Free Study Guide IncludedEphesians: A Friends Illuminated Commentary
The whole armor of God, the mystery of Christ, and the church as one body in whom all distinction dissolves. Penn drew deeply on Ephesians for his vision of holy community and the spiritual warfare that shapes it.
- 6 chapters · ~30,000 words
- EPUB + Study Guide
This edition
Read itE-book · EPUB
- Time to read1 hour
- Length14,895 words
- Files1 EPUB, DRM-free
How we get 1 hour
This figure is here so you can compare one book against another. Every title on the site is timed from its own word count at the same reading speed — nothing is adjusted book by book — so if this edition says 1 hour and another says half that, the second one really is about half the reading. It is a measure of size, in the way a page count is. Your own pace is your own: at the speeds typical adult readers actually manage, this edition runs anywhere from 50 minutes to 1.4 hours.
What is in this edition
| Modernized text | 14,895 words |
|---|---|
| Total | 14,895 words |
Counted from the text of the EPUB you receive. Navigation, the title page, the table of contents and the licence page are excluded — they are packaging, not reading.
The reading rate
238 words per minute, for adult silent reading of non-fiction, applied unchanged to every title on the site. We did not pick the number; it is the pooled result of a published meta-analysis. Nothing is adjusted book by book — that consistency is what makes two of these figures worth comparing.
Brysbaert, M. (2019). How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate. Journal of Memory and Language, 109, 104047. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2019.104047
190 studies, 18,573 participants.
The same paper puts most adult readers between 175 and
300 words per minute, and those two speeds give the
50 minutes and 1.4 hours above.
Because time is words divided by speed, an even range of speeds produces an
uneven range of times, so 1 hour sits nearer the fast end of that
range than the middle of it.
If it were a paperback
Roughly 43–60 pages.
Words per printed page is a typesetting convention, not a measurement — it moves with trim size, type size and leading. The range above assumes 250–350 words a page. Friends Illuminated publishes no print edition of this book; the figure is here only because pages are a more familiar size than words.
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About This Edition
Ephesians gave early Quakers their language of spiritual warfare and their vision of the church as a unified body in which national, social, and gender distinctions are dissolved in Christ. The passage on putting on the whole armor of God (Ephesians 6:10–18) was read not as metaphor but as a description of the actual experience of the Friends who went to prison for their faith — the truth, righteousness, peace, faith, salvation, and the word of God were the only armor they carried, and they believed it was sufficient. William Penn’s writings on holy community drew repeatedly on Ephesians’ vision of the church as the fullness of Christ, the household of God, and the place where the mystery hidden from ages is made known.
The commentary traces the Quaker engagement with Ephesians chapter by chapter: the great doxology of chapter 1 with its vision of a cosmic plan centered in Christ, the remarkable claim of chapter 2 that Jew and Gentile have been made one new humanity through the cross, the prayer for power to comprehend the love that surpasses knowledge, and the ethical instructions of chapters 4–6. Friends found in Ephesians both a description of what the gathered meeting was meant to be and an account of why it required courage to build it. The free Group Study Guide accompanies this commentary.
