Read the Bible with Me!

Welcome to the Pauline Family's "Year of the Bible"! We've been reading the Bible clear through this year. We are finishing the New Testament, so read along with me. But first, let us pray: 

Father,

When the fullness of time had come, you sent your Word in the One who said, “Whoever sees me, sees the Father.” No revelation can surpass this until Jesus comes again. By your gift, the Church continues to receive unfathomable riches from the inheritance handed on from the Apostles and guaranteed by the Holy Spirit.

Let the Spirit who inspired the writing of today's pages "guide me in the truth and teach me" to follow Jesus ever more closely, until he calls me to follow him to the Kingdom where he lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, forever and ever. Amen.

Today's chapters are Ephesians 1-3.

One of the tricky things about the Letter to the "Ephesians" is knowing who its original recipients really were. I know that, given its name, this sounds like a solution in search of a problem, but the letter is strangely objective for one directed to a community where there were people who had put their lives on the line for him. And the letter to the Colossians it is practically its fraternal twin. The most important ancient manuscripts of Ephesians do not even include the words "in Ephesus" in the greeting (a fact that was noted by the attentive eyes of certain Fathers of the Church), while Colossians mentions a letter "to Laodicea" that we otherwise know nothing about. Is the letter to the Ephesians really to the Laodiceans? Or was Ephesians written as an open letter for all the communities in the province of Asia, meant to be read and then passed on?

Starting about 150 years ago and still popular in some circles is the theory that Ephesians was not written by Paul at all, but is a later document drafted by a follower, as if Paul were to address the issues of their day. 19th and 20th century scholars were convinced that the sophisticated vision of the community as a Temple and Body could not have arisen with the first decades after the Resurrection. On that score, we now know that they were right. The idea of a sacred, priestly community that was established as a holy Temple or Body had already been written about more than a century earlier, in the Jewish writings we call the "Dead Sea Scrolls."

What we do know about Ephesians is that the writer (N.T. Wright is confident that it is our Paul) is in prison, reflecting on Christ and the Church. And the opening prayer blessing God (it has a Eucharistic tone to it) is a masterpiece. Look at how it brings together God's plan "before the foundation of the world"; our adoption as true children of God; redemption in the blood of Christ; and the "recapitulation of all things in heaven and on earth in Christ," something we already have a first "installment" of by the gift of the Spirit! 

This blessing-prayer (praise) is followed by a prayer of intercession. You can adapt Paul's intercessions for the Ephesians for each member of your family, asking that the "eyes of their heart be enlightened, to know the hope that belongs to God's call" to them. 

As he goes into his theme of the unity of the Body, the Church, we see Paul also pick up the Temple imagery. But Ephesians is noteworthy especially for its presentation of the relationship of Christ and the Church as a marriage. This, we now know, is an age-old biblical tradition. 

The Bible began with a marriage when God created human beings in the divine image; the Bible will end with the Wedding of the Lamb. Paul is speaking now to the Bride (us) about what that means in real life. The important thing for us to hold on to (no matter how broken our own experience of family life may have been) is that God is the origin and model of all fatherhood "in heaven and on earth." Anything that departs from God's model is not the real thing, but a warped facsimile. Christ came to restore the image of God to what God made in the divine image.

Start reading here.

For additional background

Dr. John Bergsma's fascinating presentation gives the ordinary reader a sense of the many points of contact between the Gospels and the culture, spirituality, writings, and expectations of the Essenes. In many ways living a kind of porto-monasticism, the Essene communities sought to prepare for the coming of the Kingdom of David through fidelity to the "works of the Law" (sound familiar?) in rigorous cultic purity. Their leadership seems to have been from the Aaronic high priesthood, and their founder clearly a prophetic soul imbued with the Holy Spirit. Many practices and expressions that we find in the Gospels and the letters of St Paul are found nowhere else in extant literature than in the Dead Sea Scrolls, making them amazingly valuable in authenticating, from a purely historical perspective, some of the very details that had been deprecated by "historical criticism" as invented or anachronistic!

N.T. Wright's Paul: A Biography is the book I would recommend to someone who wanted to read one (only one) book that combined the life and letters of St Paul. Written by a noted Scripture, this is a flowing narrative that is scripturally enlightening and historically sound. Wright gives the reader a way of following Paul through the Acts of the Apostles and the writing of his letters, making Paul the person that much more approachable, and the letters themselves more readable as a result of having a social and historical context.