Outside my window the seventeen-year cicadas have appeared. The male cicadas boast while their impregnated females lace the branches of trees with their eggs, thus beginning the cycle that will finally visit its offspring upon Indiana once again in 1987.

The study here offered for discussion is the result of a rather lengthy process that had its inception in a study of the NT Haustafeln, begun under my father in the faith, Prof. Fred D. Gealy, at Perkins School of Theology in 1959. Unlike the cicadas, however, the fertilization of the minuscule egg did not take place until I came under the tutelage of Prof. Nils A. Dahl in a graduate seminar on Golossians and Ephesians offered at Yale University in 1961–2. The seminar elicited my first efforts to unite my interest in the Haustafel with Prof. Dahl's sensitivity both to Ephesians and to the wealth of traditions circulating within the early church. My dissertation, ‘The Form and Function of Ephesians 5: 21–33’, grew out of the paper submitted from Prof. Dahl's seminar.

With the completion of a metamorphosis in which considerable parts were changed, many features sloughed and extensive additions made, the current work is offered in the hope of contributing to both the illumination of the traditions of the early church and a relatively new phase in the study of Ephesians.