Letters from the sub-editor II
“Greeting.”
Perhaps my earlier CHN was overly harsh. I can see why it would be necessary to insert this word as a subheading at the beginning of one of Paul's letters. A lot of us, struggling to come to terms with the Lord's Word and having only the indwelling Holy Spirit to help us, might have read Paul's first words to the Corinthians and thought:
Now wait a minute. Is this the beginning of the letter or the end? Or is it something completely different? Paul appears to be introducing himself as the writer of the letter, speaking with divine authority as an apostle of Christ Jesus. He seems to be saying that the letter is written to the church of God in Corinth, and mentioning some powerful ideas such as grace, and peace—ideas that we know from reading other letters of Paul are key to summarizing the gospel that he stands for. At least that much is clear.
But how grateful I am that the sub-editor has told me that this is a greeting. Were it not for this important piece of information, I would have paused in puzzlement, at least for a brief moment, to wonder whether or not I had started reading in the middle of the letter.
The only thing I wish is that the sub-editor could have specified whether these were introductory greetings or concluding greetings. As it is, I shall have to solve this tangled problem for myself. I wonder if context will give me a clue.
Apart from the completely redundant nature of this subheading, the more serious point is that a word like “Greeting” simply encourages me to skip over the first few verses of what God is saying as if it were nothing more than a “Hello” or a “Dear Fred”, safely ignored without changing the basic meaning of the text. This is not so, and as a result the editor's uninspired heading has misled me. Grr.