A Syntactical Analysis of oὖν in Papyrus 66 97 the commandment and the words that he speaks. Recall that although οὖν appears post-positively, in the second position, it relates the main clause to the previous sentences. Jesus knows that the commandments of the Father have life; therefore, he speaks the things he hears. In the above analysis, it has been observed that the Gospel prefers to use οὖν in narrative and dialogue sections and not extended speeches. Where it does occur in discourse, it is not in customary use for John; rather, it functions to highlight a comparison. It is not our goal to explain the relative absence of οὖν in discourses by saying that John borrowed this syntax from a different source or that he attempted to represent the Aramaic speech of Jesus. Hypothesizing concerning the cause of this phenomenon is beyond the scope of this article, but a grammatical ex- planation, dealing with the text itself, is fitting. Barnabas Lindars notes, “Differences noted (e.g. by Schweitzer) between the Greek of the narra- tives and the discourses are probably no more than is inevitable in the handling of different kinds of subject matter”90. Because these speeches are typically explanatory and do not recount narrative, they focus on logical instead of chronological connections, so we should not expect οὖν to be used in a continuative manner. But this still leaves us in need of an explanation for the paucity of occurrence of the inferential οὖν. Perhaps, the inferential use of οὖν was not common in Hellenistic speech but is more inclined to writing. This conjecture warrants testing in a broader corpus than the Gospel of John. IV. Unique Use of Οὖν in John 7:53-8:11 Critical commentaries have documented the stylistic deviation between 7:53-8:11 and the rest of the Gospel. The external testimony against its originality includes its absence from the Alexandrian text family includ- ing P66. I will limit the investigation of the syntactical differences to an analysis of its use of οὖν. I note here the infrequency of οὖν, the less common use of οὖν, and the overuse of connectives especially δέ91. First, every other dialogue in the Gospel that contains more than 2 speakers also includes multiple uses of οὖν. In fact, one expects the Gospel to in- dicate speaker switches at least sometimes through οὖν. The continuative use of οὖν, so frequent in the Gospel as a whole, is absent from 7:53-8:11. 90 Lindars, Gospel, 46. 91 Poythress attempts to establish patterned uses of conjunctions in the Gospel of John, and then he compares this usage to disputed passages. He concludes from this analysis that 7:53-8:11 is from a different author (“Testing for Johannine Authorship”, 353, 361-2).