But that it was addressed to “the saints which are _in Ephesus_” is more difficult to believe. The apostle has “heard of the faith which prevails amongst” his readers; he presumes that they “have heard of the Christ, and were taught in Him according as truth is in Jesus.”[18] He hopes that by “reading” this epistle they will “perceive his understanding in the mystery of Christ” (iii. 2-4). He writes somewhat thus to the Colossians and Romans, whom he had never seen;[19] but can we imagine Paul addressing in this distant and uncertain fashion his children in the faith? In Ephesus he had laboured “for the space of three whole years” (Acts xx. 31), longer than in any other city of the Gentile mission, except Antioch. His speech to the Ephesian elders at Miletus, delivered four years ago, was surcharged with personal feeling, full of pathetic reminiscence and the signs of interested acquaintance with the individual membership of the Ephesian Church. In the epistle such signs are altogether wanting. The absence of greetings and messages we could understand; these Tychicus might convey by word of mouth. But how the man who wrote the epistles to the Philippians and Corinthians could have composed this long and careful letter to his own Ephesian people without a single word of endearment or familiarity,[20] and without the least allusion to his past intercourse with them, we cannot understand. It is in the destination that the only serious difficulty lies touching the authorship. Nowhere do we see more of _the apostle_ and less of _the man_ in St Paul; nowhere more of _the_ Church, and less of _this or that_ particular church. It agrees with these internal indications that the local designation is wanting in the oldest Greek copies of the letter that are extant. The two great manuscripts of the fourth century, the Vatican and Sinaitic codices, omit the words “in Ephesus.” Basil in the fourth century did not accept them, and says that “the old copies” were without them. Origen, in the beginning of the third century, seems to have known nothing of them. And Tertullian, at the end of the second century, while he condemns the heretic Marcion (who lived about fifty years earlier) for entitling the epistle “To the Laodiceans,” quotes only the _title_ against him, and not the text of the address, which he would presumably have done, had he read it in the form familiar to us. We are compelled to suppose, with Westcott and Hort and the textual critics generally, that these words form no part of the original address.