The Pauline Letters

Book excerpt: In The Pauline Letters: A Rhetorical Analysis, David Oliver Smith unveils his revolutionary discovery that the apostle Paul divided his letters into structured literary units as he wrote them. These literary units are based upon repeated words, phrases, and abstract concepts and are invariably patterned into chiastic, parallel, or hybrid structures. Using his technique of rhetorical analysis, Smith sets out each literary unit in the seven undisputed letters of Paul. After the structures of the literary units have been exposed, the units reveal interpolations that disrupt Paul’s original structure. When the interpolations revealed by this technique are compared with interpolations heretofore proposed by Pauline scholars, there are some surprising results. Smith also uses his technique to analyze the Deutero-Pauline letters to determine whether any of those letters exhibit the same literary attributes as the undisputed letters.