上下文解經：雅各書第三章13節至第四章17節中的銜接性分析

Context Matters: An Analysis of Cohesion in James 3:13-4:17

劉加恩(Chia-En Liu)

《華神期刊》 13期 (2022/12) Pp. 64-84

並列摘要

Context plays an essential role in interpretation because every literary items should be understood on the basis of the relationship between it and its neighboring elements. Following the same pattern, one should interpret a discourse without taking it apart from its context. There are at least two levels of contexts: historical and literary contexts. Historical critics have employed different disciplines to reconstruct the historical context. In contrast, other scholars have proposed many details to identify elements that highlight the logical flow of this text within the literary context, which is the co-text. Nevertheless, what can be done to determine the role of context in a text is still under debate. In order to identify the function of the co-text in the sense of interpretation, scholars argue that a repeated term, rhetorical question, usages of verbs and nouns, and analysis of the exact keywords will serve the function of interpreting a text within its co-text. It is still unclear, however, to determine exactly what the term "repetition" means. Therefore, tracing cohesion in a text is important to tease out the idea of repetition. In other words, cohesion serves to identify the relationship of items within a given text and can be traced by the employment of these concepts. This paper will focus on different types of "repetition," which is an important criterion for determining cohesion in terms of lexical and grammatical patterns. Methodologically, this paper will employ the model of textual metafunction to realize how a text is glued together. Furthermore, the continuity in the epistle of James has been a notorious problem for decades. Some scholars argue that there is no coherence in the whole book, whereas others propose different models to demonstrate the continuity of the pericopes in James. Hence, it will be a good place to test the methodology in the book of James. This paper provides a framework of the function of the co-text to argue that the passage James 3:13-4:17 is cohesive and the wisdom from above and from below in 3:13-18 controls the discussion of friends of God and the world in 4:1-17.