The problem of how to situate Ephesians vis-à-vis Paul and Paulinism—one with a long
and venerable history in Pauline scholarship, although now largely taken for granted—is
better characterised as the problem of how to read Ephesians vis-à-vis the corpus
Paulinum. Any study of Paul, working in historical mode, has to reckon with the nature of
the evidence: to study Paul is to be a student, firstly, of a letter collection. Any judgment
about Ephesians, then, is, in the end, born from a judgment about how to read a letter collection.
This thesis, therefore, comprises three parts. Part 1 recounts the rise of a distinctively
modern way of (not) reading Paul's letter collection, which privileges discrete letters,
chronologically arranged, as the raw data for narrating Pauline biography and early
Christianity (chapter one), and the effect that this reading strategy has on Ephesians,
which is now displaced—one strand of the welter of the Pauline legacy (chapter two). Together,
chapters one and two make the negative argument that the consensus on Ephesians,
more than a scientific reconstruction of history, is a hermeneutical construct of
modern criticism.
Part 2 turns to Paul's late-ancient tradents to ask the same two questions: how do
these readers read Paul's letter collection (chapter three), and how does this impact how
they read Ephesians (chapter four)? Chapter three finds that late-antique Paulinists privilege,
at one and the same time, both the collectivity/arrangement of the corpus and fragmentary
ways of reading it that derive from the practices of late-ancient grammar. The
priority of the collection, together with reading strategies that negotiate rather than dis-
place difference, serves to place Ephesians consistently near the centre of late-ancient
portraits of Paul—so the argument of chapter four. A different way of reading a letter collection
generates a different way of reading Ephesians vis-à-vis Paul. This is the cumulative
argument of Part 2.
Part 3, then, picks up one of the most pervasive contemporary judgements about
Ephesians—its developed image of Paul (chapter five) as inscribed in 3.1-13—in order to
ask a simple question: if one does not begin with assumptions about authenticity and
chronology, how do this text read vis-à-vis relevant co-texts within Paul's letter collection?
Contemporary rhetoric aside, chapter five argues that Ephesians holds together various
tensions in the collection's image of Paul that surface not just between so-called disputed
and undisputed letters, but between the undisputed letters themselves. Rather than developed,
a less hermeneutically loaded designation of the difference would be to call Eph
3.1-13 a generalised account of what we find ad hoc in the other letters. But this does not
allow one to make claims about historical distance. At least with respect to its image of
Paul, then, I argue that Ephesians is a source for Paul, whether Paul wrote it or not.
This relatively simple argument has three rather significant implications: [1]
scholars of early Christianity lose a key text frequently used to situate Ephesians in the
middle of developmental trajectories of Pauline reception; [2] scholars of Paul may not
buttress one-sided accounts of Paul by appeal to the 'divergent' or 'developed' account of
the same in Ephesians—that is, they must deal with the data of Ephesians, or provide an
account of why they do not; and [3] scholars of Ephesians, not least of 3.1-13, will need to
learn to speak of Paul, and not just the Pauline legacy, again
