emotion subsides, he then picks up where he has left off in his letter, recapitulates the last
phrase before the aside, and continues the letter he was intending to write.
This scenario is certainly more satisfactory to me than some of the other proposals
about those sections in Paul's letters that just don't seem to fit. Chief among these is
2 Corinthians 6:14
7:1. Since one can go seamlessly from open wide your hearts also
in 6:13 to make room for us in your hearts in 7:2, the intervening section has always
been a puzzling section. Proposals range from trying to fit this pericope in the rhetorical
flow of the letter to calling it a part of the very first lost letter Paul wrote to the
Corinthians to seeing it as slightly Christianized piece of Qumran theology, non-Pauline
or even anti-Pauline, inserted here by some careless editor. Need I remind you? Editors
don't do that! Second Corinthians 6:14
7:1 forms another unit of Pauline passion where
the apostle minces no words. It is more satisfying to me to hypothesize the origin of this
pericope that Paul has heard something during the writing of 2 Corinthians that gets his
dander up, so he gets it off his chest before he continues with his letter to the believers in
Corinth.
Have I overstated the case I have been making here? Perhaps. Have I exaggerated
the type-A personality of Paul? That too is possible. But I have done so for a reason, in
order that you might grasp a different scenario of what may be going on in Paul's letters,
especially with those passages that just don't seem to fit in the sequence of what he is
writing. If I have done nothing else in this paper, I hope I have given you something new
to reflect on as you work with the critical issues on the letters of Paul. I hope, in other
words, that you consider the possibility that sometimes some of the things Paul includes
in his letters are writer-directed rather than reader-directed.