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> Christianity > Bible > | |
| Outlines, and problems thereof |
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| Of the making of outlines there is no end. I give outlines to help you move between the details and the big picture of a Bible book. But you need to know they aren’t gospel truth. |
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| Outlines of biblical books are not be universally
helpful. You need to understand several things:
1. Bible books do not contain outlines themselves. They do not have chapters, sections or even paragraphs. They do sometimes contain words that imply the beginning of new sections. "And after a few days ..." or "Again he sat down to teach..." 2. There isn’t always a consensus on how to divide a book. You can examine 5 scholars and have 5 different outlines. There is no "official" outline, no church has ever voted on one. For some books there is broad agreement, for some next to no agreement. 3. What criteria should an outline be based on? Should it be some literary marker (as shown above), change of geography, change of activity, etc. It’s not always obvious. By choosing a concept to use for your sections you are making a decision about what the Bible author thought was important. 4. An outline of the A, B, C. type assumes the story can be divided into discrete episodes that occur one after the other. This may not be a good assumption for books that originated out of an oral tradition. Perhaps the outline should be a set of overlapping circles where the end of one episode is also the beginning of the next and things flow. That would be how you’d organize stories so you could memorize them. Here’s an example from the gospel of John. Unit 1: ..... Jesus knows all men. Unit 2: Now there was a certain man .... The idea is that one story or unit or episode is linked to the next. The meat of the story is in the connection of the episodes. How does a linear outline capture that? A story may be told as a set of cycles of stories (Mark’s feeding of the 5,000 and feeding of the 4,000 is an example): Unit 1: A1 B1 C1 Unit 2: A2 B2 C2 A story may be told chiastically (some parables in Luke seem to be this): Unit 1 A1 Unit 2 B1 Unit 3 C Unit 4 B2 Unit 5 A2 A story may be told as a interacting and recurring set of themes that bounce back and forth among a series of ideas (this might describe Ecclesiastes): Unit 1 A1 Unit 2 B1 Unit 3 A2 Unit 4 C1 Unit 5 B2 Unit 6 C2 Unit 7 A3 Unit 8 B3 Unit 9 A4
And there might be more alternatives. |