Week 47 Ephesians 3
A long time ago I sat in an English Composition class learning about Unity-and-Coherence. The teacher would’ve said: when you write a composition it should be a) unified & b) coherent. She might have given an example of a unified-&-coherent essay. So today I’m thinking that a good example of a non-unified-non-coherent essay would be Ephesians 3.
Paul began: for this reason, I Paul, the prisoner of Jesus Christ, for the sake of you Gentiles – . Then he just stopped…and switched tracks!
I figure that the dash means “I’m not going to apply the Unity-and-Coherence rule. I’m going off on a tangent.”
I checked another bible. It used an incomplete sentence and a dash too.
I scanned chapter three looking for a second dash. There wasn’t one. I did see that chapter three ended with “Amen” and chapter four started with: I, therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, entreat you… (which looks a lot like Paul is picking up where 3:1 left off). I’m thinking that all of chapter three is a tangent.
I already knew that Paul hopped around a lot. And today was a reminder that a) Paul makes un-signaled lane-changes and b) my being miffed by it won’t alter his writing style anytime soon.
Note: quotes from Ephesians 3:1 4:1 (NASB). The NLT version made 3:1 a full sentence and did not use a dash so gave the impression the passage was actually unified-and-coherent. Final thought: Paul might be jumpy but when it comes to Topical Parkouring Proverbs is #1.