Praising the Glory of God in Christ (Eph 1:3-14)

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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]

Workflow Recommendation

You will immediately note that this section does not follow the normal TBWM flow. That’s because this TBWM introduces what may be your first real exposure to truly long Greek sentences. In order to get the most from this lesson, I am going to deviate from the normal weekly publishing cadence for new lessons, and give you two weeks for this one. I recommend the following sequence of steps:

1. read the next section “Before you commence,” which will give you guidance on how to read long Greek sentences;
2. read the whole passage in your Greek New Testament;
3. work through the passage trying to translate it yourself;
4. prepare your own grammatical diagram or come back and study the one here, and then adjust your translation if need be; and
5. finally, read the rest of the lesson.

If you get stuck, don’t fret. Read my translation, study the grammatical diagram, and review the lesson. Then try again. You’ll have more practice as the book of Ephesians unfolds.

Before you commence: A note on reading long sentences

Up until now, most sentences you may have confronted did not extend beyond a single verse, maybe two. This passage spans 12 verses, and is but one single sentence—205 words in the Textus Receptus.¹ Do not be intimidated. Let me give you some guideposts that will help you read lengthy Greek sentences. I am devoting extra time on this because if you learn to read Ephesians 1:3–14 well, you will have acquired a skill that will help you throughout the rest of Ephesians, much of Paul, and many other portions of the New Testament.

It may feel challenging at first to translate sentences that extend multiple verses for a number of reasons. First, long sentences develop gradually and sometimes delay resolution of their main ideas until deep in the sentence. When you have a verse that starts and finishes a thought, it’s easier to read because you can hold the whole sentence in your mind, and you can identify right away what the sentence is about. Longer sentences are challenging because the thought unfolds over an extended space. 

That means you have to allow your understanding of the sentence to develop progressively.  What you think Paul is saying in verse 4 may need to be adjusted once you reach verse 7, verse 10, or verse 14.  The long-sentence is not challenging because the words suddenly become harder or change meaning somehow as you read, but rather the message itself may begin to unfold differently from what you expected.^⁠

Second, it’s hard to know at first whether a portion of the text you are reading is a sentence, a fragment of a sentence, or a non-sentence. This is where the remarkable verse and chapter numbering tool we have does us a disservice. Chapters and verses are navigational aids—nothing more. You know this already: the original authors did not include chapters and verses. Chapter and verse numbering are editorial annotations that enable modern readers to quickly navigate to scripture passages, compare passages, and otherwise orient themselves.

The problem is our English minds have been trained to see verses as discrete nuggets. We think in terms of chapter-and-verse addresses. It’s surprising to see sentences extend past verse boundaries—even though in our heads we already know that a verse does not necessarily equal complete thought.

Additionally, the way we practice reading Greek from elementary Greek onward is by reading concise discourse units. We do not always have to think in terms of complete sentences. The goal is merely to translate the words in front of our eyes as a syntactical exercise. The goal is not reading.

Now that you are reading, you need to apply a different skill set. You need to understand what a sentence is, and how to know if what you are reading is one, or part of one, or something else. Let me give you a few grammar book rules, just to orient you.

Like English, a Greek sentence expresses a thought, and the sentence can be complete or incomplete.² Simple sentences have a subject and predicate (Jesus wept). Compound sentences are two or more simple sentences joined by a coordinating conjunction (the disciples walked, and they entered Decapolis). Complex sentences have a main sentence and one or more clauses that would be complete sentences on their own, except that they are subordinated to the main sentence (whenever Jesus saw someone sick, he healed them).

These rules enable us to develop guideposts for you when reading what might turn out to be a long sentence. Here are questions you can ask yourself as you read a portion of text that invokes these rules:

• Is this a sentence at all? You will usually know when you have encountered one of these non-sentences.
• If it is a sentence, have you reached the central thought—the “spine”?
• If you have not reached the spine, are you reading a dependent structure (e.g., a dependent clause, a participial, an infinitive construction, or a prepositional phrase)?
• Once you arrive at the spine, has the author (Paul in our case) resolved the central thought, or is he still building dependency? Answering this may require you to look ahead to the next verse.
• If the phrases, clauses, participles, and prepositional expressions are still hanging from the same central thought, the sentence remains alive.

If you can focus on those questions, then you’ll know right away whether you are in the midst of a short (perhaps verse-length) sentence or whether the sentence will span at least another verse.

When you find yourself in the midst of a long—or very long!—sentence, work through it piece by piece. When you reach the end, look back, identify the spine, and analyze the subordinate clauses to determine how they interrelate to the spine. Adjust your translation as needed to reflect the sentence as a whole. This is why diagramming sentences matters. Diagrams help you see the spine of the sentence and then observe how the subordinate parts attach to it. 

Text and Translation

Graphical Grammar

Weighty Words

• ἀνακεφαλαιώσασθαι – aor mid inf. ▶ ἀνακεφαλαιόω: sum up, recapitulate, bring together. It’s only used twice in the New Testament, here and in Romans 13:9.
• ἐκληρώθημεν – 1st pl. aor. pas. indic. ▶ κληρόω: appoint by lot, obtain by lot, and sometimes simply to receive. See “your turn” for a question on this.

Syntax Sense

If you have taken a shot at diagramming and translating this passage before getting here, you probably have a lot of thoughts about it already. Eph 1:3-14 is many things, among them, an excellent case study in how Greek discourse holds together over an extended span without losing its structural integrity.

As I discussed in the note on reading long sentences, this sentence can feel overwhelming because it is so long. Yet it is not a loose collection of ideas. Every clause has a place, every transition has a purpose, and the sentence unfolds with remarkable coherence. Understanding that architecture is one of the great rewards of lingering over the Greek text. For example, you surely noted the extensive use of participials, relative clause chaining, and prepositional framing. But how do those things reveal the architecture of the passage and how does the architecture reveal the meaning that Paul was trying to convey?

One of the joys of careful reading is that understanding often emerges rather than arriving all at once. Let’s examine it.

We may begin by asking small questions: Why this participle? Why this relative clause? Why doesn’t the sentence seem to end? As those questions accumulate, larger patterns begin to appear. The text gradually reveals its own architecture. What first looked like a long sentence becomes a carefully constructed unfolding of a single central idea.

What is the main spine and the passage’s structure?

Despite its length, there are surprisingly few candidates for the main spine. In fact, the sentence largely tells us where to begin. What lies beyond the main spine, we’ll get to shortly.

As you probably noticed, pretty much every finite verb in the passage does not stand alone but is embedded in a participial clause. Only “Εὐλογητὸς ὁ Θεὸς καὶ πατὴρ τοῦ Κυρίου ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ” stands outside a dependent clause. But there is not even a finite verb here, or is there? Here, the copula—εἰμί—is implied. But what form of εἰμί? There are a few candidates, optative, imperative, or indicative.^⁠3  My translation opted for the indicative, which seems the most probable. This appears to be a doxology, a passage praising God. In such a case the mood of assertion, the indicative, seems the logical choice.

What of the remainder of this passage?  

Once you identify the main spine, you can examine how each subsequent clause modifies the main statement.^4⁠ The remainder of the passage is an exquisite unfolding of why the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is blessed.

Much of the sentence’s forward movement unfolds through a succession of verbal centers: εὐλογήσας (having blessed), ἐξελέξατο (He chose), προορίσας (having foreordained), and γνωρίσας (having made known). Notice that these verbs do not all occupy the same grammatical level. Rather, Paul repeatedly develops one verbal idea, expands it through dependent material, and then launches another. The result is not a simple chain, but a series of nested expansions that unfolds another aspect of the opening blessing, so that what first appears to be a simple doxology gradually reveals the fullness of God’s saving work.

Paul moves from one facet to the next by chaining relative clauses, particularly favoring the prepositional phrase ἐν ᾧ (in whom/which) and ἧς (which) in this passage. You can observe this with ἐν ᾧ ἔχομεν (v. 7), ἧς ἐπερίσσευσεν (v. 8), ἐν ᾧ καὶ ἐκληρώθημεν (v. 11), ἐν ᾧ καὶ ὑμεῖς (v. 13). Each clause is like a launchpad for the next, creating this cascade.

Near the center of this unfolding, Paul widens the scope dramatically with ἀνακεφαλαιώσασθαι τὰ πάντα ἐν τῷ Χριστῷ—to unite all things in Christ. What has repeatedly concerned God’s work toward “us” and “you” suddenly expands to “all things,” in heaven and on earth, before narrowing again to our place in that purpose. Watch this movement carefully in the diagram.

As you work through the diagram, notice also how persistently Paul uses ἐν. Its local function varies, but its repetition—particularly ἐν Χριστῷ, ἐν αὐτῷ, and ἐν ᾧ—helps give the passage its remarkable cohesion.

Finally, the passage is framed by a repeating goal: εἰς ἔπαινον τῆς δόξης αὐτοῦ (to the praise of His glory), which appears in verse 6, verse 12, and verse 14. This framing divides this long sentence into three distinct “stanzas” or movements, the meaning of which I will leave to the Your Turn for you to grapple with.

Demystifying the Discourse

The purpose of this analysis is to make the sentence’s remarkable coherence easier to see, not to make it seem more complicated. This is not a catalogue of disconnected blessings. It is a single, sustained doxology. As you read, resist the temptation to chop it into independent propositions. Instead, watch how each blessing unfolds naturally from the previous one until the sentence arrives at praise.

Learning to see that coherence begins with surprisingly small observations. Those small questions are not ends in themselves. As they accumulate, individual observations begin to cohere into a unified picture, and the larger architecture of the passage becomes visible.

The goal of this kind of analysis is not to impose an architecture on the text, but to recognize the architecture already present.

Time in Text

Notice what happened as we spent time with this sentence. None of these observations changed what Paul teaches. Election, redemption, adoption, forgiveness, inheritance, and the sealing of the Spirit were all plainly present from the beginning. What changed was our perception of how Paul communicates those truths. Careful reading often works this way. It does not usually uncover new doctrines; rather, it uncovers the craftsmanship through which those doctrines are presented. Like listening to a familiar symphony with newly trained ears, you do not hear a different symphony—you hear more of the same symphony.

Your turn!

Some of this you may have done if you undertook to follow the workflow recommendation. If not, try them now.

• Read the whole passage in your Greek New Testament.
• Work through the passage trying to translate it yourself.
• We translate ἐκληρώθημεν with the active “we have obtained an inheritance,” but Paul used a passive form of κληρόω. Why? What are the possible ways of understanding the passive here, and which best explains Paul’s meaning? You’ll have to go beyond the text for the answer to this one.
• Prepare your own grammatical diagram or come back and study the one here, and then adjust your translation if need be.
• Analyze what Paul means by the three repeating goals appearing in verse 6, verse 12, and verse 14 (εἰς ἔπαινον τῆς δόξης αὐτοῦ (to the praise of His glory)). Are there alternative interpretative options? If so, are they preferable to the understanding that you reached? Defend your answer using semantics, grammar, discourse analysis, or a combination of all of them.

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Return to TBWM – Ephesians

See complete translation of Ephesians here.

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1. Long sentences seem unmanageable because we are taught to think in verses. Remember, our own language has produced some remarkably long sentences, many of which you read and comprehend without even thinking about it. Greek reading need not be any different.
   
   For some serious monsters, Jonathan Coe’s The Rotter’s Club, may have the record with a 13,955 word sentence. A notable runner-up is James Joyce’s 4,391 word sentence in Ulysses.
   
   For an English sentence the same length as Eph 1:3-14, let’s take a look at Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses:
   
   “That night he dreamt of horses on a high plain where the spring rains had brought up the grass and the wildflowers out of the ground and the flowers ran all blue and yellow far as the eye could see and in the dream he was among the horses running and in the dream he himself could run with the horses and they coursed the young mares and fillies over the plain where their rich bay and their chestnut colors shone in the sun and the young colts ran with their dams and trampled down the flowers in a haze of pollen that hung in the sun like powdered gold and they ran he and the horses out along the high mesas where the ground resounded under their running hooves and they flowed and changed and ran and their manes and tails blew off them like spume and there was nothing else at all in that high world and they moved all of them in a resonance that was like a music among them and they were none of them afraid horse nor colt nor mare and they ran in that resonance which is the world itself and which cannot be spoken but only praised.” ↩︎
2. An incomplete sentence is not necessarily an example of poor grammar. There are lots of types of incomplete sentences: interjections, asservations, vocatives, greetings in letters, and the like. These incomplete sentences are perfectly proper grammatical constructions. ↩︎
3. “εἰμί is implied—either an optative (εἴη, ‘may God be blessed’), impv. (ἔστω, ‘let God be blessed’), or more probably, an indic. (ἔστιν, ‘blessed is God’ [cf. Rom 1:25] or εἶ, ‘blessed are you, God’; R 396).”  Benjamin L. Merkle, Ephesians, ed. Andreas J. Köstenberger and Robert W. Yarbrough, Exegetical Guide to the Greek New Testament (B&H Academic, 2016), 18. ↩︎
4. The main statement may not always be the initial statement, even though it is here. ↩︎