Interludes: The Adulteress's Chiasm

I admit I'm a little bit excited about this one.

The Pericopae Adulterae is the famous passage in GJn (and some manuscripts of GLk) describing a woman caught in adultery who is brought to Jesus.  Jesus says the famous words "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone", and her accusers leave.  Jesus then forgives her and sends her away.

Its presence in GJn, however, (or in GLk) is notoriously unstable in the manuscript traditions (with many textual variants), though not conclusively so.  Wikipedia provides a good summary.  The language is generally considered non-Johannine, though this is disputed.

Leaving all of this aside, I've discovered something else about the pericope, independent of any theory as to its origins:

It has a chiasm.

Here it is:

Interludes: The Crucifixion Chiasm

I'd hoped to be making a series of posts about various chiasms in GMk, based on the work of Michael Turton.  Turton does truly admirable work in teasing out these chaisms and gets a lot right.  He has my deep respect.  Sometimes however I think he makes a mistake here and there, throwing off the structure of the chiasm in general.  However, I'm discovering that these chiasms really can be subtle, and there are numerous questions about how the canonical redactor might have changed this or that pericope, what verses (or even words) are truly original to GMk, and so on.  So this project is on hold right now.

But there is one chiasm that I feel confident I have discovered the correct structure for.  It's the crucifixion scene itself, and this weekend seemed like an appropriate time to post it.  (Yesterday would have been better, of course, but I ran out of time.)

And here it is.  Turton's brackets from his own chiasm for the crucifixion are in black capital letters; my revisions are in capital red letters.  Where my revisions supplant Turton's work, I have used a strike-through.

A Chiasm for Secret Mark

I wanted to take a brief break from discussing the Didache to touch on the Gospel of Mark.  I have been hypothesizing that there was a pre-canonical version of GMk that the Q author used, and since this hypothesis forms a part of my structure for the composition of the Unforgivable Sin logon, this would be a good time to discuss that pre-canonical version of GMk.  I regard this version as identical with Secret Mark, and I'll show one reason why I think so: because Secret Mark exhibits the distinctly Markan features that Michael Turton has uncovered in his online Commentary to the Gospel of Mark.  That is, it shows the same attention to chiastic structures as Turton's Mark does.