Strangers and Aliens No Longer: Negotiating Identity and Difference in Ephesians 2

Extract

Issues of identity and difference in the Letter of Paul to the Ephesians have provoked a long history of scholarly debate, particularly around the narrative of Jews and Gentiles becoming “one new humanity out of two” in 2:15, . Should one read this passage, 2:11–22, as “an attempt throughout to articulate [the identity of the] in relation to Jews and Gentiles in the Roman world,” that reflects “significant engagement with the life and fate of the Jewish people”? Or does the text “look back on an achieved unity between Jew and Gentile in the Church as the one body” that has left behind “heated struggles with rival groups”? Furthermore, how do these identity categories of “Jew” and “Gentile” relate to the theological distinctives of the epistle? While the deutero-Pauline status of the text remains widely accepted, this does not put to rest the question of the text's overall relationship to Pauline theology. Does the account of a single new humanity in Ephesians represent the apex of development in the ideas of the Pauline school, or does it stand in disjunction to Paul's original vision?