The Structure of Paul's Letters
by Robert A. Bailey

In an era of no punctuation, not even spaces between words, sentences, and paragraphs, and when all letters were capital letters, Paul made careful use of internal structures of parallelism.  These structures are like Hebrew poetry, which is not based on meter or rhyme, but on parallelism of clauses, a symmetry of form and sense.  They emphasize, organize, and clarify his thoughts.  They can help a careful reader to see his outline and the units of thought that go together to make a whole structure of thought.  They also made it difficult for anyone to alter his letters without making that evident to a careful reader.

In all of the Pauline letters, structures of symmetrical parallelism (also called chiasmus, symmetrical inversion, or concentric symmetry) are used to organize the entire letter, and then are often repeated to organize the subdivisions, often to three or more levels.

These structures call for translations, paragraphing, and outlines appropriate to the structures and their themes.  But many of them are obscured and unnoticed in popular English translations.  This translation is relatively literal in order to retain more of Paul's structures.  Only in Greek could all the details of Paul's structures be seen and demonstrated.

This work is far from being a complete and perfect identification of the poetic structures in Paul's letters.  But hopefully it is a helpful advancement of that project.

Except where noted, the English translation follows Nestle-Aland's 27th edition of the Greek text (Novum Testamentum Graece, 1993), omitting any words that NA27 placed in brackets as doubtful, but not necessarily following the punctuation proposed by NA27 (there was no punctuation in the original Greek).  The English translation also uses a degree of literalness comparable to the King James Version, and, like the KJV, uses italics to indicate text not in the Greek source.  Quotations or allusions to Scripture or other writings are shown in quotation marks.  The references can usually be found in NA27 or the various study Bibles, especially the New Jerusalem Bible, Regular or Deluxe Edition.

The Pauline structures available from this web site were originally published under the title The Structure of Paul's Letters (2004).  Mr. Robert Bailey has graciously chosen to republish his updated editions (2008) in electronic format and share his labor of love for the Word of God with those who have an internet connection.  If you find his work edifying, please let him know by e-mail.

You may also enjoy other works by Mr. Bailey.  These are listed below.