Paul knew the church at Ephesus well. He spent more than two years there (Acts 19–20) – probably longer than he spent in any other single city during his missionary work. One might therefore have expected his letter to this church to be particularly intimate and personal. But in fact this letter to the ephesians is the least personal of all those attributed to Paul. There is little to suggest that the writer was personally acquainted with his correspondents – indeed the impression given by such verses as 1.15 and 3.2–4 is that he had never met them; and it is difficult to believe that the letter could really have been written by Paul to his friends at Ephesus. A further peculiarity of the letter is that, compared with Paul's other letters, it has little in the way of a precise purpose or occasion. There is plenty of solid teaching in it about the church, about the unity of all Christians, about the institutions of marriage and slavery and about the fight against supernatural powers; but, even if one may occasionally suspect a particular danger or heresy to have been in the writer's mind, there is no point at which the letter is addressed to a specific situation or problem. The tone is throughout general, never particular, and the letter, apart from the brief personal greetings at the beginning and the end, reads more like a homily or a circular letter than a document from a missionary's correspondence.