The overall book-wide unit in which the Roman centurion story occurs is Matt 8:1–11:1. In closing, we will attempt some observations on what this study may show us about first-century apostolic pedagogy. Next, we will analyze the literary structure of the story, keeping in mind Dorsey’s three points for examining structured text. This broader perspective increases the likelihood that these structures originate with the biblical author and help readers understand better the author’s purposes for the passage in its context and for the passage itself. 9Before looking at its patterning, we will first examine the larger literary patterns in which the story itself forms a part. We will use as our sample study the Gospel story of Jesus’ healing of the Roman centurion’s servant as preserved for us in Matt 8:5–13. This essay will seek to put a sleeve to a window and give it a good rub in the hopes that in some small way it will let us see back to the days of the apostles and glimpse what they, perhaps, consciously embedded in the very words of their written text. Having had the opportunity to carefully read through a full-length copy of the manuscript before Dorsey sent it to the publisher, 8 I began to wonder if this was an organizing and communication technique used by the New Testament writers in the same kind of thoroughgoing way to convey and package meaning for the benefit of their readers. through the composition’s overall structureĪ literary structure’s reach can be at the overall book-wide level or extend down to sub-sections at multiple levels within a book.When approaching an OT text, Dorsey explains that literary structure conveys meaning in three primary ways: It is fascinating to see the cognitive link between the patterning development testing that the nurse was doing with my young son and the consistent use of these very same patterns as foundational “literary packaging” 6designed to preserve and pass on history and instruction, in this instance, to Israel throughout the OT era. 4 Dorsey has provided extensive, sensible patterning examples (most as chiasms) of this, supplying with commentary the overall pattern for each book, the patterns for each of their sub-points, and sometimes those of the third level as well. His argument is quiet but persistent and compelling that the OT text exhibits a conscious surface structure designed to convey meaning. 3After years of research and careful analysis of the Hebrew, his work is a compendium of the fruits of his labors in each Old Testament book. Dorsey has plausibly demonstrated that such patterning techniques (parallelism, symmetry/chiasm) comprise a common writing format used in each book of the OT to convey meaning and even to grace simultaneously linear chronological accounts. In a landmark study on Hebrew literary structure in the Old Testament, 2David A. Such patterning ability was considered an important marker of cognitive development. In time this progressed to short sequences and then longer ones, where she might line up a row of blocks in the order of red to blue to green to yellow and see if he could follow the pattern and create on his own the same arrangement. At first, she would randomly pick out any colored block, say a blue block, and see if he could associate color and pick out the same colored block. As our son grew a little older, she began to bring colored toy blocks for him to play with. Under the National Healthcare System that was provided, we were periodically visited at home by a district nurse. At the time I was doing my post-graduate work in New Testament studies at Kings College at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, my wife gave birth to our second child, a son.
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