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The Letters to Philemon, the Colossians, and the Ephesians: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary on the Captivity Epistles is unavailable, but you can change that!

This volume completes Ben Witherington’s contributions to the set of Eerdmans socio-rhetorical commentaries on the New Testament. In addition to the usual features of these commentaries, Witherington offers an innovative way of looking at Colossians, Ephesians, and Philemon as interrelated documents written at different levels of moral discourse. In Philemon we see Paul using moral discourse in...

some years. All this is because the document is not addressed to some particular audience and because the author does not know many of the recipients (cf. 1:15; 3:2; 4:21). Ephesians seems to be addressed to a whole group of Christians in a particular area—namely Asia.8 We have no other such Pauline document. What of the apparent reference to Ephesus in 1:1? The words “in Ephesus” are absent from some of our most important early witnesses (P46, א*, B*, 424, 1739, Origen, and manuscripts mentioned
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