Translating the Bible requires a lot of judgment calls. As readers, we generally value publishers inserting helpful subheadings in the text. These weren’t in the original manuscripts but they help us navigate the pages.

In today’s article, we look at the tail end of Ephesians 5. And I think the NIV makes gets the judgment call about where to put a subheading. Some other translations don’t.

Here’s the bulk of the passage (NIV):

Instructions for Christian households

²¹ Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. 

²² Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. ²³ For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Saviour. ²⁴ Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. 

²⁵ Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her ²⁶ to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, ²⁷ and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. ²⁸ In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. ²⁹ After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church—³⁰ for we are members of his body.

As you will have seen, the NIV places a subheading before verse 21, rather than after it. But some other translations put it a verse later. That makes a significant effect on the emphasis.

Without reading that verse 21, we might go away thinking that this is a passage is advocating a very hierarchical form of marriage.

The context of the passage

Now, there is a good reason why translators might place the subheading a verse later. And that is because the phrase “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ” is referring both backwards in the chapter as well as forwards. It is “transitional” as Andrew T. Lincoln in the World Biblical Commentary volume on Ephesians puts it.

Lincoln writes:

If believers are filled with the Spirit [described in verse 18], this should manifest itself in their mutual submission.

In other words, the power of the Holy Spirit working on our hearts encourages us to show good fruit to each other, such as love, kindness and gentleness.

Marriage in Roman society

I know that people over the centuries have looked at this passage in Ephesians 5 and focused mostly on the bit aimed at women. But the radical notion in this text, compared with first century Roman society, is really the part aimed at men.

After all, Paul wrote this text in a hierarchical society. Women could not vote or hold office. And yet we have Paul here saying that it’s not the man who gets to make all the decisions: husbands and wives should submit to each other.

What’s more, Paul really drives home his teaching to the men in Ephesus by saying they have to show love to their wives like Christ loves all of us. He’s telling the husbands to ensure that the culture of their marriages is loving.