Ekklēsia and Civic discourse in the Rhetoric of Ephesians

Abstract

In Ephesians scholarship, the term ekklēsia typically has been interpreted within a Septuagintal frame. However, given that Ephesians was written by a Greek-speaking Jewish Christian, this article explores whether Ephesians’ use of ekklēsia might also incorporate Hellenistic connotations. By drawing upon the writings of Philo, Josephus, and Dio Chrysostom as background, this article demonstrates that ekklēsia and related terms are used in Ephesians in a manner reflective of contemporaneous Hellenistic civic discourse. Such discourse, used in a blended fashion with Septuagintal meanings of ekklēsia, is shown to support Ephesians’ paraenetic strategy of relativizing the audience’s Gentile identity to a new citizenship in Christ’s ekklēsia grounded in Israel’s history.