In the Beloved Figural Echoes of Jesus’ Baptism in Ephesians 1:3–14

Sammanfattning

This thesis advances a baptismal reading of Ephesians 1:3–14 by arguing that the eulogy’s language is shaped by figural echoes of the divine voice at Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan. Against proposals that treat the passage as a preserved hymn, the study contends that Eph 1:3–14 is an authorially composed berakah—an extended doxology to Israel’s God, articulated in elevated epideictic Greek—that narrates salvation “in Christ” and culminates in the sealing of believers by the Spirit.Methodologically, the thesis tests hymn hypotheses using established hymn-critical criteria and evaluates the proposed resonances through Richard B. Hays’s diagnostic framework for intertextual echoes. It argues that expressions such as “in the Beloved,” divine “good pleasure,” adoption and sonship, election, the “heavenlies,” and the Spirit as seal form a dense and recurring network of correspondences that reinterprets the baptismal declaration spoken over Jesus as the identity of the baptized community “in him.”