[Please note: The Structure of Paul's Letters (Revised Fifth Edition, December 10, 2010) by Robert Bailey, which may be downloaded by selecting "All Paul's Letters" from the menu, is the latest edition available from the author. The soft cover Third Edition (July 10, 2008) by Xulon Press, which is available from Amazon.com, is significantly out of date as compared to this online version.]

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.

Each letter document is divided into three parts. The first part is a short introduction to the epistle. Next, an English translation follows that is arranged and formatted indicating its structure. Finally, the entire Greek text of the epistle is arranged in the same manner without any change in the original Greek word order.

The Pauline structures presented by Mr. Robert Bailey are in Adobe 7.0 PDF format and backward compatible to Adobe 5.0 PDF format. Regardless the size of your computer screen, they will automatically open to 100% of the original document size. This feature works properly for Internet Explorer 6.x or higher. Other browsers may not support this feature. Regardless, you will be able to view, download, or print the files available. However, because of the propriety Greek font used in these documents, editing of the files is password protected.

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 (Revised Fifth Edition, December 10, 2010) in electronic format and share his labor of love for the Word of God with those who have an internet connection.

If you find Robert Bailey's work edifying, please be sure to contact him. It only takes a few minutes and it will encourage him.