Introduction

A Letter for a Learned City

Theophylact’s Argument to Ephesians dwells, before anything else, on the character of the city itself. Ephesus was “the metropolis of Asia,” home to the great temple of Artemis and proud of its title as her temple-keeper, a city where the Evangelist John spent his exile and his last years, where Paul had left Timothy as teacher, and where, Theophylact notes, “those of the philosophers who most flourished passed their lives.” A congregation drawn from so sophisticated and so religiously self-satisfied a city called, in Theophylact’s judgment, for a letter of unusual depth: Paul, writing from Rome in chains, “entrusted to them the deeper and loftier of his thoughts, inasmuch as they had already been catechized,” and Theophylact warns his own reader at the outset that the letter will need “much attentiveness toward the understanding of the mysteries in it.” Of all the Pauline commentaries, this is the one Theophylact most explicitly frames as demanding real effort from the reader before it yields its sense.

Chosen Before the Foundation of the World

The letter’s opening blessing, with its declaration that God “chose us in him before the foundation of the world,” draws from Theophylact the same careful, synergistic reading he gives the comparable language in Romans. To be chosen “before the foundation of the world,” he explains, is to say that “our affairs were foreordained” from the beginning rather than settled only recently—but the choosing itself, he insists, is not blind or arbitrary: the word “he chose” shows at once “the love of God for mankind and their own virtue; for he chooses all who are going to prove approved.” And lest a reader conclude from having been chosen that nothing further is required, Theophylact stresses that the purpose of the choice is stated in the same breath—“that we should be holy and blameless before him”—a holiness Theophylact locates specifically in the life given at baptism and lived out afterward, and one that must hold not merely before other men, as with the Pharisees, but “before him,” before God himself.

Marriage as a Great Mystery

In the letter’s final chapter, Paul’s instruction to husbands and wives leads to a citation of Genesis—that a man shall leave father and mother and be joined to his wife, so that the two become one flesh—which Paul calls “a great mystery” concerning Christ and the Church. Theophylact takes the wonder of the passage seriously on its own terms before turning it toward Christ: that a man should forsake those who begot and raised him for the sake of a woman he had never known before is itself remarkable, and Moses’ words, read prophetically, disclose that Christ himself “forsook the Father, not by a change of place, but by the condescension toward the flesh,” to be joined to the Church as a bridegroom to his bride. Marriage, on this reading, is not merely regulated by the analogy to Christ and the Church; it is given its very meaning by it, so that the ordinary bond between husband and wife becomes, in Theophylact’s exposition, a visible sign of the deepest mystery in the letter.

The Whole Armor of God

The letter’s close turns from the household to the battlefield, as Paul calls his readers to “put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.” Theophylact fastens on Paul’s choice of word: not “battles,” nor “wars,” but “wiles”—the enemy’s characteristic weapon is deception rather than open assault, working by plausible argument and disguise rather than by urging sin directly. And when Paul adds that “our wrestling is not against blood and flesh,” Theophylact reads this not as meant to frighten but to steady: naming the true scale of the opposition makes believers more watchful, not less secure, since “he who relates the power of the enemy makes his own people more secure.” The armor that follows—the readiness of the Gospel, the shield of faith, the sword of the Spirit—answers a warfare that is real but, rightly met, need hold no terror for those who fight it clothed in what God himself has supplied.

How to Read This Commentary

Because Paul himself moves in Ephesians from the loftiest doctrine—election, the mystery of Christ, the unity of Jew and Gentile in one body—to the most concrete practical instruction on households, work, and warfare against unseen powers, Theophylact’s commentary asks to be read in the same two registers. The first three chapters reward slow, attentive reading, since Theophylact himself treats them as the letter’s densest and most demanding ground; the last three move more quickly, as doctrine already established is worked out in the ordinary relations of Christian households and congregations. A reader who has taken the trouble to follow the argument of the earlier chapters will find that the household instructions of the later ones read not as a separate, lesser concern but as the doctrine of election and adoption made visible in daily life.