1 - Introduction

Summary

The problem

One of the crucial but almost neglected questions in New Testament research is that of the Jewish attitudes toward the Gentiles in the epistle to the Ephesians. The main reason for the neglect of this ethnic factor, unfortunately, has been the uncritical reading of some of the statements about the Gentiles in Ephesians itself, which I hope to rectify in the present study. Still more importantly, the neglect of the factor is closely associated with the hermeneutical ‘grid’ through which Pauline Christianity was portrayed. A brief comment on the framework mentioned above is appropriate.

New Testament scholarship on Pauline Christianity since the second quarter of the nineteenth century, as widely recognised, has been dominated largely by the philosophy of dialectics, epitomised by the works of Hegel. The founder of the Tübingen School, F. C. Baur, and a chorus of scholars who depended upon this philosophy, had read the history of earliest Christianity in dialectic terms. Baur and his followers, as we shall see, have had a continuing sway in subsequent New Testament scholarship not only in the area of Paul's earlier letters but also in such letters as Ephesians. The heritage of the dialectic philosophy with which Baur was associated may also account for the tendency to interpret Pauline Christianity in terms of conflict between Jews and Gentiles or between Jewish Christianity and Hellenistic Christianity (see my review of Percy and Fischer below).