The pericope boundary in Ephesians 5:18–24: Discourse markers favor the break being at Verse 22

Abstract

Since the proliferation of scholarly works examining Ephesians 5 through the lens of modern gender debates, the preferred segmentation of the text in many articles, commentaries, Bible translations, and Greek editions of the New Testament has shifted. Verse 21, “submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ,” is now commonly grouped with verses 22–24 instead of with verses 18–20. Scholars argue that verse 21, which focuses on human-to-human relationships, marks a sharp topical break from verses 18–20, which deal with human-to- divine relationships, but verse 21 fits thematically with verses 22–24. By contrast, we argue that linguistic considerations make it more natural to keep verse 21 with verses 18–20 and start a new subsection in verse 22. Our approach focuses on discourse markers that indicate coherence and discontinuity in the Greek text, most notably Levinsohn’s (2000) concept of a point of departure as the primary marker of discontinuity and Baugh’s (2015) notion of the distinction between a grammatical and a periodic sentence in Greek discourse. Whereas modern readers tend to dichotomize vertical and horizontal relationships, the author of Ephesians structured the text to position both giving thanks to God and submitting to one another as parallel results of being filled with the Spirit. We do violence to his train of thought when we impose modern categorizations of the world and contemporary gender concerns upon a first-century text.