The address to wives at Eph. 5.22-24 represents an expansion of Col. 3.18. What guided the expansion? An answer emerges from an investigation of Pauline and Jewish reflection about Adam, Christ and the New Creation. The argument of the study is that Eph. 5.22-24 contains language which elsewhere in the Pauline Corpus associates Christ with Adam or the first two chapters of Genesis. Both the adamic character of the language at Eph. 5.22-24 and the application of Gen.2.24 to Christ and the church (Eph. 5.31-32) support the contention that Pauline New Creation theology guided the construction of Eph. 5.22-24. The first chapter outlines the shortcomings of previous investigations which have underestimated the adamic character of Eph. 5.22-24. Chapter two contains a detailed analysis of the grammatical structure of the text, which leads to the conclusion that the logical and theological core of the text is Eph. 5.23c. The arguments in the next chapter demonstrate that the soteriology of 5.23c is to be interpreted in the light of 2.14-18., which recasts Christ's death on the cross in language found in Gen.1-2, suggesting the adamic character of 5.23c. The fourth chapter explores the adamic nature of the terms head and subordination whitin Pauline text prior to Ephesians. The final chapter contains a fresh exegesis of Eph. 5.22-24 in light of Pualine New Creation theology and some brief hermeneutical reflections.