Ephesians 3:15

of whom … is named Lit., "out of Whom, &c." The derivationof the "name" is from His Fatherhood.

the whole family Gr., patria. It is difficult to preserve in English the point of the Gr. here. "Father" and "family" have no verbal kinship, while patêrand patriahave. "The whole fatherhood," or "every fatherhood," would scarcely convey a clear idea.

An interesting question of interpretation arises here. The Revisers render "every family," or (margin) "every fatherhood" ;and in this they have the concurrence of many commentators, modern and ancient. Indeed, there could be no doubt of their rendering were the usages of Greek in the N. T. and in the classics the same; the absence here of the article before patriawould be decisive in Xenophon, for example. But the law of the Gr. article is in some respects less precise in the N. T., as was observed on Ephesians 2:21 (where see note); and we are at liberty here, as there, though of course with caution, to take the context into account, before surrendering the A. V.

The alternatives then are, (1) to understand the Apostle to diverge to the thought that God's spiritual Fatherhood is the Archetype of all family unions, in earth and heaven; the source from which every other "father" draws his "name," his title and idea; (2) to understand the Apostle to dwell on the thought of the oneness of the family union of saints and angels under the Eternal Father of Spirits Who gives "name," designation as His children, to the whole company.

We feel the difficulty of the question. And we are willing to own that there maybe communities in the heavenly world to which the idea of family may attach. But if so this is the solitary hint of it in Scripture. And meanwhile the context as a whole seems to us to plead strongly for the idea of oneness as against particularity. And the phrase "in heaven and earth," compared with Ephesians 1:10 (where carefully observe the connexion), suggests to us far rather the idea of the Great Family "gathered up" in Christ than the extraneous and new idea of many families, connected or not connected with Him. We plead accordingly for the A. V.

And we thus see presented in the passage the great truth, so characteristic of the whole Epistle the spiritual oneness of the holy Community.

It is worth observing that the word "family" was used by the Rabbis in a sense somewhat akin to the sense (thus explained) of this passage. With them "the upper family" and "the lower family" meant, respectively, the Angels and Israel. Wetstein here quotes a Rabbinic comment on Jeremiah 30:6: "All faces;even the faces of the upper and lower family; of the angels and of Israel." And again; "God does nothing without counsel taken with His upper family." This is not a perfect parallel here, where, as we take it, the idea is strictly of one united brotherhood; but it is near enough to have had, possibly, a share in moulding the phrase here. The suggestion to translate the Greek, "the whole family in heaven, and that on earth," oversteps, we think, the limits of the grammar.