Open English Translation EPH Introduction

Introduction

The author

This Letter to the believers in Ephesus was written by Paul from prison in Rome.

This letter

This letter wasn’t just written for the assembly of believers there in Ephesus, but also for other assemblies of believers.

Paul’s main theme is about God’s plan that ‘at the right time he will gather everything, whether in heaven or here on earth, for the messiah’ (1:10).

In the first part of letter, he wrote about unity. Paul carefully explained about how God the father chooses his people, about forgiving and saving them from their sins through his son, Yeshua the messiah.

In the second part of letter, Paul urges the reader that the believers need to be united in the messiah by means of their unity with each other.

Paul uses many allegories about the unity of people with God via the messiah: the believers are the body of the messiah, he is the head; it’s like a house, with the messiah as the foundation stone; the believers are also like a bride with the messiah as the groom.

It’s also explained here about the correct behaviour for couples, of parents and children, and for slaves and masters. Then in concluding his letter, it’s explained about the armour that’s given to believers for them to use to stand against Satan’s attacks.

It should be noted here that this letter, like most of the scriptures, was dictated to a scribe (See 2 Thess 3:17), so it was an oral letter, quite different from our modern letters which we edit with word-processing software, adding a word back in a previous sentence, combining two short sentences, or breaking an over-long sentence. Oral letters tend to contain a lot of run-on sentences where the thoughts keep flowing without a break, thus 1:3-14 is considered by most Greek experts to be one long sentence (like this one is 😀), however for us as readers, a sentence with some two hundred words is very difficult for us to absorb, hence this Reader’s Version breaks that single Greek sentence into a number of smaller sentences, in fact, this kind of adjustment is regularly done throughout the Bible by all major English translations in order to make them easier for us to read, but the disadvantage is that we can sometimes lose whatever the connection was between the consecutive thoughts. The OET tries to be more transparent about such adjustments by placing the Literal Version right beside this text so that the serious student can compare the two.

This is still a very early look into the unfinished text of the Open English Translation of the Bible. Please double-check the text in advance before using in public.