Sermon Tone Analysis

Ephesians has been recognized as a canonical text and, from earliest days, received as a Pauline text

Would someone close to Paul dare to write under his name if it was a practice viewed with suspicion

All in all, there are good internal and external reasons not to take theological distinctiveness as a reason for doubting authorship claims

Presumably these figures and communities would have had a broader sense of Greek style and vocabulary, of thematic and generational change regarding theology, and of the expanding Pauline corpus (not least Colossians and its relationship to Ephesians).

That some of them overtly talk about texts in the primitive Christian milieu that are pseudepigraphic and yet specifically judge that Ephesians is authentic is no small thing.

While we might read this text with much profit against its background in the Greco-Roman world, the history of Jewish literature, and the development of early Christian instruction, we nonetheless must—absolutely must—attend to these words with a commitment to perceive them as another instance of divine gift

But we read Ephesians as part of a larger corpus that circulated together and has been received by Christians as a whole.

Indeed, we might say that Ephesians plays a distinctive and hermeneutical role in the church’s reception of that Pauline collection, for it alone bears the marks of a letter unmoored from local crises and particular anachronisms.

In many ways, Ephesians provides a set of lenses or spectacles through which we see the church as what we confess to be “the communion of saints.”

Second, the saintliness of these addressees is bound up with their being “faithful

He highlights this twinned relationship—grace and peace—by locating both personally in the action that comes “from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”