Paul wrote to Gentiles about a barrier they could have walked up to and read.
The crowd in Jerusalem had seen Paul around the city with a man from Ephesus, and they put two things together that nobody had put together. The man's name was Trophimus. He was a Gentile. And the temple was close by.
For they had previously seen Trophimus the Ephesian with him in the city, whom they supposed Paul had brought into the temple. (Acts 21:29)
Luke is careful with that word supposed. Nobody saw anything, and it didn't matter. Within minutes Paul was dragged out of the temple, the doors were shut behind him, and the mob was trying to kill him (Acts 21:30-31). All over a rumor about a foreigner and a line.
The sign
The line was real. Around the inner courts of Herod's temple stood a low stone barrier, and set into it at intervals were notices in Greek and Latin. Josephus describes them. Two of those notices have been dug up. In 1871 the French archaeologist Charles Clermont-Ganneau found a complete limestone slab in Jerusalem, built into the wall of a Muslim school. It sits in the Istanbul Archaeology Museums now. A partial second fragment turned up in the 1930s, and it's in the Israel Museum. The Greek is blunt. In close translation, it reads:
No foreigner is to enter within the balustrade around the sanctuary and the enclosure. Whoever is caught will have himself to blame for the death that follows. (The Temple Warning inscription)
Picture what it was to be a Gentile in that city and read that. You could stand close enough to see the gold and hear the singing. You could believe in the God of Israel. And a sign told you, in your own language, that one more step would be your last.
The letter that points at it
Luke records how that crowd behaved when Paul finally got a hearing. They listened quietly while he told his story, right up to the moment he said God had sent him to the Gentiles. Then they shouted that he ought to be wiped from the earth (Acts 22:21-22). The word itself was the trigger, because to them it named the people the sign was written for.
Now read what Paul wrote from prison, the same Paul, and the same accusation that put him there.
For this reason I, Paul, the prisoner of Christ Jesus for you Gentiles... (Ephesians 3:1)
Two chapters earlier, to those same Gentiles, he says this:
But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been made near by the blood of Christ. For He Himself is our peace, who has made both one, and has broken down the middle wall of separation. (Ephesians 2:13-14)
Paul doesn't write "the temple wall," and it's worth being careful here. Scholars still argue over how directly he has that stone barrier in mind. But "middle wall of separation" is the language of a thing his readers could have seen, and the man writing it was in custody because of the dispute over crossing it. It's hard to believe the picture wasn't in the room.
The strongest objection
The reading most of us inherited treats the wall as figurative, and it has good support in the next verse. Paul says Christ abolished the enmity, which sounds like a description of hostility between peoples, not a piece of masonry. That reading is understandable, and it isn't wrong. Hostility is what Paul names.
But the enmity wasn't floating in the air. It lived in ordinances, and ordinances had edges, and the edges were built into a place with a notice on it. The sign shows what the hostility looked like when it had a doorframe. Paul says Christ abolished that enmity in His flesh, to make one new man from the two. The figure and the stone are the same story told at two sizes.
Where the line gave way
The sign's logic was simple. Come close, and you die. Mercy had no place in it, because mercy would have erased the line, and the line was the whole point of the sign.
Then a man came close to the death the line threatened, and took it. Matthew says that at that moment the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom (Matthew 27:51). That's a different structure, an inner curtain and not the outer barrier, and nobody should pretend otherwise, but it moves in the same direction. The building that was built on distance began coming apart the hour the distance was paid for.
That's why Paul says the nearness is by the blood of Christ. The Gentiles didn't get close by becoming more worthy, or by agreeing to be Jewish, or by working their way up the steps. They were far off, and they weren't climbing, they were made near. Someone else did the crossing, and He did it before any of them had asked.
A flinch that doesn't belong
Think about Trophimus for a moment. He was a believer, a traveling companion of Paul's, and he stood in the middle of a city where a rumor about him nearly cost another man his life. He lived under the shadow of that sign. It's tempting to imagine he carried a quiet flinch around holy places for the rest of his life.
The people who first read Ephesians may well have had that flinch, and it isn't hard to find today. People who've been told by a church, a family, or a long list of rules that there's a place they can't go and a distance they have to keep tend to have it too. Paul doesn't answer it with advice to try harder to belong. He tells them the wall is down, and that Christ took it down Himself.
Now, therefore, you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God. (Ephesians 2:19)
