The Missing Verb in 'Wives, Submit to Your Husbands'

“Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord” sounds like a self-contained command. Yet important early witnesses to Ephesians 5:22, including Papyrus 46 and Codex Vaticanus, contain no verb in that verse. Understanding the instruction requires following the sentence back into its context.

Papyrus 46 (P.Mich.inv. 6238, fol. 157v), Ephesians 6:8-18, c. 175-225 CE · University of Michigan Library · Public Domain Mark. This particular leaf preserves 6:8-18, not 5:22 — but it is the same manuscript. Papyrus 46, alongside Codex Vaticanus, is an early witness to the verbless text of Ephesians 5:22. Image record.

A Sentence With No Verb

In the shorter reading, Ephesians 5:22 has: hai gynaikes tois idiois andrasin hōs tō kyriō — literally, “the wives, to their own husbands, as to the Lord.” There is no verb there corresponding to “submit.” Translations of this shorter text supply a verb from the preceding verse to make the instruction explicit. That’s standard, necessary translation practice — but it has the side effect of making verse 22 read as though it always stood on its own as an independent command.

This isn’t a modern discovery buried in a footnote. Two of our earliest and most important manuscripts — Papyrus 46 (third century) and Codex Vaticanus (fourth century) — begin verse 22 with no verb at all, carrying forward the sense of the participle in verse 21 instead. Other manuscripts have an explicit imperative, either hypotassesthe (“[you] submit”) or hypotassesthōsan (“let them submit”). Most modern critical editions of the Greek New Testament (NA27/28, UBS4/5) print the shorter, verbless text as original — though the question isn’t entirely closed; a 2024 study by Joey McCollum has reopened the case for an original verb on internal grounds, even while the external manuscript evidence still favors the shorter reading.

The shorter reading is the text printed in NA28, not a statement that every early witness lacks the verb. Codex Sinaiticus, also fourth century, includes one. The age of a manuscript and the age of its reading are related questions, not interchangeable ones.

Borrowed From the Verse Before

So where does the missing verb come from? From the sentence just before it. Verse 21 says “submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ” — but the Greek word behind “submitting,” hypotassomenoi, is a present participle, not an imperative. Many English translations render it as if it were a command, but grammatically it’s the last in a chain of participles (“addressing one another… singing and making melody… giving thanks always…”) that all depend on a single main verb back in verse 18: “be filled with the Spirit.”

Verse 22 picks up mid-sentence, introducing a new subject (“the wives”) without a new verb, and applies the sense of that ongoing participial chain to a specific relationship. Both Andrew T. Lincoln’s Ephesians (Word Biblical Commentary 42, 1990) and Harold W. Hoehner’s Ephesians: An Exegetical Commentary (Baker Academic, 2002) note that verse 22 is grammatically dependent on verse 21 — the sentence doesn’t stand on its own without it. That’s not a minor footnote about Greek syntax; it’s a real question about where the paragraph actually begins.

Reading It Inside the Whole Household Code

That grammatical thread pulls verse 22 into a larger unit. Ephesians 5:21-6:9 follows a literary pattern common across the ancient Mediterranean world — what scholars call a “household code” (German: Haustafel) — addressing three paired relationships in turn: wives and husbands (5:22-33), children and parents (6:1-4), and slaves and masters (6:5-9). In this household code, both parties in each pair receive instruction, including those who hold social authority. Immediately after the exhortation to wives, husbands are commanded to love “as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (5:25) — a standard of self-sacrifice that is, on any reading, demanding in its own right.

This is exactly where interpreters part ways. Some read verse 21’s “submitting to one another” as establishing a genuinely mutual principle that governs everything that follows, so that the wife’s submission sits inside a larger frame of reciprocal self-giving — a reading favored in egalitarian scholarship. Others read verse 21 as a heading that then unpacks into distinct, role-specific instructions — wives submit, husbands sacrificially love — with the underlying role distinction still intact, a reading more common in complementarian scholarship. Both camps generally accept the grammatical link between the two verses; they differ on what that link is meant to accomplish theologically.

What the Grammar Actually Settles

Knowing the Greek doesn’t resolve the debate on its own. But it does settle one thing: in the shorter reading, verse 22 depends grammatically on its context. It is bound to the wider flow of “submitting to one another,” and it sits at the head of a passage that immediately places an equally weighty demand of self-giving love on husbands. Getting the sentence structure right doesn’t tell you how to apply the passage — but it does mean whatever conclusion you reach starts from what the text actually says.

Didymus Lab builds sermon-prep materials that trace this kind of original-language grammar and manuscript history down to the verse level. Take a look at Didymus Lab if that’s useful to your own study.

References

• Andrew T. Lincoln, Ephesians (Word Biblical Commentary 42; Word Books, 1990)
• Harold W. Hoehner, Ephesians: An Exegetical Commentary (Baker Academic, 2002)
• Joey McCollum, “The Intrinsic Probability of τοῖς ἰδίοις ἀνδράσιν ὑποτασσέσθωσαν in Eph. 5:22,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 46(4) (2024): 556–578, DOI
• Novum Testamentum Graece (NA28) and UBS5, critical apparatus on Ephesians 5:21-22

Comments

Loading comments…

Leave a comment

Comments are reviewed before being published. Only your name and comment are stored — no personal data collected.

Name (required)Write a comment (max 1,000 characters)

Submit comment