I therefore agree with the several scholars who have insisted that Paul was imprisoned in Ephesus, and I suggest that this makes best sense of all the evidence—as well as providing a location from which he wrote not only his letter to Philemon but also the other Prison Letters, including Ephesians itself. That letter, as I shall suggest presently, is a circular written to churches in the area and is therefore couched in more general terms than normal. But it was also in Ephesus that Paul experienced what we might call the “Corinthian crisis.”
