Commentary on Ephesians

Contents

Only the comment on Eph 5:22-33 (wives, husbands, and Gen 2:24) is published.

1. 3.5.22Jerome explains the wife's subjection to her husband by the image of Christ and the church, warns that a union not made according to Christ's precepts is adultery rather than marriage, and gives an allegorical reading of body and mind.
2. 3.5.24Jerome urges that marriage modelled on Christ and the church be holy and free of bodily passion, setting the Ephesians' higher teaching above the concession of marital relations given to the Corinthians.
3. 3.5.25Jerome explains the holy love Paul enjoins on husbands, answers heretics who reject marriage, urges abstinence during pregnancy, and gives a tropological reading of soul and body.
4. 3.5.28Jerome explains that since husband and wife are one flesh, a husband must care for his wife as for his own body, and gives a literal and a tropological reading.
5. 3.5.29Jerome explains that husbands must provide for their wives, and allegorically that the soul must nourish the body with the sacraments toward the angelic life of the resurrection.
6. 3.5.30Jerome explains that believers are members of Christ's body according to his assumed humanity, not his divinity, or as members of the church.
7. 3.5.31Jerome notes how Paul quotes Gen 2:24 freely, warns against seeking such quotations in the apocrypha, and explains the union of Adam and Eve as a figure of Christ and the church, against Marcion.
8. 3.5.32Jerome holds that only Gen 2:24, not the whole story of Adam and Eve, is a prophecy of Christ and the church, and reports Gregory of Nazianzus's view of Paul's humility in interpreting it.
9. 3.5.33Jerome explains that “love your wife as yourself” expresses confirmation, not mere likeness, and that the wife's “fear” of her husband is to be understood as reverence.