Assuming therefore that the "Epistle to the Ephesians" is the epistle which Paul wrote to the Laodiceans, various questions arise, such as, Why did he write to the church there? What was there in the state of the church in Laodicea to call for an epistle from him? Was there any heresy there, like the false teaching which existed in the neighboring church in Colosse?
The answer to such questions is that though we do not possess much information, yet these churches in the province of Asia had many things in common. They had originated at the same time, during the two whole years of Paul's residence in Ephesus. They were composed of men of the same races, and speaking the same languages. They were subject to the same influences of doctrinal error. The errors into which any one church fell could not fail to affect the others also. These churches were permeated to a large extent by the same ideas, derived both from the current philosophy and from their ancestral heathen religions. They would, therefore, one and all, require the same apostolic instruction and exhortation. This epistle, accordingly, bears a close resemblance to the Epistle to the Colossians, just for the reason that the circumstances of the church in Laodicea were similar to those of the church in Colosse; and also, that the thoughts which filled Paul's heart as he wrote to Colosse were adapted, in the first place, to counteract the false teaching in Colosse, but they are also the foundation of all Christian experience, and the very life of all Christian truth and doctrine. These are the great thoughts of Christ the Creator of all things, Christ the Upholder of all things, Christ the Reconciler of all things. Such thoughts filling Paul's heart would naturally find expression in language bearing a close resemblance to that in which he had just written to Colosse.
It is no more astonishing that Paul should have written to Laodicea, than that he also wrote to Colosse, which was probably the least important of all the cities and churches mentioned in the apostle's work and career. Neither is it any more to be wondered at that he should have written so profound an epistle as that to "the Ephesians," than that he should also have given directions that it be sent on to Colosse and read there; for this reason, that the exposition of Christ's great love to the church and of His giving Himself for it--the doctrine of the grace of God--is the very corrective required by the errors of the false teachers at Colosse, and is also the groundwork of Christian truth and experience for all agesú
NOTE: A very remarkable circumstance in regard to the apocryphal Epistle to the Laodiceans is mentioned by Nestle in the preface to his edition of the Latin New Testament, published in Stuttgart in 1906. He writes that "the Epistle to the Laodiceans was for a thousand years part of very many Latin Bibles, and obtained a place in pre-Lutheran German Bibles, together with Jerome's Epistle to Damasus."
John Rutherfurd