Beyond Guthrie?: Text-linguistics and New Testament Studies 29 one reason for this struggle. For the interpretation of modern literature where the receiver is bombarded with obvious structural signals (e.g., indentation, headings, chapter titles, a table of contents, bold or italicized fonts, marginal summary statements, etc.), this task is often so straightforward that one need not hone an interpretive sensitivity to these issues. For the interpretation of the ancient, biblical text, where space was precious and could not be wasted upon such convenient, visual signals and where these visual signals would have been essentially wasted in communication to an orally/aurally-based society, this interpretive task is no longer so straightforward for the modern interpreter. Several recent studies have sought to utilize the insights of linguistics, as developed within secular disciplines, to bridge this gap in biblical studies. The results, to date, have failed to impress. Carson states, “[O]ne . . . area in which considerable work has been done, but which has, so far, had relatively little impact on Biblical Studies . . . is the study of Greek, especially as nourished by the burgeoning field of linguistics”5. The confusion regarding terminology and methodology, within both the fields of biblical studies and the larger field of linguistics, has no doubt contributed to this failure6. Recent applications of text-linguistics to the study of Hebrews are illustrative of this failure7. One must ask, “Is the application of linguistics to biblical studies an interpretive dead-end? Can its perceived promise of objectivity justify the intellectual expense, or even produce consistent results? While a thorough analysis of linguistic issues foundational to these questions and a survey of past applications of linguistics to biblical studies fall beyond the scope of this limited study, an evaluation of one recent example may prove informative and offer suggestions for moving the discussion forward. For this, the methodology of Cohesion Shift Analysis, as developed by George Guthrie, has been chosen. His work is particularly suited for this study because it has been described in detail in several places, because his work has proven influential in subsequent 5 D. A. Carson, “Reflections Upon a Johannine Pilgrimage,” in T. Thatcher (ed.), What We Have Heard from the Beginning: The Past, Present, and Future of Johannine Studies (Waco, TX 2007) 97. 6 For a summary of competing schools of thought, see S.E. Porter, “Discourse Analysis and New Testament Studies,” in Discourse Analysis and Other Topics in Biblical Greek (JSNTSup 113; Sheffield 1995) 24–34. 7 For differing structural conclusions from scholars each utilizing discourse analysis, see Linda Lloyd Neeley, “A Discourse Analysis of Hebrews,” OPTT 3–4 (1987) 41, 66, 86, 114; Guthrie, Structure, 144; Westfall, Hebrews, 299–301. Cf., Vanhoye, Structure of Hebrews, 32–40, whose approach utilizes a similar methodology.