30 Michael A. Rudolph studies8, and because his methodology, which has been described as eclectic, offers the opportunity to consider some of the critical principles of linguistics without being restricted to one school of thought. It is the thesis of this study that the contribution of linguistics to biblical studies will not significantly progress unless certain critical, linguistic principles are adequately understood and appropriately applied. 2. AN OVERVIEW OF GUTHRIE’S METHODOLOGY Guthrie does not provide a formal definition for “Cohesion Shift Analysis” in his monograph, nor in his later article, although his discussion is descriptive of what it is and what it seeks to achieve (see below). His student, Mark Taylor, however does. Taylor states, “Cohesion shift analysis . . . is a means of probing the cohesion dynamics of a text in order to discern where significant linguistic shifts occur in discourse. These shifts can then be analysed in light of other dynamics of the text to determine if the shift represents an intended boundary marker in the text”9. The first two steps of the process (i.e., grammatical and constituent analysis) are not unlike the work any other biblical scholar would utilize in exegesis. The block diagram format Guthrie chooses to depict these syntactical relationships in his grammatical analysis may be unfamiliar to some10, but the observations are typical. In a somewhat similar fashion to most standard grammars, Guthrie’s constituent analysis examines the logical relationships between clauses or groups of clauses. If anything, Guthrie’s work here may be more thorough, or comprehensive than some and the terminology somewhat different, but the observations are, once again, typical of most exegetical works11. 8 M.E. Taylor, A Text-Linguistic Investigation into the Discourse Structure of James (LNTS 311; London 2006) xi; M.E. Taylor and G.H. Guthrie, “The Structure of James,” CBQ 68, no. 4 (2006) 681; R. Van Neste, Cohesion and Structure in the Pastoral Epistles (JSNTSup 280; London 2004) 9, 14–16. While Taylor was more closely mentored by Guthrie, the influence of Guthrie’s methodology upon Van Neste is also evident. 9 Taylor, The Discourse Structure of James, 45. For Guthrie’s description, see Guthrie, Structure, 54; or G.H. Guthrie, “Cohesion Shifts and Stitches in Philippians,” in S.E. Porter and D.A. Carson (eds.), Discourse Analysis and Other Topics in Biblical Greek (JSNTSup 113; Sheffield 1995) 39. 10 See, G.H. Guthrie and J.S. Duvall, Biblical Greek Exegesis: A Graded Approach to Learning Intermediate and Advanced Greek (Grand Rapids 1998) 27–37. 11 Ibid., 39–52. For a somewhat different approach to labeling propositional relationships, see K. Callow, Man and Message: A Guide to Meaning-Based Text Analysis (Lanham, Md. 1998), 249–300; and Larson, Meaning-Based Translation, 297–377.