The so-called “Paul within Judaism” perspective—championed in recent years by Mark Nanos, Magnus Zetterholm, Paula Fredriksen, and Matthew Thiessen—has made a significant impact on the modern landscape of Pauline studies by contesting the assumption that Paul ceased to be a Jew upon his becoming a Christ-follower. According to proponents of this perspective, a major consequence of such a premise is that Paul’s polemics targeted neither Jews, nor Jews and Gentiles together, but only Gentiles. Thus, Paul’s gospel sought to remedy not a universal plight but what Thiessen calls “the Gentile problem”—the utter lostness that stems from pagan idolatry and immorality and is particular to non-Jews. Thiessen has advanced his case in a much-discussed monograph, Paul and the Gentile Problem (Oxford University Press, 2016), which focuses on Romans and Galatians. Receiving far less attention is a separately published essay in which Thiessen argues for a similar depiction of the Gentile problem in Ephesians, perhaps the single most important Pauline letter for defining global Christianity. In the essay “The Construction of Gentiles in the Letter to the Ephesians,” Thiessen argues that “the author” (Thiessen is agnostic about the letter’s authenticity) is involved throughout in ethnic stereotyping, and in the process, the author “both portrays the negative situation of the Gentiles and affirms Paul’s positive portrayal [in the undisputed letters] of the ‘Jewish situation.’” Indeed, Thiessen argues that, in Ephesians, Gentiles are regarded as “sinners” while Jews are, “relatively speaking, righteous.” However, is Thiessen correct when he suggests that Ephesians maintains a rigid anthropological distinction between righteous Jews and Gentile sinners that renders to the former a “positive” situation and to the latter a “negative” situation? In other words, is the plight articulated within Ephesians unique to Gentiles? This paper seeks to demonstrate that while Ephesians projects an Israel-centric worldview that attributes to the Jewish people a position of relative privilege and increased hope, the letter nonetheless portrays the Jewish people as sharers in the same ultimate plight as the nations (guilt, spiritual deadness, imprisonment to sin/flesh/Satan, hostility with God), and they thereby require the same Christological solution (forgiveness, liberation, new life, and reconciliation to God). This topic has significant implications for one’s understanding of global Christianity, which will be thoroughly explored in the paper. If the body of Christ is nothing other than “Israel 2.0,” consisting of plightless Jews and rehabilitated Gentiles (as Thiessen envisages), then the global church is actually a form of Jewish imperialism and the nations are nothing other than prospective Jewish colonies. Such an ecclesiological vision has the potential to create all sorts of intrachurch problems, to say nothing of international challenges. But the church is not Israel 2.0. It is rather a new human, a new body, a new spiritual entity with its own new politeia (2:11–22). Thus, creating healthy global evangelicalism requires an accurate view of the shared human plight and its shared Christological solution, both of which are presented plainly and powerfully in Ephesians.