Commentators have often noted that the relation of 1 Corinthians 13 to its immediate context is problematic. The observations of Wayne A. Meeks are typical: 1 Corinthians 13 'interrupts the train of thought; 14.1b would follow logically after 12.31a, while 14.1a repeats 12.31a almost verbatim... Moreover, ch. 13 is a self-contained unit, composed in the style of an encomium on a virtue so familiar in Greek literature'. Many years ago, Johannes Weiss argued that the chapter originally stood somewhere other than in its present position, perhaps after ch. 8. Jean Hering and others have agreed. Without committing himself regarding its original placement, Hans Conzelmann suggested that 'the passage must be expounded in the first instance on its own. At one point, Anton Fridrichsen even argued that ch. 13 was a Christian-Stoic diatribe added to 1 Corinthians by a later hand, though he later rejected this view.

In 1959, Eric L. Titus suggested—apparently independently of Fridrichsen's initial position—that 1 Corinthians 13 might be a nonPauline interpolation. Perhaps in part because Titus' article is brief (less than four pages) and because it appeared in one of the less wellknown journals, it has not, in my judgment, received the scholarly attention it deserves. Indeed, Jerome Murphy-O'Connor, in his discussion of possible interpolations in 1 Corinthians, fails even to mention

1 Corinthians 13. To be sure, Titus' suggestion has occasionally been noted, but it has almost always been rejected, and Gordon D. Fee goes so far as to label it 'criticism run amok'. So far as I am aware, however, no one has submitted Titus' work to a detailed critical examination or undertaken an independent study of the possibility that 1 Corinthians 13 is non-Pauline. It is my intention, therefore, to argue that 1 Corinthians 13 is in fact a non-Pauline interpolation—that is, that it was both composed by someone other than Paul and inserted at its present location in the Corinthian letter by someone other than Paul.

. . .

6. Conclusion

It is my judgment that 1 Cor. 12.31b-14.la forms an independent, selfcontained unit, that it was not originally located between chs. 12 and 14, that it was not composed by Paul, and that it was inserted in the Corinthian letter by someone other than Paul. Titus suggests that the interpolation may have been made by someone who 'disagreed with Paul's exaltation of prophecy and "corrected" it in terms of his [sic] own evaluation of love as the supreme way'. Titus also suggests that the interpolation 'has served its purpose well', because, 'after reading the inspiring panegyric on love, the force of chapter 14 with its stress on prophecy is lost to the average reader, so that he [sic] scarcely knows that it is there at all'. Another possibility, of course, is that 1 Corinthians 13 was inserted into the Corinthian letter by someone who, for whatever reason, assumed it to be Pauline in origin and, again for whatever reason, decided to place it between what we now know as chs. 12 and 14