Except for recent immigrants, we Americans are mainly monolingual, and therefore inclined perhaps to overlook certain kinds of questions and problems. With respect to the Bible, many Americans think its text is divine and, in some meaningful way, dictated by God--it's "God's word," whatever the details. That God spoke in Hebrew and Greek doesn't seem to concern anyone very much. Still, it seems worth mentioning that there is a translator, a human intermediary, between American Bible readers and the supposedly inspired text. Is it the officially approved fundamentalist view that only the original Hebrew and Greek texts qualify as the word of God, or are all the various translators divinely guided in their work so as not to spoil the effect?
And what does this have to do with Ephesians?
Well, sometimes when you're reading something that's been translated from another language, and you feel that your powers of comprehension are being routed, your suspicions might fall upon the translator. That's my experience of Ephesians, and, turning for assistance to the people who might be able to render a verdict on the hypothesis, I find that, with one voice, they say that the problem is the other way 'round. That is, the most widely used English translations--King James and Revised Standard--are actually doing a favor for the original text, which is a shoddy mess. Ernst Kasemann, for example, said of Ephesians 1:3-14 that "the most monstrous conglomeration of sentences in the Greek language is found here," and that "any successful translation of it is a tribute to the translator's ingenuity." [quoted words are Norman Perrin's rendering, in his Introduction to the New Testament, of Kasemann's German]
This provides a taste of the challenges facing the usually forgotten translator, who, when we think of him at all, is usually imagined marching to and fro on a linguistic cross walk. But if that was all there was to it, then the opening to Ephesians would be a case of GIGO--garbage in, garbage out. The real task is to use one's knowledge of Greek to wrest meaning from the mad jumble of the original and then "translate" that into English. Being "faithful to the original" is widely regarded as the translator's first responsibility, but, in the case of Ephesians, fealty to that principle interferes with another pretty basic obligation: that of producing something intelligible.
To evaluate the merit of the above you'd have to be able to read Ephesians in Greek. Since I can't, I'm taking on faith the word of scholars, an attractive option inasmuch as it supplies a flattering explanation for my incomprehension. You can see, however, why the general messiness is embarrassing for our fundamentalist friends. Honest perplexity lives uneasily with the notion that the text is a transcript of the mind of God intended for our edification, for why then should there be any barriers to understanding? Did God make a poor grade in freshman composition? Close textual analysis, and the results it yields, suggest that we're dealing with a text like others instead of with something supernatural--probably that is the root of the discomfort.
The conclusions of scholarship should at least not be embarrassing for those concerned about the reputation of Paul, to whom authorship of Ephesians has traditionally been assigned. The known letters of Paul are characterized by a strong, plain, often intimate style--a sufficient reason to doubt he could have written Ephesians. Moreover, there are in Ephesians, which is only a few pages long, something like forty words that are never used elsewhere in the Pauline corpus. The whole backdrop is entirely different from what we're accustomed to in Paul's letters, where he is invariably addressing a particular church in a particular location that needs instruction on some particular doctrinal or ethical question. When the word "church" occurs in Ephesians, the reference is not to the local congregation at Ephesus but to the universal Church made of the body of all Christian believers. Thus there are no personal touches, such as the greetings and blessings extended to named individuals that frequently occur in Paul's known letters. Paul's great theme of justification by faith is present, though in a way that might strike some as suspiciously perfunctory, and even for the unsuspicious there is no reason therefore to reject the view that Ephesians was written by a Pauline disciple after Paul's race was run. There is in Ephesians no discussion of the timing of the Second Coming, a frequent topic in Paul's letters; this absence might plausibly be attributed to the passage of time and consequent shift in attention away from an imminent conclusion to history and toward a new epoch defined by the activity of the unified Church. For these reasons, it seems that Ephesians is best understood as a document of emerging Catholicism rather than one from the hand of Paul.
Discarding the notion that Ephesians is another of Paul's letters makes it easier to see that it's not actually a letter at all. Writing on Ephesians in Peake's Commentary on the Bible, Henry Chadwick notes that the book is "a theological manifesto addressed to everybody in general and to nobody in particular." It's possible to make out, though with difficulty, that the subject of the manifesto is baptism, and the parts that might sound familiar have to do with a new man who "takes off the old and puts on the new." Wayne Meeks, editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Paul's writings, thinks "Ephesians was intended to be read to new converts in a group of churches in the southwestern part of the province of Asia (modern Turkey), as a written substitute for a personal address by the apostle to the newly baptized." The specific hortatory advice to these new Christians, supposing Meeks's surmise to be correct, is a mixture of the discredited and dated with the arguably sublime:
Wives, be subject to your husbands, as to the Lord.
Slaves, be obedient to those who are your earthly masters, with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart. . . .
Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.
Comments