As historians, we must not set up the artificial standards of contemporary moralizing and then construct a “Paul” to fit. Fashions come and go in the scholarly world. The fashion for rejecting Ephesians and Colossians—or perhaps we should say for helping the Protestant Paul to keep his distance from Judaism, on the one hand, and from Catholicism, on the other—has had a long run for its money. Because it appears “critical,” many are frightened to challenge it for fear of appearing “uncritical.” Once we place the letters in Ephesus, where I think they belong, these problems begin to look as
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