neilgodfrey

To quote myself quoting Porter and Reed on JM in dialogue with Michael Hoffman a couple of months or so ago.....

There's no question that there are chiasmic units within texts but
the concept I'm addressing is that of the macro-chiasm that is seen
to frame the whole text and that is further used to supposedly
identify the original text.

A widely cited article is Porter and Reed's "Philippians as a macro-
chiasm and its exegetical significance" (NTS, 44, 1998, pp.213-231):

"To say that chiasm appears regularly in Hellenistic literary genres
at the clausal level would be difficult to deny since examples can
be found that correspond to the kind of clausal alternation briefly
and belatedly discussed among the ancients. But it is another matter
to claim that chiasm was regularly used as the macro-structure of a
discourse.... chiasm does not appear as a literary category in the
ancient rhetorical handbooks and is not to our knowledge a topic of
discussion among the ancients regarding any form of literary
structuring." (p.222)

Some "clausal level" rhetorical chiasms can be readily identified
and agreed upon by virtually all readers approaching the text any
which way, but as for overall structure then the case for a macro-
chiasm becomes much more subjective and debatable. To go one step
further and use such chiasmic perceptions to argue for textual
emendation seems to be essentially circular as a support for such a
macro-chiasmic structure.

Furthermore, your point about Dart's inclusion of Secret Mark within
an overall chiasmic structure of Mark underlines the fact that even
if everyone could agree on a macro-chiasm for the whole of Mark that
would by no means prove the original authenticity of the text.


I earlier asked what criteria were being used in the selection of units of text as chiasmic markers but the reply indicated a study of the criteria used would follow the praxis. The problem with this, I suspect, is the same as sceptics traditionally use against those who find inspired numbers behind texts -- would the same determined searches find the same sorts of results in, say, shopping lists? The mere fact that such a variety of contradictory chiasmic structures have been constructed for Mark over so many years suggests to me that the whole exercise is too subjective to be of scholarly value. (As for the Wonders Beyond Thule case, first: we only have a summary of this; second: the longer a work analyzed for chiasm (regardless of Porter and Reed's observations) then the greater the possibility of successfully finding some pattern through subjective selection and deselection of the matter at hand.)

Neil