Corpus-Paul

[Ron Price <ron.price AT virgin.net>]

Richard Fellows wrote:

> I used to partition 2 Corinthians, but I now consider it a unity, and see it
> as being written to more than one audience. Perhaps you could comment on the
> suggestion that 2 Cor 10-13 was aimed at a city other than Corinth. Do
> partition theories have any advantages over this type of explanation?

Richard,

  From my vantage point, partition theories in general have three
advantages: they reveal letters which have greater internal consistency,
they fit better into the life of Paul, and they produce a more plausible set
of letter sizes.

  The first two arguments involve a lengthy examination of detail and have
been discussed in many publications. The third is my own, and is new as far
as I know.
  With no partitioning, 1Thess is Paul's shortest letter to a church. But it
is more than four times the size of Philemon.
  With the partitioning that I would advocate, Paul wrote five other letters
shorter than 1Thess, including the Philippian Thankyou Letter (about half
the size of Philemon) and a commendation for Phoebe (about the same size as
Philemon). If all the posited letters are arranged in size order, there is
no gap greater than a factor of two. This seems to be a much more natural
spread of sizes, with several short letters rather than one outstandingly
short. Curiously with this partitioning, four of the five shortest of Paul's
letters (Philemon plus three Philippian letters) were written from prison.

Ron Price

Derbyshire, UK