We recently featured S. M. Baugh’s new Ephesians commentary, suggesting it may be just the right replacement for O’Brien’s iconic commentary, now out of print. We were able to catch up with Dr. Baugh and ask him a few questions, especially about his experience with the Greek of Ephesians.
S. M. Baugh
First, thank you very much for this opportunity. It’s an honor to chat with you and your readers. The actual writing of the commentary took five years, and it sometimes was very trying work of ten to twelve-hour days toward the end. When I finished I thought to myself that this was the very best I could do (despite its many flaws).
Exegetical Tools
Well it certainly turned out well and I look forward to using it for years to come.
One of the first things I noticed about your commentary is that you divide the text into cola. Can you explain for our audience what cola are, and what the advantages are of using cola instead of our traditional notion of sentence?
Baugh
This started with Eph 1:3-14. Most commentators notice this is one “sentence” in Greek and some treat it as if Paul is being undisciplined and too wordy here. My notion was to ask how the original audience would have heard the text.
It turns out that ancient Greeks do not think in terms of sentences but in terms of three divisions of their compositions: the comma (=phrase); the colon (=clause); the period (= a grouping of two to four or sometimes more cola). A “period” may or may not complete the “sense” or “idea” which is how Greeks describe what we call a “sentence” (there is no Greek word corresponding exactly to our “sentence”). So, I tried to present the text as an ancient Greek would.
In my more recent work on Hebrews I’ve refined and expanded on this approach. Hebrews is more “literary” than Ephesians, so I think it is the one work in the New Testament to read for this ways of reading the text. One central issue here, which I have not elaborated (yet), is that the composition of a work into various types of cola and periods (e.g., bicolon, tricolon, isocolon, “falling” or “rising” groupings of cola and especially use of occasional rounded periods) is a main feature of an author’s style.
When scholars evaluate the style of Ephesians as not Pauline, they miss these vital, ancient Greek characteristics of style. I have noticed, for example, many stylistic similarities between Ephesians and Romans, which substantiates Pauline authorship of Ephesians further. To read ancient Greek as sentences and paragraphs is to re-shape the text into a modern form and miss its original compositional characteristics.
ET
There’s definitely still a raging debate about Ephesians’ authorship, so maybe there’s some room there for a couple articles.
Your commentary strikes a good balance of working with the text itself and interacting with secondary literature. Given that detailed study, did your exegetical work teach you many new things about the Greek language, or did your Greek improve in certain ways through the process?
Baugh
Thank you very much! Well, yes, oddly enough (I started Greek in 1977). I did learn a lot of Greek–or better, I refined aspects of my Greek I think. This was primarily because I was reading as much as I could outside the New Testament in Greek that would help with understanding Ephesians better. I had already read all the published Greek inscriptions from Ephesus during my Ph.D. studies on Ephesus and Paul in an ancient history program (completed in 1990), and my second degree is in classics (completed in 1982), and I’ve taught Greek classes on the Septuagint and on the apostolic fathers, so I’ve read a lot of Greek over the years.
What happened though, is that things I’d heard about earlier (e.g., “tricolon crescendo” in Cicero) were cemented into my understanding better. I’ve read Ephesians many times over the years (including for notes in the ESV Study Bible), so the basic grammar was familiar, but now I had to nail things down and make decisions on certain of its features and statements.
ET
You argue that the main theme in Ephesians is “unity in the inaugurated new creation” and it seems to me you have this biblical theological focus throughout the commentary. For you, what are some of the major passages in Ephesians that have significant biblical theological connections with the OT?
Baugh
The Bible displays what we can call “organic development.” This means that it is one story from Genesis to Revelation that is unified but develops as redemptive history develops. It seems to me that any treatment of a biblical book needs to account for this fundamental character of Scripture and place your book in the context of where it stands in the development of redemptive revelation.
Paul has many statements that form the basis of this understanding of Scripture. For example, take Eph 2:12 and his idea of “the covenants of promise.” This phrase implies that there is one gospel promise running throughout God’s redemptive covenants. This is what we in Reformed theology call the covenant of grace with warrant for such theological terms from Eph 2:12 and elsewhere.
ET
Now, a grammatical question. Recently, Craig Blomberg wrote an extensive review of Benjamin Merkle’s EGGNT volume on Ephesians. Merkle sees several attributed (not attributive) genitives, especially in Ephesians 1, but Blomberg questions whether the category is even legitimate. Since you’ve worked through all the interesting genitives and genitive chains in Ephesians, what’s your opinion on the attributed genitive and do you think some appear in Ephesians?
Baugh
With respect I have to differ with Prof. Blomberg here. He says that Dan Wallace invented this category for the genitive, but this is not true. The ancient Greeks called this “antiptosis” (ἀντίπτωσις, “inversion”; see the commentary p. 249 n. 92).
I don’t recall seeing genitives of this sort in Ephesians, but it is a legitimate interpretation of some genitive phrases elsewhere. (My term in an earlier sketch of Greek grammar is the “reversed adjectival” genitive–Ben Merkle may have read this when he was my Greek student many years ago.) In the New Testament, the relatively high frequency of the adjectival genitive is due to Hebrew influence (via the Septuagint); e.g., “mountain of his holiness” (=adjectival, “his holy mountain”). It is not much difference to have the first substantive modify the second (“attributed”).
In my opinion, the genitive is not a technical thing. Grammarians create grammatical terms and categories, but this is simply a way of describing common meanings of this very flexible part of speech. At the end of the day, the genitive simply attaches a substantive to another substantive and calls for the reader/hearer to figure out the inter-relation from the meaning of the terms and other contextual features. In English, a prepositional phrase with “of” has pretty much the same range of inter-relations. For example: “basket of beans” (=content), “candlestick of gold” (=material), “depth of soil” (=attributed, “deep soil”), etc.
ET
After working this long exegetically in Ephesians, what has been most impactful on your spiritual life?
Baugh
Frankly, it was a great, most edifying experience. Many times I had to stop work and just thank the Lord for the truths I was handling. I’m deeply thankful to the Lord for the time in this beautiful book!
ET
This commentary was well done. What else can we look for you to put out there in the next 5-10 years?
Baugh
It was so much fun to do Ephesians that I’m now doing groundwork for the other book I’ve worked on off and on for many decades: Hebrews.
ET
Our great thanks to Dr. Baugh for entertaining our questions today with some insightful answers on the Greek and authorship of Ephesians. We’ll look forward to his Hebrews commentary; while you wait for it, check out our Hebrews Greek Reading Videos by Dr. Amy Peeler.
You can order Dr. Baugh’s Ephesians commentary on Amazon.
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