Beyond Guthrie?: Text-linguistics and New Testament Studies 31 Although Guthrie notes the necessity of keeping the larger view in focus as one examines the details of micro-analysis, his analysis in these initial steps is heavily weighted toward these details and only gradually moves to the consideration of the text as a whole12. In defense of this essentially “bottom-up” approach Guthrie argues, “In analyzing each colon separately, the researcher is able to focus on the author’s propositions which are central to his argument”13. He further asserts, “To understand the function of a paragraph unit in the broader discourse one must first understand the various functions of the clauses that make up the paragraph”14. With the third step, which is further sub-divided into four parts, Guthrie reaches the heart of his methodology: the identification of unit boundaries. The first part involves an examination of the cohesion of a text for the purpose of noting seams where the cohesive dynamics are disrupted. He argues these cohesive shifts are suggestive of structural boundaries in the author’s text. Referencing Halliday and Hasan for support, Guthrie defines cohesion as the “semantic property of a text which gives the text unity, . . . a network of relationships, some grammatical and others lexical”15. He offers various criteria which may be evaluated to gain an objective analysis of these cohesive shifts: “genre, 12 G.H. Guthrie, “Discourse Analysis,” in D.A. Black and D.S. Dockery (eds.), Interpreting the New Testament: Essays on Methods and Issues (Nashville 2001), 260. Guthrie states, “To perform a thorough discourse analysis, one must, in essence, move back and forth between the micro- and macrolevels of the discourse, engaging in exegesis both on and above the sentence and paragraph level”. Guthrie continues by describing a procedure slightly modified from his monograph on Hebrews, yet the overall flow of microlevel (grammatical and constituent analysis), to macrolevel (the identification of unit boundaries), to microlevel (analyzing the internal structure of each unit), and once again to macrolevel (analyzing the relationship and progression between units) is the same. It should be noted, however, that Guthrie’s first examination of the “macrolevel” does not extend beyond identifying paragraph, or unit boundaries. Thus, it is not until the last step that Guthrie appears to consider the text as a whole. Hence, while he suggests an interplay between these various levels of analysis, in practice, he is essentially moving from details to the larger picture, i.e., a “bottom-up” approach. See further discussion below. 13 Guthrie, Structure, 47, n. 4. 14 Guthrie, “Shifts and Stitches,” 38. 15 Guthrie, Structure, 49–50. For Guthrie’s discussion of confusion regarding this term, see Ibid, 49–50, n. 9. Cf., Halliday and Hasan, Cohesion in English, 4–6; and particularly, K. Berger, Exegese des Neuen Testaments: Neue Wege vom Text zur Auslegung (Heidelberg 1977), 12–17 who states, “Ein Text ist ein Netz von Beziehungen, eine kohärente Folge von Sätzen” (13). Translation: “A text is a network of relationships, a coherent sequence of sentences”. Berger’s work appears to have been at least as influential upon Guthrie’s thinking as Halliday and Hasan, appearing at critical junctures as support for his view of cohesion. (See Guthrie, Structure, 36, 47, 50, 51, 52, 54, 95, 112, compared to five references to Halliday and Hasan.) See also the discussion below.