Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians contains that rarest of things, a cluster of ideas that no one on earth had ever before imagined! It defies the maxim of old that “there is nothing new under the sun” (Ec 1:9-10). This small letter is filled with concepts that here come into the world for the very first time. It is a miracle! If someone wants to scorn the gospel, then he must first explain away the divine mystery of Ephesians. How could any man have conceived and written such things, unless they are simply true?
And it becomes even more wonderful when you remember that Paul was a first century Jew, a devout monotheist, utterly committed to the worship of one God − Yahweh of Israel. He reckoned it foul blasphemy deserving a savage death to call any man divine. Yet suddenly we find him ascribing to Jesus of Nazareth an exalted honour beyond imagination! Paul no longer sees him as merely human, but as wholly divine, possessing dazzling, heavenly magnificence! Such a transformation is inexplicable apart from the explanation Paul himself gives – he had undergone a radical conversion caused by his shattering encounter with the risen Christ on the road to Damascus. (Ac 9:1-8; 22:3-10; 26:9-19)
If that story is denied, then some other adequate explanation must be devised for the staggering things the apostle wrote. But no one has ever been able to do so.
Nevertheless, some people, even if they accept that Paul was a real person, still denounce his letter, calling it a piece of fiction, a human invention, an irresponsible fabrication. But it defies reason to suppose that such a man as Paul would or even could invent such a collection of ideas, and then present them as life-changing truth. What he writes in Ephesians runs counter to all that he had formerly been as a man, a Jew, a scholar. Here are beliefs that undo many of his previous deepest convictions, so that although he once called it blasphemy to accord divinity to anyone but Yahweh, now he calls it blasphemy to deny that Christ possesses divinity equal to Yahweh! (Ac 26:11)
Furthermore, Paul dared to write such things while thousands of people were still alive who had actually seen Jesus in Palestine! To those observers, Jesus had been just as human as they were. Paul too, during the years when he furiously persecuted the Church, had thought of Jesus only as a common blasphemer, if not insane. Yet now we find Paul, with immense drama and passion, calling Jesus God! And he presents visions of Jesus so supernal they demand that all creation should revere the former Man of Galilee and offer him heartfelt worship.
No explanation of this transformation of Paul the Jew to Paul the Christian is easier to accept than the claim that what he writes is no human coinage, but divine revelation.
(From the preface of Ken Chant’s new book, “Treasures from Ephesians.”)
