Thanks for all the replies. Now that I've had a bit of time to lick my wounds, I'm going to try my next round of agents without the paragraph and see what happens.
I'm with those who question whether the rejections were made because of that one paragraph. It's more likely that the paragraph was pointed to as a symptom of a larger issue - possibly a larger issue they see hints of in the first three chapters and fear may be prevalent throughout the book, since these were rejections of partials.