There are two points indeed which present a rather striking difference from the earlier Epistles. The thought ol the quick return ol the Ixird is atieent, and in ito steail we have a vista ol genemtinns vet to <»me. through which the Church Is to glorify God (r;21). But it is conceivable that these generations arc thought of by the writer as following the Lord's return ; it is conceivable, In accord with this, that the struggle which lies tielore the Church ((1'2) is that which Is to precede thecnnung of the l»nl(cl. 2Th 2*12); and further, it is clear that .St. Paul, when he wrote the Ep. to the Romans, hail contemplaU'd the possibility of some long period of Church hUtory before the Lord's coining (Ro 112S).
Once more, the high conception ol lamily life Is at first sight Inconsistent with the preference for celiha«\v and discourage- ment of marriage in 1 Co 7. But that wiis written in the Srenence of a pressing necessity : even there St. Paul recognizes lat lioth the celibate and the married have a gift from Cod; »nd u time went on and the I.«rd did not return, it became neces-sart to build up a tnie conception of marriage in the face ol heathen laxity. It is as likely that St. Paul should organize lainilv life as thiit he should organize church order, and tliis he bad (lone Irom the first.
(c) The style Is again admittedly Pauline up to a pomt "There are sonie twenty words peculiar to St. Paul in his earlier Epp. ; others common to Eph with the Poatoral Ejip. (cl. Iloltzniann, Kritik, p. '2->7) : there Is the love of iianwloxical antithesis (cl. 61.%. »)) ; the plav upon cognate wortis (4'*-10 61*- 1*) ; the same tree paraphrasing ol ()T (is^'l. cl Ro 1(1""); the same unaiknow. Cige<l Oilaputlon ol OT language (122 2liH7 4*i. » 62 flU 01418, cf. 1 (jo 310-1', 2 Co 3i»i"). On the other hand the sentences are
K
less broken, rather more elal>orate and complicated by paren theses ; • but this apjtlies miiinly to the earlier part ol the Kp. where we have great statements of doctrine rather than cuii troversial arguments, so that it may be adequately explaiiii.l as due to the quieter tone in which St. Paul was writin- So. too, of verbal differences: there is a large number of «Ta; Xirsf.ux (76), but not proportionately larger than in the ollu i Epp. (for details cf. Von Soden, p. 87 ; Uoltzmann, EiiUeitvii.!. p. '2811). Some of them occur in quotations ; the majority <>t tbem rise naturally out ol the subject-matter ol the Ep. ; even where the application is different from that in the earlier Epp. , «.(/. in «'«a*«^.'«,rX>;**,ttx,xip«A*j,yiu.iXjo». this, too, grows natumllv out of the change of subject ; and certainly there is no one word which St. Paul could not have u8e<l. The two that have bcin most objected to are the use ol • 8/«/3oXi>< (4'^' 6") and «' ii-yiu itrtrroXit (3'). To the first it is objected that St. Pwil elsewheic uses • <r»Ta*af or • Tn^aC** : hut St. Mt, St. Lk, St. Jn (Gosp. and Apoc.), the writer of 1 Ti, and St. Paul himself as reporte.l bv St. Luke in the Acts (13i» 2618), use both • a.i^«x« and i rxTa.¥ii ; and the stress on unity in this Ep. makes the use of Jm^rtot, ».«. the slanderer, more appropriate than r«T«.i,-. Possibly, too, the word means here ' any human slanderer ' (Zahn, Einl. 367). Again, the phra.se ' the holy apostles ' sounds like the ecclesiojitical formula of a later generation looking baiU on its canonized founders; but, aiiart from the consideratimi that the reading is a little doubtful (cf. Smith, DE- pp. 956 ami 904). the context shows that Styiti refers to special consecrntir.ii of the apostles and prophets as recipients of the new revelation, in contrast to the sons of men (cf. Rev 2114 and Lk I'O).
(d) The relation of the Ep. to that to the Col adds to the complexity of the problem. The extent of this has been brought out already, and the fuller details may be seen in Uoltzmann, Kritik der Epheser- und Kolosser-briefe, cap. ii., or in Von Soden, pp. 94, 96. There is nothing exactly like the problem elsewhere in NT. The nearest parallels are the relation ot the Synoptic Gospels to each other, or the relation of 2 Peter and Jude : in those cases the similarity is due partly to the use ot common documents, partly to the deliberate use of the earlier writer by the later. In this case a somewhat similar theory has been propounded by Uoltzmann ; he holds that St. Poul himself wrote a short letter to the Col., that some latei writer elaborated this into the Ep. to the Eph, and that the same writer, or another, subsequently composed our present Ep. to the Col, based upon the two preceding letters. Such a theory rests upon the fact that in some resemblances priority seems to he on the side of Eph, in others on the side of Col ; but such an argument is very subjective and precarious ; it has not met with any acceptance, and may safely be set aside as too artiflci-al (see Smith, Dlfl pp. 959, 960, for a fuller eiamina- tion of it).