Linguistic Tools for Identifying the Structure of the Gospel of John

• Autores: Jenny Read-Heimerdinger
• Localización: Filología neotestamentaria, ISSN 0214-2996, Vol. 38, Nº. 58, 2025, págs. 27-46
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • For the past 40 years or so, linguists have been working on aspects of Koine Greek that operate outside the domain of traditional sentence grammar. The overall purpose has been to identify principles of the language that function above the level of the sentence (discourse analysis). In this work, there is a focus on the cohesion of a text and, in recent applications of the approach, attention has been paid to analysing how authors structured their writings. By explaining and applying the tools that discourse analysis provides, this paper explores the structure of John's Gospel. The text of two manuscripts, Codex Vaticanus and Codex Bezae, is used for this study in preference to the familiar eclectic text which has been reconstructed without the application of discourse analysis tools. The narrative text of John's Gospel in the two manuscripts is analysed by paying exhaustive attention first, to the occurrence of connectives between sentences and secondly, to the word order of sentences in relation to the main verb. In this way, the organisation of the book is seen to emerge, from the overall macro-structure down through the hierarchical levels to the smallest units. The application of the resultant narrative framework to exegetical and theological study of John's Gospel is suggested as an avenue of study opened up by the analysis.