This paper situates the metaphor of the bath in Eph. 5:25-27 in the contemporary artistic motif of female bathing. Both in Christian and Greco-Roman circles, the bath began to acquire associations of female power in the mid-first to early second centuries CE. In Christian circles, there was a shift away from the earlier Jewish model of Susanna’s suffering after her bath and Jubilees’ understanding that Reuben and Bilhah’s liaison arose from her bath. Instead, Rhoda has rights concerning her bath in the Shepherd of Hermas. Similarly, the humiliating bath in Callirhoe becomes the empowering one in Daphnis and Chloe. This literary trend coincided with the late first and early second centuries CE artistic trend of portraying elite women in the guise of Venus bathing. Significantly, Daphnis and Chloe offers private couples' bathing as a reversal of societal oppression, much as the Gospel of John reverses the traditional hierarchy with footwashing while promoting a more just society. Ephesians, then, replicates this contemporary literary trend rhetorically. Reading Ephesians with contemporary intertexts enhances the egalitarian mode of these verses. Original audiences could have understood a far more intricate counterbalance to the discussion of the female subordination in Ephesians’ Haustafeln than previously thought.