What is striking in this literature is the way in which the idea that the end is at hand, so prominent in Paul’s letters, has faded from view. The author of Ephesians is prepared to talk about ‘the coming ages’, which seems to mean a long time on this earth.21 Nowhere is this shift more perceptible than in one feature of these documents, also to be found in the first of the two epistles attributed to Peter, which also takes many cues from Ephesians: sets of rules for conducting a human household, which in the sixteenth century Martin Luther styled Haustafeln, ‘tables of household duties’.
