Comments on suggested chiasms by Bullinger and others

This text is from a letter written by David Gooding in 2008.

Bullinger was certainly a very high-powered literary scholar, as is manifest in his other work, Figures of Speech in The Bible. But a general observation of his work and the work of others would be that there is a potential weakness.

When a suggested chiasm depends on noticing that the first story in the chiasm is a miracle, and the last story is a miracle—fair enough. But must we not also consider what the two miracles were about?

To look at Luke 8 to illustrate what I mean, one could say that the deliverance of the demoniac was a miracle, and so was the healing of the woman with haemorrhage a miracle; but the detail of each story shows that they were very different miracles. The woman's haemorrhage was not caused by a legion of demons within her—and to have suggested that it was, might well have driven the poor lady into deep despair.

In other words, a miracle at the beginning and at the end of a chiasm can certainly be significant; but it is not necessarily significant enough to justify the proposed chiasm. One would do better to ask to study the detail of the first miracle and the issues at stake in it, and whether those details have any connection in thought with the paragraph that immediately follows the miracle; or whether the miracle is in thought unconnected with both what precedes it and what follows it.

In other words, one ought first to consider the thought flow within the record of the first miracle, and then one ought to do the same with the thought flow within the record of the last miracle.

Yours sincerely,