Many of us, I would assume, have never doubted whether we should believe that the writers to our beloved New Testament epistles are who they claim to be. The very fact that Paul begins all of his letters with his name [along with the names of his occasional co-authors] is good enough for us. We take it as an article of faith. However, as is often the case in the world of higher-critical scholarship, disputes concerning Paul's actual authorship abound. None more so than Ephesians.
The first reason why many have doubted that Paul really wrote Ephesians is that the letter is so different from the rest of his other letters. There is, for example, unique vocabulary and phrases that Paul doesn't employ elsewhere. Not only that, there is a perceived emphasis in theology that many scholars say is different, even contradictory to the theological issues that are taught in the rest of Paul's known corpus. The author to the Ephesians seems too focused upon the institutional church, in their opinion, to really be the apostle Paul, who was more focused upon an individual's personal religious experience and the free association of like-minded believers.
Aside from a faulty theology of the church, this position assumes that the apostle Paul was incapable of having a wide-ranging vocabulary and that He would never use different (yet similar) words or phrases to convey the same concepts. Likewise, this position also entails that Paul's theology was one-dimensional, and that he could not apply different theological points to different issues that confronted the various churches whom he was writing. Do these men forget Paul's vast education and intellect?
The second reason why many doubt Pauline authorship of Ephesians is that the book is too much like Paul. You may be asking at this point: "How can Ephesians be not like Paul and too much like Paul at the same time?" Well, as you may already have guessed, the book of Ephesians is remarkably similar to the book of Colossians; they are traditionally known as "sister epistles." Rather than explain their similarity by assuming that they are from the same author, many scholars suggest that one is a copy of another. Typically, therefore, Ephesians is explained away as a product of a pseudonymous author who is borrowing from another one of Paul's works.
What we find in Ephesians, however, is not a cut-and-paste product that reeks of pure plagarism, but a brilliant treatise that teaches similar ideas, while applying them in different ways. Certainly, this is Paul's prerogative and to suggest somehow that Paul would not or could not do this is the height of arrogance in my opinion. To conclude, I appreciate this quote taken from Carson, Moo, and Morris' Introduction to the New Testament: “Which is more likely – that an imitator of Paul in the 1st century composed a writing 90 to 95% in accordance with Paul’s style or that Paul himself wrote a letter diverging 5 to 10% from his usual style?”
Finally, many scholars doubt Paul's authorship of Ephesians because the book is not friendly enough. What I mean is that there are relatively few personal greetings at the end (or anywhere else, for that matter) of the letter. We know that Paul spent a significant amount of time living in Ephesus, over two years, in fact (Acts 19:10). One would expect therefore, a lengthy list of personal greetings like those found elsewhere in his writings (cf. Romans 16, and keep in mind that Paul hadn't even been to Rome!). Is this not a sign of forgery?
I would first respond to this by saying that no one can be completely sure why Paul wrote the way he did, but to automatically assume that it can't be him is a big mental leap for me. What we do know is that Paul was sending the letter to the Ephesians by a man named Tychicus, who was to report on all of Paul's exploits and, we would assume, to also give personal greetings. Perhaps Paul wanted to save space on the parchment he was writing on, who knows? Another explanation that is given is that Ephesians was meant to be a circular letter, that is one that was not intended for any particular city, but rather, was to be copied and sent around from church to church in Asia Minor. Certainly, if this was the case, we would not expect to see any personal greetings. To bolster this argument, there is some textual evidence that we have that proponents point to. In some of our really good manuscripts, the words "in Ephesus" in 1:1 are not there. Perhaps these are copies of this apparent circular letter that did not originate from the Ephesian's copy of the letter. While this theory may or may not be true, one thing is sure, Paul was certainly not rude to his audience and his tone of writing was certainly appropriate to the occasion.
