How hard can it be to read and understand personal correspondence?

Part of the answer is that these letters are a little longer (in the case of Romans and 1-2 Corinthians, much longer) than the typical personal letter; keeping in mind where the shifts in topic occur helps orient the reader.

But even a friend’s casual letter has a certain structure, whether the writer was conscious of it or not.

Our ability to understand a letter (or any other document) is tied to how accurately we perceive its structure.

Reading the NT Letters as Literary Documents

• Reading the NT Letters as Literary Documents

• This process of identification is largely unconscious, but if we receive a longer and more complicated letter, we may start asking ourselves structural kinds of questions (“Is the lawyer talking about something else in this paragraph, or am I missing the connection?”).

• The more explicit we are about these issues, the more sensitive we become to the information that the context provides.

Reading the NT Letters as Literary Documents

• Reading the NT Letters as Literary Documents

• This kind of study also provides the means of comparing the various letters with one another so that we can identify what is distinctive to each of them.

• For example, as we study the salutations in Paul’s letters, we find that most of them are very brief.

• Only two of them, those in Romans and Galatians, are expanded to include substantive material.

• In the case of Galatians, this detail may well be additional evidence of the urgency with which Paul wrote this letter.

Reading the NT Letters as Literary Documents

• Reading the NT Letters as Literary Documents

• No sooner has he mentioned his title of apostle than he feels the need to deny one of the accusations that prompted the writing of the letter.

• So he assures us: “an apostle, sent not from men nor by man, but by Jesus Christ and God the Father.”

• The second part of the introduction (1:6-10) is even more interesting.

Reading the NT Letters as Literary Documents

• Reading the NT Letters as Literary Documents

• At this point in his other letters Paul consistently expresses his thanks (or utters a blessing) to God for the people to whom he is writing.

• Here, however, instead of beginning with “I thank my God,” he exclaims, “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ!”
• Someone familiar with Paul’s letters would find this remark completely unexpected, and it is the unexpected that makes the greatest impression on us.
• More important, for Paul to diverge in this way from his practice tells us a great deal about his mood and motivation in writing Galatians.

Reading the NT Letters as Literary Documents

• Reading the NT Letters as Literary Documents

• Very few people would object to this kind of discussion or to the outline on which it is based.

• But is it possible that Paul made greater use of literary techniques?

• A long time ago it was noticed that in Galatians 4:4-5 the apostle seems to use a chiasm, that is, an ordering of clauses in an A-B-B’-A’ pattern:

Reading the NT Letters as Literary Documents

• Reading the NT Letters as Literary Documents

• God sent his Son, born of a woman, (A)
• born under the law, (B)
• to redeem those under the law (B’)
• that we might receive the full right of sons. (A’)

Reading the NT Letters as Literary Documents

• Reading the NT Letters as Literary Documents

• Taking his cue from this passage—as well as from other evidence that chiasms were used frequently in the ancient world—a New Testament scholar (John Bligh) in the 1960s believed he detected other and more sophisticated chiasms in Galatians.

• Indeed, he proposed that Galatians as a whole was one immense chiasm, composed of secondary chiasms, which in turn were made up of tertiary chiasms, and so on.

• This notion was too much for most contemporary scholars.

• While some of the chiasms proposed by the author are intriguing and may be valid, many others can hardly be considered a natural reading of the text.

Reading the NT Letters as Literary Documents

• Reading the NT Letters as Literary Documents

• More persuasive, though still debatable, is the suggestion that Galatians reflects in its structure the rhetorical principles of ancient Greek and Latin oratory.

• Particularly influential has been the proposal (by Hans Dieter Betz) that Galatians was composed as an “apologetic letter,” with the following sections:

Reading the NT Letters as Literary Documents

• Reading the NT Letters as Literary Documents

• Epistolary prescript, 1:1-5
• Exordium (introduction of the facts), 1:6-11
• Narratio (statement of the facts), 1:12-2:14
• Propositio (summary of legal content of narratio), 2:15-21
• Probatio (proofs or arguments), 3:1-4:31
• Exhortatio (exhortations), 5:1-6:10
• Epistolary postscript, 6:11-18