(2) A second class of critics, led by Grotius, re vive the view of the ancient Gnostic Marcion and maintain that the church addressed is that at Lao dicca and that we have in this Epistle the letter written to that church and alluded to in Col. iv :t6, which wag commonly supposed to have been lost. \Vhile this view is plausible for many reasons, it has been in modern times set aside in favor of an other theory held in the following two varieties.
(3) That the letter was an encyclical or circular addressed to a circle of churches without the spe cial designation of any of them in the original copy. Such an encyclical might be localized at Ephesus and the phrase in Ephesus being inserted in i :r, would be perpetuated. In such a case the address would read, "to the saints existing (Tol's ()Liao) and faithful in Christ Jesus." (See Milli gan, EncycloPaqia Britannica, art. "EritEstkrs.") As this construction is one unusual in Greek, many have objected to the whole view associated with it and have resorted to another explanation.
(4) That the encyclical was addressed to a defi nite circle of churches and issued in separate copies to each of these churches. The original had a blank wherein the name of each of the cities of the circle could be inserted in each sepa rate copy. The name Ephesus among others (Laodicea, Hierapolis) was thus introduced into one of these copies and gradually displaced the others by serving as the original of subsequent copies made for collections of Paul's Epistles. As the original character and purpose of the Epistle, however, was remembered long after this period, the omission from the text of some MSS. would also be natural. This view, proposed first by Ussher, has been accepted and held with some modifications by Bengel, Neander, Olshausen, Reuss, Ellicott, Lightfoot, Hort, B. Weiss, Moule, Abbott, etc. It best explains the facts of the case and may be safely taken as fairly well estab lished.
(3) Genuineness. The genuineness of the Epistle to the Ephesians was not called in ques tion until the first quarter of the nineteenth centu ry. Although Erasmus did express his apprecia tion of the difference of style between it and the other epistles of Paul, no one in the ancient or mediaeval church doubted that it was a writing of Paul's. In fact, the testimony of antiquity is fuller and clearer for the authenticity of Ephesians than for any of the other Pauline letters. This testimony goes back to Marcion, who, as already referred to, ascribed it to Paul, though alleging that it was addressed to the Laodiceans. Poly
carp somewhat earlier quotes from it, and Igna tius addressing the Ephesians says to them in effect that they are the church to which "the sanc tified Paul" "remembers them in Christ" in "the whole letter" (Ign. ad Eph. xii :3). This testi mony, however, did not seem sufficiently strong to Usteri, a disciple of Schleimacher, who upon the basis of internal evidence surmised that it was written by Tychicus or some other companion of Paul and signed by the Apostle himself, who in general agreed with its content and adopted it as his own. DeWette elaborated the objections to the au thenticity of the epistle and came to the conclusion that it was a "verbose amplification" of the Epistle to the Colossians. These objections were further taken up by the Tiibingen school (Baur, Schweg ler, Kostlin, Hilgenfeld, Hausrath) and woven into their system of New Testament criticism. These critics ascribed Ephesians as well as Colos sians to a writer of the middle of the second centu ry who proposed it as an irenicon for the purpose of uniting the various factions of the Church. From these radical positions the criticism of more recent years has been very slow to recede, if in deed it may be said to have receded at all. David son in England, Hoekstra and others in Holland. and Pfleiderer, Weizsacker, Ritschl, and the Ritschlians in Germany, together with Von Soden, Schmidel and others, still deny the Pauline au thorship of Ephesians. On the other hand, how ever, there arc not lacking critics of the highest type of scholarship who stoutly defend the older belief. Some of these are B. Weiss, Salmon, Godet, Zahn, and in fact the great body of con servative scholars. To these may be added further some who, like Jiilicher, take the position that though the Pauline authorship of the Epistle can not be demonstrated, neither can the denial of such authorship be established. The external testimony is certainly exceedingly strong. In fact apart from theoretical and a priori grounds the argument for authenticity is more than sufficient to overcome all the objections alleged against it. Accordingly we may safely regard the Epistle as neither the work of a second-century disciple of Paul nor "deutero Pauline" in the sense that it was thought out and composed by a close companion of the Apostle's and adopted and signed by himself.