38 Michael A. Rudolph and lexical use. If one also considered the hortatory skewing of the first expositional statement, one might add a cohesive shift in mood. Yet these two, seemingly unrelated statements, reflect a cohesive dialogue. While this discourse differs significantly from the biblical focus of Guthrie’s study, it does illustrate that an apparent lack of “cohesion,” as defined by Guthrie’s methodology, is not a guarantee of a structural boundary45. It should be noted that what Guthrie is attempting to do is to ascertain divisions in the text by noting the lack of a linguistic feature intended to connect the text. If textual division and cohesion were uniformly, inversely related, this model would work, but they are not as this illustration shows. Vanhoye states, “De fait, lorsqu’un auteur soigne ses transitions,—et c’est le cas dans notre épître—, la rupture de cohésion entre la dernière phrase d’une section et la première de la section suivante peut sembler presque inexistante. Dans d’ autres cas, une rupture de cohésion peut se produire à l’intérieur d’une unité littéraire”46. This problem may have arisen from Guthrie’s decision to view cohesion as synonymous with coherence47. They are not synonymous and the distinction is significant. Eggins states, “[C]ohesion is not the only component of texture. Not only must a text ongoingly create its own cohesion, but so also a text must relate in relatively stable, coherent ways to the context in which it is functioning to mean”48. Eggins brings out the 45 Brown and Yule state, “It is, of course, easy to find texts, in the sense of contiguous sentences which we readily co-interpret, which display few, if any, explicit markers of cohesive relations. . . . [Conversely,] formal cohesion will not guarantee identification as a text nor . . . will it guarantee textual coherence”. Brown and Yule, Discourse Analysis, 196–97. 46 Vanhoye, review of George H. Guthrie, The Structure of Hebrews: A Text-Linguistic Analysis, Bib 76, no. 4 (1995) 590. Translation: “In fact, when an author pays attention to his transitions,—and this is the case in our epistle—, the break in cohesion between the last sentence of a section and the first of the following section can seem almost nonexistent. In other cases, a break in cohesion can present itself within a literary unit”. 47 See Guthrie, Structure, 49–50, n. 9. Guthrie states, “Use of the term ‘cohesion’ in the present study follows the definition of Halliday and Hasan and may be used interchangeably with the concept of coherence”. See also Guthrie, “Shifts and Stitches,” 38, n. 6. Guthrie perhaps falls victim here to the confusing definitions of competing schools of linguistic thought and the delicate nuances of linguistic terminology. 48 S. Eggins, An Introduction to Systemic Functional Linguistics (2d ed.; London 2004), 53. For a less technical discussion of these terms, see D.A. Black, Linguistics for Students of New Testament Greek: A Survey of Basic Concepts and Applications (2d ed.; Grand Rapids 1995), 171. Black states, “Cohesion is a syntactic category and refers to the means of linking sentences into larger syntactical units. . . . Coherence, on the other hand, is a semantic dimension of meaning and refers to the various ways in which readers make sense of a text”. See also Reed, “Discourse Analysis as New Testament Hermeneutic,” 234, who brings out the sense of coherency as one’s ability to understand meaning when he states, “Surprisingly, despite all of the barriers confronting successful communication we