Most North Americans associate the country of Turkey with the Islamic faith. For the first 1,000 years of Church history, however, the geographical area known as Asia Minor that is the territory of the modern nation of Turkey was a bastion of the Christian faith. Virtually all of the essential dogmas and doctrines of the Christian faith were put into words at ecumenical church councils meeting in towns such as Nicea, Ephesus, and Chalcedon. Even as early as the late first century AD, the time in which the book of Revelation was written, we can see the central importance of Christian Asia Minor. All seven churches addressed in the first part of the book are located there.

The conversion of Asia Minor to the Christian faith was largely the enterprise of St. Paul and his missionary companions in the beginning. The two letters we will be reflecting on this month, Paul’s letters to the Galatians and to the Ephesians, are addressed to churches located in this vast and fertile area of the Roman Empire. Geographically, culturally, and politically the audiences for the two letters were quite different, illustrating both the diversity of early Christianity and the unique genius of Paul. The “apostle to the Gentiles” was inspired to discern the heart of the gospel message and communicate it in ways appropriate to very different populations.

Town and Country
Ephesus, a seaport located along the western coastline of Asia Minor in the southern Aegean Sea, was one of the five largest cities in the Roman Empire. During Paul’s lifetime the population was approximately 250,000 people— an enormous population for an ancient city. We know from Paul’s writings as well as stories in the Acts of the Apostles that Ephesus was Paul’s headquarters for more than two years during his third journey and that Paul wrote a number of letters from this site. A large seaport such as Ephesus would have afforded good cover for the controversial Messianic movement within Judaism that would come to be known as Christianity. Such a city would invariably have contained at least one synagogue where Paul could proclaim the gospel to his fellow Jews and to Gentiles who attended the synagogue services as interested observers. These “God-fearers” were captivated by the uniquely Jewish belief that there was only One True God.

Ephesus was the site of one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the enormous temple complex dedicated to the goddess Artemis. (See “Paul faces a pagan world” for more details.) Preaching about an obscure Jewish sect in a town dedicated to such a central pagan cult of the ancient world must have initially made Paul the butt of more than a few jokes. That bemusement soon turned to hostility as Paul began to make inroads, and silversmiths who made their money selling various statues and trinkets to devotees of the goddess saw their sales fall off. Paul, due to the quick thinking of a local magistrate, narrowly escaped the clutches of a lynch mob worked up by these disgruntled merchants (Acts 19:21-41). Paul’s great affection for the Ephesian church is reflected in the farewell speech recorded in the following chapter of Acts of the Apostles (20:17-38).

Galatia is not a city but a geographical area. Originally, the term referred to the lands in the north central highlands of Asia Minor where Celtic tribes related to the Gauls had settled many centuries before. This mountainous region remained sparsely populated even in Paul’s time; it seems that Paul originally met the Galatians while looking for a place to rest up from an illness during his first journey (Gal 4:13). While churches in Ephesus and the surrounding towns are referred to a number of times in early Christian writings, not much if anything is heard of Galatia again after Paul’s letter.

Yet despite the anonymity of the region, Paul’s letter to the Galatians provides us with a window into the life of the apostle himself. In Galatians we hear directly from Paul about his conversion (1:11-24), his meetings with the leaders of the Jerusalem church at what is commonly referred to as the “Council of Jerusalem” (2:1-10), and a tense encounter with Peter that occurred in the Syrian city of Antioch sometime later (2:11-14). There is a rawness to the emotion Paul expresses in Galatians that is unique in all of his letters; only 2 Corinthians 10–13 approaches the level of anxiety and fury that Paul exhibits here. (See Galatians 3:1-3, for example.)

Conversely, the letter to the Ephesians lacks almost all of the personal touches found in Paul’s other letters. This letter focuses on the broader, more mystical implications of the gospel: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love. He destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace that he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved” (Eph 1:3-6). If the opening verses of the letter were eliminated, Ephesians would much more resemble a homily than a letter.

Amazing Grace
Despite the very different audiences and circumstances that the letters to the Galatians and Ephesians address, and their contrasting styles, the essential message of both epistles is the same. Both proclaim the joyful “good news” of grace and transformation brought into being through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. In Galatians, Paul must defend this proclamation of the risen Christ as the basis for our transformation from slaves to sin into children of God against the teachings of the “Judaizers”—missionaries hailing from the mother church in Jerusalem. These visitors, who arrived in Galatia sometime after Paul’s visit, believed that conversion to Judaism as well as baptism into Christ was necessary to attain salvation.

Paul recognizes the danger: “For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. Listen! I, Paul am telling you that if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no benefit to you” (Gal 5:1-2). Either God’s gift of unconditional love poured out upon us through Jesus is sufficient for our salvation or it is not. Suggesting that baptism is insufficient undermines the entire gospel message!

No such immediate crisis can be sensed in the letter to the Ephesians. Here, the emphasis is on the deeper meaning of the sacrament of baptism and the consequences of uniting oneself with Christ. Through Christ, both Gentile and Jew have been reoriented in their relationship to God, to one another, and to the whole of creation (Eph 2:15-16). The last section of Ephesians consists of a number of particular ways the disciple who has “clothed (himself or herself) with the new self, created according to the likeness of God” (4:24) ought to conduct himself or herself in personal and communal affairs (Eph 4:25–6:9). “By grace you have been saved” is the core message of these two distinct letters.

A final similarity between the two works is that both are shrouded in an air of mystery. Although the geographical area of the Galatians is in the central highlands of Asia Minor, the Roman province of Galatia incorporates some large towns closer to the southern coast. This Roman province includes such towns as Iconium, Lystra, and Derbe. Did Paul address his letter to these towns or to the actual Celtic territory of Galatia to the north? We have no way of knowing.

While the specific destination of the letter to the Ephesians is clear, Pauline authorship is not. None of the earliest copies of what we refer to as the letter to the Ephesians actually include the letter’s first verse—the only place in the entire letter where the city of Ephesus is actually mentioned! The letter is almost completely devoid of references to any particular members of the Ephesian community. This is hard to understand if Paul actually wrote the letter to a community within which he had lived for more than two years.

While Paul provides no answers to these questions, his letters to the Galatians and Ephesians continue to offer much more important insight into questions believers have asked through the ages: Do I matter? Is there a meaning and purpose to the universe? Does God really love me? In profound and practical ways, Paul’s answer to such questions as these is always a resounding, “Yes!”  GWT