So they are Ephesians. Anything else?
You bet! Paul does not merely identify the great city from which these citizens hail. He drills down further carving out the Christ-followers, the saintly denizens of that commercially oriented port city. But that is not all. He distills from the wider body of Christians those who are faithful to Christ Jesus.
So this is a letter to those people who have made a commitment to Jesus Christ and are living accordingly; faithfully.
Paul is not writing this letter to convince the followers of Artemis or any of the lesser deities the Ephesian nationals espouse. Rather he targets those who have bought into the program. They bought the software; they have club-level season tickets; they are using the paid version, commercial-free version of the app.
And finally, as the letter arrived 4 to 8 years after Paul did the members of this church which he was addressing were still young believers. They were young, but not newbies.
Did we skip Paul? The author?
The stuff I have written about above jumped right over the top of that phrase which told us about Paul. How, after all, did he self-identify?
1 Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God (Ephesians 1:1a–ESV)
That was an easy question: an apostle. What, however, constitutes an apostle? How does the Bible define it? Is it rigidly constructed in the scriptures? Did common practice of the primitive Christian church add anything else to it? To answer these questions thoroughly would stretch far beyond the scope of this lesson and what I am currently versed in, but will briefly sketch some things germane to it.
Here is a great link to get you started in your apostle studies if you feel so directed. It seems that before the Christ-launched church took off the word has seen little use in the Greco-Roman world. It dovetailed very well with the 12 disciples of Christ. Those men were hand chosen by Jesus and walked with him from the time of John the Baptist. We see in the last verses of Acts 1 that the 11 who remained after Judas’ suicide considered passages from the Old Testament to imply that they should appoint another in his place. Mattias was chosen by lot after a selection process and prayer.
So the men Jesus chose to establish his church in the world seemed to have three general requirements.
- Called by Christ
- Personally taught by Christ
- Seen Christ after the resurrection
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