sure what you are asking...are you asking about bible commentaries? or books about how to "critique" ancient greek text?

  Narkissos would be the man to ask about that.
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  Midget-Sasquatch

  Well, partly why the authorship of Ephesians is in question is how it seems to copy alot of material from Colossians and expand on it. I mean just check out the layout of the different points and also the wording used and you can't deny that one must have served as a template for the other. People who copy from other works tend to add material, rather than making the thoughts more succint.

  Sure you could say Paul just wrote this second letter and fleshed out the ideas he had in the first letter butPaul was expecting an imminent return of Christ. But this letter seems to focus less on that and talks about a more future time for salvation in "the age to come". Couple that with language differences. I'm no expert on this but I recall it being said that the language of Ephesians is not a close match to those of the undisputed Pauline letters. Even Colossians may not be a sure thing.
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  Narkissos

  The inevitable "date and authorship" section in introductions to Bible books is generally the most conjectural and questionable, but also the least important imo (although hasty readers run to it as if it were the main or the only thing to "know"). Insights about the text's structure, ideology, rhetorics and so on are infinitely more helpful for intelligent reading and understanding.

  Btw, this has little to do with "textual criticism" (TC) which is about establishing the exact text(s) of every work on the basis of the extant manuscripts, early translations and quotations. Only exceptionally does TC contribute anything significant to the "date and authorship" issue -- in the case of Ephesians, the variant readings of the address offer such a clue, but it weighs comparatively little in the "when/who" debate, which is essentially about internal considerations, i.e. what the text says and how: style, vocabulary, rhetoric, themes, ideas, etc.

  The basic problem is this: the complete collection of "Paul"'s epistles offers a diversity of material (including a lot of not only formal but ideological contradictions) which seems definitely beyond the scope of one author. Of course the most conservative scholars still deny that, since to them, the fact that the author names himself Paul closes the debate in effect (pseudepigraphy is ruled out in principle); their whole argument is henceforth apologetic or defensive, trying to show that the arguments displayed by critical scholarship are not compelling (this kind of apologetic scholarship is echoed in WT works like All Scripture is Inspired or Insight on the Scriptures).

  Critical scholarship, otoh, has mostly approached the topic from the perspective of authenticity; we must have genuine works of Paul which must be situated within his biography (however the only source of Paul's biography is the book of Acts, which has been shown to be highly unreliable historically, especially when confronted with the alleged "authentic" Pauline epistles!); and pseudepigraphic works of "Paul," which follow very different trajectories (e.g., depending on the authors, 2 or even 1 Thessalonians, Colossians, Ephesians, and almost unanimously the so-called "Pastorals" = Timothy-Titus). There is actually as much ideological difference among the latter works (for instance, Colossians is about as much "Gnostic-friendly" as the Pastorals are "anti-Gnostic") than between them and the former. The issue gets even more complex when you consider the possibility that even the epistles generally considered as authentic may have been produced by more than one man, however following the trajectory of a particular "school" (from Paul to Marcion; Galatians for instance seems closer to Marcionite theology than Romans, although they have a lot in common).
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  PSacramento

  In regards to authenticity,

  I think that one needs to take into account WHO Paul was writting too, he seemd liek the type to tailor his writing to the audience and we also need to remeber that these are letters and as such, there is a "one way" view to them for US, but not for Paul or his audience.

  Paul directed a letter to a specific group, with specific questions or concerns and as such, he probably voiced them in a contextula manner that they would understand, just as is the case of Hebrews.

  Paul would not have written to Gentiles they way he wrote to converted Jews or written to Converted jews the way he wrote to non-converted, but interested, Jews.

  If the HS spoke/wrote through Paul, this would have been even MORE the case.
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  My Struggle

  bookmarked
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  Leolaia

  Well, partly why the authorship of Ephesians is in question is how it seems to copy alot of material from Colossians and expand on it. I mean just check out the layout of the different points and also the wording used and you can't deny that one must have served as a template for the other.

  What makes the problem even more complex is that there is a three-way question of literary relationship: Colossians, Ephesians, and 1 Peter, with the latter agreeing with Colossians mainly when Ephesians agrees with it, and frequently agreeing with Ephesians without a parallel to Colossians. Although scholars have held a variety of views, the one that seems to best account for the literary evidence is that Ephesians is dependent on Colossians and 1 Peter is dependent on Ephesians. C.L. Mitton had a good article on this in JTS (1950).
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  Watkins

  So... what do you guys think about the authenticity issues? Do the facts void the spirit of the words written? Some of the writings attributed to Paul have made me scratch my head... but my heart, mind and spirit respond to a great deal of them too --- whoever wrote them, lol. I've reasoned that if I were to write letters in the same manner as Paul, they too would resemble each other to a degree, but would vary wildly because of the interests or specific intimate matters the recipient and I shared. I feel Paul(or whoever) did this, while knowing congregations were sharing / copying his letters to their specific group, and so he elaborated on different points to different degrees... and he dictated some of them...

  Hmmm. well, what would be a dangerous teaching from the letters in question? Is there something terribly wrong - why is authorship in question - what's wrong? (not sure what you mean, Narkissos, about 'gnostic-friendly Colossians' vs. the 'pastorals' --- I'm going to have to look into that!)

  thanks for your time, you guys - you're great!
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  Farkel

  In very few and I mean VERY FEW books of the Bible does the author specifically identify himself. Also, more often than not, they are written in the third person. Not good.

  I don't trust any "holy" book written by ancient anonymous sources.

  Jesus never wrote one word of the Bible, so the Bible is almost entirely secondhand information written by true believers. That makes no sense to me, either.

  In a court of law they call that "heresay" and its not even admissible as evidence. One would think that God would have thought that one through before he "caused" that Bible to get written.

  Farkel