want of connection and its many parentheses, in much of its phrase- ology, and in the poverty of its contents. To him it is a composition copious in words but poor in ideas, lacking originality, so dependent indeed on the Epistle to the Colossians as to look like a “ verbose amplification ” of it, the work not of Paul himself but of an imitator. But the similarities between Ephesians and Colossians, as we have seen, admit of a simple explanation, and it is a surprising judgment, one that few certainly will accept, which De Wette pronounces on our Epistle when he speaks of it as having no distinctive character, as a dependent production, and non-Pauline in style. We should rather say with Meyer that it is so like Paul in tone, tenor and much else as to make it hard indeed to imagine that it can be the work of a mere imitator; all the more so if it is, as De Wette thinks it, without any special object.
Baur, Schwegler, and other adherents of the Tiibingen School dilate chiefly on its doctrinal character as inconsistent with the Paul- ine authorship. They find it full of Gnostic and Montanist thought ᾿ and terminology. They lay stress on the use of such terms as πλήρωμα, on the peculiarities of the Christology, etc., and judge it to be the product of the second century, when Gnostic speculations had taken shape and had become familiar. But this view of the Epistle is no longer asserted with the former confidence or in the pronounced form in which it was elaborated by Baur himself. It is acknowledged more generally now that the phenomena in the Epistle on which the old Tiibingen School fastened may be accounted for by the operation of ideas which were in affinity with those known as Gnostic, but which came short of the developed Gnosticism of the middle of the second century ; and further that the passages most insisted on by Baur, when fairly interpreted, are quite consistent with the form of doctrine found in the primary Pauline Epistles.
The objections most generally urged against the Pauline author- ship take the following forms. In the first place the vocabulary of the Epistle, it is said, presents great difficulty. The ἅπαξ λεγόμενα are thought to be so numerous and of such a kind as to raise a very serious question. But when the list is examined the case is considerably modified. The whole number of words which are found in this Epistle and nowhere else in the NT is forty-two. The number of words found in this Epistle and occasionally elsewhere in the canon- ical books, but in none of the other writings generally recognised as Pauline by the critics in question, is thirty-nine, according to the reckoning of Holtzmann. But the Epistle to the Colossians and the three Pastoral Epistles are left out of account in this computa-