On "The Early Christians in Ephesus from Paul to Ignatius" by Paul Trebilco ****

I was looking for a book about the Johannine cricle or about second-century Ephesus, and there really don't appear to be as many as I thought there would be. Trebilco's book is a huge tome, though, and was well worth time involved in getting through it, though it only goes up to the time of Ignatius.

Trebilco largely makes the argument that Ephesus housed several Christian groups and that certain groups were friendly toward one another, while others were beyond the pale. Pauline and Johannine circles, in other words, borrowed from each other, but Nicolatains and the like were not acceptable. These folks left the Johannine circle, forging their own docetist circle that were not acceptable to Ignatius.

The first small bit of the work looks at the social context, providing a short history of Ephesus, its religious and trade importance, and the Jewish community within it. Next, Trebilco turns to the accounts in Acts and in Paul's letters, finding Acts to be mostly trustworthy. He's less certain about what we can glean directly from Paul about Ephesus, as the Pauline imprisonment in Ephesus isn't perhaps as clear as might be desired. The letter to the Ephesians, furthermore, was likely not directly to the group--in fact, it may have actually been written in Ephesus. It bears, in early manuscripts, a blank to whom it is written, suggesting that it was an enciclical for sorts, sent out to various churches and that Ephesus was just a convenient name to attach to it in the end.

Next, Trebilco turns to the pastoral epistles, the Johannine epistles (and gospel), and Revelation. He takes the view that the pastorals were pseudonymously written by Paul by people from a Pauline group in Ephesus. The Johannine works, he believes, were written not by the apostle John but by John the Elder. The pastorals were written in the 80s, the letters from John in the 90s, so we're looking at two groups nearly contemporarily to each other. From this, Trebilco draws out various ideas about what the leadership practices and theological concerns were among the two groups.

Although one has to go along with Trebilco's ideas with regard to authorship and time of writing (which are fairly common among scholars) to glean what he does about the community(ies), the argument is well put out (if often redundant) such that his ideas are easy to follow. I didn't learn quite as much about Christianity in Ephesus as I would have liked, but what Trebilco shows is that after Acts, we really have little to go on other than theoretical leaps about where works derived and what those works represent about the people who wrote them and to whom they were written.