Creating a People for Good Works (Eph 2:1-10)

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[Reading Paul Through TBWM] • [1:1-2] • [1:3-14] • [1:15-23]

[2:1-10] • [2:11-22] • [3:1-13] • [3:14-21] • [4:1-16] • [4:17-32]

[5:1-14] • [5:15-21] • [5:22-33] • [6:1-9] • [6:10-20] • [6:21-24]

[Reading Paul Forward]

Text and Translation

Graphical Grammar

Weighty Words

There are lots of great words to choose from in this passage, but let’s look at three that are doing especially heavy lifting. Three verbs, one repeated prefix. Paul describes God’s action with three coordinated συν- compound words:

• συνεζωοποίησε(ν) – 3rd sing. aor. act. indic. ▶ συζωοποιέω: “to make alive together”;
• συνεκάθισε(ν) – 3rd sing. aor. act. indic. ▶ συγκαθίζω: “to seat together;” and
• συνήγειρε(ν) – 3rd sing. aor. act. indic. ▶ συνεγείρω: “to raise up together.”

Note that the συν- prefix isn’t decorative. The “together” component belongs to all three actions, and coupled with τῷ Χριστῷ / ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ tells us with whom this shared action is conceived.

Syntax Sense

This is not quite as difficult a passage to translate as Chapter 1 verses 3-14, but it is challenging for reasons that we’ll discuss in Demystifying the Discourse. For now, here are three things to consider that may help your translation work.

In verse 1, we have the suspended ὑμᾶς ὄντας construction. The circumstantial participle ὄντας is difficult to discern. Is it concessive (although), is it temporal (when), is it something else? It’s hard to determine for two reasons. First, it does not have a clean local relationship because the main verb of the sentence does not appear until verse 5. Paul launches with ὑμᾶς ὄντας and then develops the entire first side of the contrast. Second, there is a shift that happens between ὑμᾶς ὄντας and the main verb in verse 5. Can you spot it? We’ll be talking about it more later, so I’ll leave this open for now.

Because of that ambiguity—and here I use the term ambiguity loosely (the phrase isn’t so ambiguous that it cannot be translated or comprehended clearly), there is no consensus among English translations on how to render it. Participles are flexible and may carry several circumstantial nuances; context can also establish a temporal relationship to the controlling verb. This is why English translations can render the phrase here differently (e.g., and you were dead, although you were dead, when you were dead) and the clause remains understandable.

Let’s turn our attention to verse 2’s “κατὰ τὸν ἄρχοντα τῆς ἐξουσίας τοῦ ἀέρος, τοῦ πνεύματος τοῦ νῦν ἐνεργοῦντος ἐν τοῖς υἱοῖς τῆς ἀπειθείας.” This is another clause we’ll talk about later. For now, note the stacked genitives. Do you observe any patterns among them? The question for you as you translate is what relationships do these genitives have to one another and to ἄρχοντα?

Finally, take a look at two verbs: ἐνδείξηται and ἐπερχομένοις. You recall from elementary Greek that the middle voice shows that the subject is actively involved in the action and is also affected by it. But that doesn’t mean that translators slavishly add himself, herself, itself, or the like to a middle-voice verb’s gloss. The middle voice of ἐνδείξηται doesn’t mean God “showed forth for Himself.” In this case it’s closer to an intensive: God, himself, showed. There is a subtlety to the translation here, and renderings like “demonstrate,” pick up that subtlety.

Our other middle voice verb is ἐπερχομένοις. But how should this be translated? This is one of those words that has no active form in certain moods. Historically, those words were taught as deponents. They were explained to be active voice in usage but only had a middle form. Some modern scholarship analyzes these words differently. Those scholars believe that these middle-voice only verbs never had an active form because, by nature they are middle voice. Take the word πορεύομαι, which means “I journey.” The nature of the action of that word is active—the person performing the action is journeying—but in doing that particular action the person is also acting on him or herself. Thus, by nature πορεύομαι lends itself to a middle voice.

Could where you come out on the issue of deponency affect your translation? Someone who subscribes to the deponency school might automatically translate the term with an active meaning in English. But the effect of middle voice verbs may be so subtle as to be imperceptible in English, since English doesn’t have a middle voice to begin with. Translating ἐπερχομένοις is one such situation. The best rendering in English is just “coming,” there is no extra middle voice emphasis to be added because the middle voice is a pragmatic choice here, not a theological one.

Demystifying the Discourse

Eph 2:1-10 is one of those passages where Paul’s literary flourish communicates deep truths very economically. This passage is two sentences: verses 1-9, and verse 10. Rather than stringing a series of sentences that assert various propositions, Paul uses Greek’s ability to fluidly use dependency to embed greater detail like a Russian matryoshka doll. A good diagram highlights this instantly.

Look at mine above. You see how from verses 1-3, Paul’s writing shifts ever to the right. Those verses all set up the contrast. You were dead to sins, you walked in those sins according to the way of the world, carrying out the desires of our flesh, and the like. The people in Ephesus lived under a dark, ominous cloud.

But then Paul gets to verse 4 and the Sun (Son!) pierces the dark: “ὁ δὲ Θεὸς,” but God. From there the whole architecture of the passage changes from nested dependency to punchy clauses describing what God did, and why.

Let’s zoom in on three particular features.

The delayed main verb. The main verb of the first sentence is συνεζωοποίησε, but it doesn’t arrive until verse 5. It’s the 88th word in the sentence! This is really important, Paul is setting up a big contrast and wants his readers to feel it. But that can make for difficult English. That’s likely why some translations, like the King James and New King James supply the verb right up in verse 1. “And you He made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins,” (NKJV). That’s a defensible translation choice, but it’s not the best choice because it deprives the reader of an important part of the message Paul was trying to communicate. It does not alter the meaning, but it alters the weight. Again, it’s a perfectly defensible translation choice. But it obscures this message.

It also obscures something else that is really subtle. Paul starts the sentence with καὶ ὑμᾶς ὄντας, then he nests in a great deal of detail, but when he resumes the main assertion of the sentence, he changes the subject to καὶ ὄντας ἡμᾶς. How did he do that and what, if anything does it mean? That’s plainly a Your Turn prompt, so I’ll leave it there for you to wrestle with.

Also, notice the word order. Paul began in v. 1 with ὑμᾶς ὄντας νεκρούς. When he returns to the construction in v. 5, he writes ὄντας ἡμᾶς νεκρούς. The reversal brings the repeated ὄντας…νεκρούς immediately back into view while the pronoun has changed from “you” to “us.” We should be cautious about assigning significance to flexible Greek word order, but the changed sequence certainly makes the resumption particularly easy to see.

Finally, the change over from ὑμᾶς ὄντας to ὄντας ἡμᾶς is so graceful, almost unnoticeable at first, that when I first translated this a year ago, I had in my mind that ὑμᾶς ὄντας was the subject of verse five. That didn’t affect my translation, but it affected how I saw the whole passage. I didn’t even discover it until diagramming the passage. 

The stacked genitives in verse 2 are particularly curious: τῆς ἐξουσίας τοῦ ἀέρος, τοῦ πνεύματος τοῦ νῦν ἐνεργοῦντος ἐν τοῖς υἱοῖς τῆς ἀπειθείας. You can spend a lot of time thinking about what they mean, and the grammar and syntax will only take you so far. The most helpful pieces that the grammar supplies are that all of these genitives supply further information about the Ruler (κατὰ τὸν ἄρχοντα) and that τοῦ νῦν ἐνεργοῦντος attributively describes τοῦ πνεύματος: it is the spirit that is now operating. I will not try to give anything more away here but save this for you in a Your Turn prompt. 

Phrases throughout the New Testament like  “the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh…” can remain a vaguely comprehensible theological blob. Readers viscerally feel approximately what Paul is talking about, and they keep reading. And that’s perfectly competent reading. But what if somebody stops you and asks, “exactly how do those expressions relate to one another? What is ‘the spirit’ doing there? What does ‘working’ modify/supplement? Why does this feel so dense?” That’s when the vagueness becomes visible. Working through constructions like this may not necessarily eliminate every ambiguity. But it will accomplish something arguably more valuable: turning undifferentiated vagueness into differentiated understanding.

Here is an interesting observation. Compare the rightward sprawl in this diagram to those in the previous two diagrams. In modern English writing, at least in technical English writing, the text is organized deductively. We write topic sentences, and then drill down to supporting sentences, which form a coherent whole. We write top down. Paul does a lot of “writing across.” He develops details by using dependency through participles and prepositional phrases. Rather than state a proposition and then unpack it, Paul can develop a proposition by extending it, so that its structure and meaning become progressively clearer as the reader moves through the sentence.

I’m not trying to elevate the diagram to more than it is—just a way to visualize a passage of text. Yet it is a feature that is particularly highlighted by this diagramming method. In this passage, Paul seems to get deeper going west to east, where modern English writers might do that going north to south. I don’t assign any theological or interpretive meaning to this, it’s just, to me, an interesting observation about the way Paul develops his message.

There is so much more to say about this passage, the sheer artistry Paul deployed in communicating his message, and the theological heights and depths it covers. But, alas, I’ll leave that to you to explore, and enjoy as you wrestle through Your Turn.

Your turn!

1. By design, the diagram above does not ‘tag’ all the grammatical features of this passage. Take a copy of my diagram or the one you made, and try to tag those features. Perhaps highlight the words that morphologically agree in a certain color, draw boxes and arrows with descriptions to label the grammatical relationships. If you’d prefer, just try to make a standard Reed-Kellogg diagram of the passage, which would accomplish the same objective.
2. What is the grammatical relationship among the stacked genitives in verse 2. Is there a pattern that helps you determine the relationship? Do the different possibilities of seeing the relationships here change the meaning of this cluster? How does it affect your translation? As you examine this issue, try to make “an ugly” translation that is wooden and over-explanatory to try to pull out the meaning you are seeing in your mind’s eye.
3. The ἵνα-clause in v. 7 follows the three coordinated verbs (this week’s Weighty Words): συνεζωοποίησε; συνήγειρε; and συνεκάθισεν. Does ἵνα ἐνδείξηται express the purpose of only the nearest verb, or of the coordinated series? What features of the Greek help you decide?
4. Paul writes ἐπὶ ἔργοις ἀγαθοῖς οἷς προητοίμασεν ὁ Θεός. What is the antecedent of οἷς? Once you identify it, then try to determine what role οἷς plays within its own relative clause, and what case might you therefore have expected?

Side Quest: τοῦτο

Ephesians 2:8 presents a particularly interesting interpretive problem involving τοῦτο, the neuter nominative singular of οὗτος. Wallace calls it “the most debated text in terms of the antecedent of the demonstrative pronoun, τοῦτο.” (Wallace, GGBB, 334.)

Wallace identifies four major interpretations of τοῦτο in Eph 2:8: “(1) ‘grace’ as antecedent, (2) ‘faith’ as antecedent, (3) the concept of a grace-by-faith salvation as antecedent, and (4) καὶ τοῦτο having an adverbial force with no antecedent (‘and especially’).” Ibid. He concludes: “The issues here are complex and cannot be solved by grammar alone.” Ibid.

Side Quest: Which of these interpretations—or another interpretation—do you find most persuasive? This question takes us beyond pure syntax and lexical meaning into exegesis, which is why this is a “side quest.” This prompt goes beyond the normal Your Turn prompts.

Examine the verse closely, consider other uses of the neuter demonstrative, and consult reference grammars or other appropriate sources. Your goal is not to write a commentary on τοῦτο, but to determine how far the grammar can take you, what additional evidence is needed, and which reading you ultimately find most persuasive.

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