Five Words with Corinth

• Anchor Bible Dictionary — “Ephesians, Letter to the,” “Ephesus,” “Pseudepigraphy,” “Election,” “Adoption,” “Principalities and Powers.”
• Dictionary of Paul and His Letters (IVP) — “Ephesians, Letter to the,” “Body of Christ,” “Election and Predestination,” “Principalities and Powers,” “Holy Spirit.”
• NIDNTT / TDNT — ἐπουράνιος, ἀρραβών, υἱοθεσία, ἀνακεφαλαιόω, πλήρωμα, οἰκονομία.
• Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament (Beale & Carson) — on Ephesians 1:20–22 and the Psalm 110 / Psalm 8 pairing it shares with 1 Corinthians 15 and Hebrews 1–2.

Ephesians is a New Testament book. There is no Masoretic column, no Septuagint column, and no offset. The shelf states this everywhere, including where the answer is nothing, because a page that mentions numbering only when it is awkward teaches readers to assume agreement the rest of the time.

Both counts were taken from the files, not from a table. The ESV prints the same shape; no ESV Ephesians file is held here to count from, and that is stated rather than assumed.

The offset that does matter on this page is in the Psalter. Ephesians 1:20 and 1:22 stand close to two psalms, and the Septuagint numbers both of them one lower than an English Bible does: Septuagint Psalm 8:7 = English Psalm 8:6 and Septuagint Psalm 109:1 = English Psalm 110:1. A third psalm turns up in stage 4 by accident: Septuagint Psalm 17:10 = English Psalm 18:9. Every psalm cited on this page carries both numbers.

ἀρραβών is a commercial word. It is the part-payment that makes a contract binding — earnest money.

Genesis 38 is Judah and Tamar. Judah promises a goat; Tamar asks what he will leave as a pledge until he sends it, and takes his signet, his cord and his staff. In Genesis the word means exactly what it means on a receipt.

What is and is not being claimed. Nothing here says Ephesians is alluding to Genesis 38, and the page would be embarrassed by the suggestion. ἀρραβών is a Semitic loanword that was ordinary commercial Greek in the first century, attested in papyri and contracts that are not held on this shelf and were not consulted. The point of the count is the register of the word: when Ephesians calls the Spirit a deposit, it reaches for the language of money paid against a balance owing, and the only place in the Greek Old Testament held here that the word turns up at all is a bargain over a pledge.

Screened across the whole Greek New Testament and across every CATSS file held here.

So the letter’s signature phrase for where the action is happening is still not one it inherited from the Greek Old Testament — the phrase returns zero at 30,348 screened verse units, and that negative is now checked against every book CATSS holds. But the sentence underneath it has to be corrected.

⚠️ What this page used to say, and what it says now. It read: “One adjective in 23,061 verse units.” That was true of the 44 CATSS files then held. On the 64 files held since 30 August 2026 the adjective stands five times in the 30,637 units on disk — and four times in the 30,348 units this shelf actually screens, because one of the five is in the Odes, withdrawn from the screening corpus later the same day. All five are named below, the withdrawn one last, because a count is only honest if the reader can see what was taken out of it.

⚠️ Why that last row is struck through, and what it is NOT. The Odes are the fourteen liturgical canticles bound after the Greek Psalter, and on 30 August 2026 all 289 of their verse units were withdrawn from this shelf’s screening corpus. They stay on disk; they are out of anything called ‘the Greek Old Testament’. Two reasons, either sufficient. (1) Two of the canticles are New Testament text. Ode 9 is Luke 1 — the Magnificat and the Benedictus — and Ode 13 is Luke 2, the Nunc Dimittis. Screened, Odes 9:48 matches Luke 1:48 at eighteen consecutive words, and a page could print that as a Gospel’s deepest Old Testament contact while measuring its own text. (2) Ten of the fourteen are second copies of passages the shelf already holds — Ode 1 = Exodus 15, 2 = Deuteronomy 32, 3 = 1 Samuel 2, 4 = Habakkuk 3, 5 = Isaiah 26, 6 = Jonah 2, 7 and 8 = Daniel Th 3, 10 = Isaiah 5, 11 = Isaiah 38 — so a verse standing alone in Habakkuk appeared to stand twice, and any tie band touching a canticle was doubled for no textual reason.

⚠️ But be exact about which of those two problems the struck row is: it is neither. Odes 14 is the morning hymn. It is not Luke, and it is not a second copy of anything else on this shelf. It comes out because the appendix is one book and is treated as one — not because this occurrence was the instrument reading its own text. So the honest statement of what changed here is a small one: one genuine, non-duplicate occurrence of the adjective sits in a liturgical appendix this shelf no longer screens, and the published count goes from five to four. The occurrence has not been shown to be spurious and it is not being hidden — it is printed above, struck through, so that a reader who wants the number for all 30,637 units held can reconstruct it.

The correction sharpens the point rather than blunting it. Outside one line of one psalm, the adjective’s only home in the Greek Old Testament held here is Hellenistic-Jewish literature written outside the Hebrew canon, where it is a title of God — the heavenly God. Ephesians does not use it that way. It uses it of a place, five times, in a plural substantive phrase that stands nowhere in any of the 64 files. Whatever this way of speaking came from, the corpus held here still cannot show it coming from the Septuagint.

A negative is a negative on the corpus searched, and this is the page that proves it: the corpus searched grew by twenty files on 30 August 2026 and one of this page’s counts went from 1 to 5. The 64 CATSS files are still not the whole Septuagint tradition, and they are still not Second-Temple Greek in general: Philo, Josephus and the Greek Pseudepigrapha were not screened for this page.

Three of Ephesians 1’s load-bearing nouns are not religious vocabulary at all.

All three belong to one world: an estate, an heir, an administrator and a part-payment. The Greek Old Testament held here has υἱοθεσία zero times. Every one of its five New Testament occurrences is Paul’s — Romans 8:15, 8:23, 9:4, Galatians 4:5 and Ephesians 1:5.

The standing caution about ancient culture on this shelf. The glosses in the middle column are lexical, not the fruit of reading Roman adoption law. No papyrus, no inscription and no legal text was consulted for this page. What is measured is the count; what is offered is the ordinary sense of the word, which the dictionaries in stage 1 supply and which this page has not independently verified.

εἰς ἔπαινον, to the praise of, occurs four times in the Greek New Testament. Three are in this one sentence.

The first has an extra noun. The second and third differ by a single article — 1:14 carries τῆς where 1:12 does not. The English column on this page does not show it, and no other translation was checked. The ESV renders 1:12 and 1:14 word for word the same — to the praise of his glory twice. A reader in English sees a refrain repeated. A reader in Greek sees three near misses.

Whether the variation is deliberate, or the ordinary looseness of a writer not copying himself, this page does not say. It reports that the three are different and that only one of the differences survives translation.

Each of the 23 verses of Ephesians 1 was screened against the other 7,772 verses of the Greek New Testament — the whole corpus with Ephesians itself removed — for the longest run of consecutive identical word forms, with the tie band beside it.

The distribution: all 23 rows reach three, 17 reach four, seven reach five, four reach seven, two reach eleven, one reaches twelve.

⚠️ The counter-example this page prints against itself. The two deepest runs in Ephesians 1 — twelve words and eleven — are the greeting and the opening benediction, and both are formulas. Twelve words with a tie band of five is not a connection between Ephesians and Philemon; it is what a first-century letter opening looked like. χάρις ὑμῖν καὶ εἰρήνη alone stands in thirteen New Testament verses. Meanwhile the sentence about being chosen before the foundation of the world reaches three. On this chapter, depth of run and depth of thought run in opposite directions, and a reader who takes a big number for a big claim will read the page backwards.

Ephesians 1:22 and 1 Corinthians 15:27 both say that God has put all things under Christ’s feet. Both are drawing on the same psalm. Hebrews 2:8 draws on it too. Here is what the three of them actually share with it.

Two changes, and both letters make both of them. The psalm has ὑπέταξας, second person — you subjected, God addressed directly. Ephesians and 1 Corinthians both have ὑπέταξεν, third person — he subjected. And the psalm has ὑποκάτω τῶν ποδῶν where both letters have ὑπὸ τοὺς πόδας. Hebrews keeps both of the psalm’s words and reaches six.

And the split runs through the whole New Testament along that one preposition.

What this does and does not establish. It establishes that two letters say the same five words in the same order and that the Greek psalm behind them does not say them. It does not establish direction of influence in any of the available directions — not that Ephesians is copying 1 Corinthians, not the reverse, not that both are drawing on a form of words already in circulation, and not that either writer had a Greek psalm in front of him at all. The measurement cannot see any of that, and neither can this page. What it can see is that on this verse the two letters are closer to each other than to their source, and that Hebrews is not.

Ephesians 1:20 says Christ was seated at God’s right hand. Several New Testament verses reproduce the Greek psalm’s own words for that. Ephesians is not one of them.

Fourteen words is one of the deepest Old-Testament-to-New-Testament runs anywhere: when the Gospels quote this psalm they copy it. Ephesians does not quote it. It says what the psalm says, in different words — καθίσας ἐν δεξιᾷ αὐτοῦ against the psalm’s κάθου ἐκ δεξιῶν μου.

Counted across the whole Greek New Testament: ἐκ δεξιῶν in 22 verses and ἐν δεξιᾷ in eight. Every verse that reproduces the psalm uses the first form; not one of the eight verses using the second is a quotation — Romans 8:34, Ephesians 1:20, Colossians 3:1, Hebrews 1:3, 8:1, 10:12, 12:2 and 1 Peter 3:22. The entailment only runs one way, and the page will not run it the other. The first form is also ordinary Greek for on the right, and among its 22 verses are the thief on the cross, the sheep at the judgement and the angel beside the altar — none of which is quoting anything.

All 23 rows were also screened against every CATSS Greek Old Testament file held here — 30,348 screened verse units of the 30,637 across 64 files, re-run on 30 August 2026 when the corpus grew from 44 files and 23,061 units, and re-run again the same day when the 289 units of the Odes were withdrawn from the screen. Not one run and not one band in the table below moved at that second re-run. Three of the fifteen unlisted rows lost a unit or two from very wide bands — 1:4 from 502 to 500, 1:15 from 23 to 22, 1:16 from 207 to 206 — which is why the last column now reads 500. Stage 2 sets out what the Odes are and why they came out.

⚠️ Read the new rows before treating them as contact. All four rows that rose did so against a book that was simply not on the disk before, and every one of the new partners is a deuterocanonical book — Tobit, Wisdom, Baruch — which this shelf reads as a witness and never levels with Scripture. And the matched strings are grammar, not quotation: blessed be God and, according to the counsel of, so that we might be, of your salvation. A tie band of one on four ordinary words means only that nothing else in the corpus happened to put them in that order — and the growth has just demonstrated how fragile that is. Ephesians 1:22 held a band of six on under his feet at 44 files and holds seven at 64, because Greek Exodus 24:10 was not on the disk. A band is a fact about a corpus, not about a text.

Ephesians 1 does not quote the Old Testament, and the measurement says so loudly. The deepest run in the chapter against the whole Greek Old Testament is five words shared with Sirach — αὐτοῦ, κατὰ τὴν εὐδοκίαν αὐτοῦ at 1:9 — which nobody thinks Ephesians is quoting and which this page does not put forward as an allusion. It is what five shared words look like when they are an accident.

And the sharpest illustration is the one verse in the chapter that really is drawing on a psalm. Among Ephesians 1:22’s deepest Greek Old Testament partners — a run of four with a tie band of seven (six at 44 files; Greek Exodus 24:10 is the seventh, and the band is unchanged by the Odes withdrawal) — are Lamentations 3:34 — to bring low under his feet all the prisoners of the earth — and Septuagint Psalm 17:10 (English 18:9), and thick darkness was under his feet. Each shares the four words ὑπὸ τοὺς πόδας αὐτοῦ. Septuagint Psalm 8:7, the psalm verse standing behind Ephesians 1:22, shares one. A screen that reported only the top hit would have pointed at Lamentations and been completely wrong, and that is the clearest warning this shelf can give about its own method.

1. The sentence-length measurement is a measurement of an editor’s punctuation, not of the text. Ancient manuscripts of Ephesians do not carry the full stops that produce the numbers 30, 202 and 169. Those numbers are what you get by splitting the SBLGNT’s printed text at every token whose trailing punctuation contains a full stop or a Greek question mark, and treating the raised dot as a comma rather than a stop — which is the usual convention and is still a choice. A different editor produces different numbers. Nestle-Aland and the Tyndale House edition were not consulted, and no manuscript was. The claim is precise, but its object is an edition.

2. The bracketed destination is reported and not resolved. The SBLGNT prints [ἐν Ἐφέσῳ] in square brackets. This page carries no critical apparatus and consulted none, so it cannot tell you which manuscripts have the words, which omit them, or how the editors weighed them. The run of seven measured at 1:1 is unaffected either way — the shared words all stand before the bracket — but every other question about the address is out of this page’s reach.

3. The authorship question is named and left open, and that is a real limitation. Serious scholarship argues that Ephesians is not Paul’s, and serious scholarship argues that it is; the arguments run through vocabulary, style, sentence length and the relationship to Colossians — that is, through exactly the material this page measures. Reporting the numbers without engaging the argument is a gap, not a neutrality bonus. The page states the letter’s own claim, states the measurements, and does not pretend the measurements settle anything.

No critical apparatus on any side. No papyri — and for Ephesians that is a named loss, since P46 is central to the discussion of 1:1. No versions: no Latin, no Syriac, no Coptic. No patristic citations, and Marcion’s reported title for this letter belongs to the 1:1 discussion and was not examined. No Qumran material. No Greek papyri or inscriptions for the commercial use of the deposit word, and no Roman legal texts on adoption.

The Greek Old Testament screen is a screen of what is on disk. Sixty-four CATSS files, 30,637 verse units held and 30,348 screened — 44 files and 23,061 units until 30 August 2026, when Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, both Joshua recensions and the deuterocanon arrived and every negative on this page was re-run; and 30,637 screened for a few hours that same day, until the 289 units of the Odes were withdrawn from the screening corpus and every negative was re-run a second time. That is still not the whole Septuagint tradition and it is not Second-Temple Greek in general: Philo, Josephus and the Greek Pseudepigrapha were not searched, and any statement on this page that a word occurs zero times means zero times in the 30,348 units those 64 files supply to a screen — and one figure on this page that used to read one read five for part of a day and now reads four, which is set out in stage 2 with its full history and with the withdrawn occurrence printed rather than deleted.

And one thing this page deliberately did not measure. The Hebrew of Psalm 8:6 was not brought into the comparison. It could have been — the Masoretic corpus is held here — but the question being asked is about Greek word forms, and a Hebrew column would have invited a comparison the run engine cannot make across languages.

One count on this page is a count of the shelf, not of the world. “All five occurrences are in Ephesians” and “all three are Paul’s” are statements about the 27 MorphGNT files. They are safe statements — the New Testament is a closed corpus and the whole of it is held here — in a way that the Greek Old Testament negatives on this page are not.

• Harold W. Hoehner, Ephesians: An Exegetical Commentary.
• Andrew T. Lincoln, Ephesians (Word Biblical Commentary 42).
• Ernest Best, Ephesians (International Critical Commentary).
• Clinton E. Arnold, Ephesians (ZECNT), and Power and Magic: The Concept of Power in Ephesians.
• G. K. Beale and D. A. Carson, eds., Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament — on Ephesians.
• None of these were consulted for any number on this page, all of which were run on the text files named in the footer.

If you sorted Ephesians 1 by how many consecutive Greek words each verse shares with the rest of the New Testament, the order would come out nearly upside down. Top of the list: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ — twelve words, and five other letters say them identically. Near the bottom: he chose us in him before the foundation of the world — three.

That is not a paradox; it is what the method is for. A run screen measures how conventional a sentence is. The conventional parts of a letter are conventional. The parts that made this letter worth keeping are the parts nobody else had said.

And then, at the very end, the two things meet. Ephesians 1:22 is neither conventional nor unique. It reaches five words — with a tie band of one, so those five stand in exactly one other verse in the New Testament — and that verse is 1 Corinthians 15:27, saying the same thing about the same psalm in the same altered words. Meanwhile the psalm itself, in the Greek either of them could have copied, shares exactly one word with both. Hebrews had that psalm open and kept its wording. These two did not, and they did not in identical fashion.

This is the shelf’s study of Ephesians chapter 1; Ephesians 2:1–10 — But God, being rich in mercy — is already up. The chapter that follows this one opens with the word and, and takes the power that raised Christ from the dead as something that has now happened to the reader.