Master's Theses

Department

English

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Abstract

This thesis is an exhaustive study of the words of Jesus which appear in the Synoptic Gospels. The purpose of the study is to show that Hebrew poetical parallelism is the major literary characteristic of the recorded words of Jesus. No consideration is given to theological problems or to the problems of date, authorship, and destination of the books. The structure of the thesis is based upon a chronological outline of the life of Jesus. The chapters consist of passages arranged to illustrate their poetical nature. A detailed analysis follows each of the passages in the first two chapters. However, chapters three and four consist only of the passages arranged in poetical form. Paul M. Biays, a graduate of Fort Hays Kansas State College, wrote a thesis in 1962 titled "Parallelism in Romans." He identified the various types of parallel construction and traced the history of parallelism as a literary device. In 1964, Tracey R. Miller produced a thesis titled "Parallelism in James," which illustrated that parallelism is a major literary characteristic of that book. The present study assumes that the reader is acquainted with the theses of Biays and Miller. Such an assumption negates the need for the definition of technical terms or an explanation of the types of parallelism. For the sake of consistency with the existing theses, and for the sake of textual accuracy, the American Standard Version of the Bible is used throughout this study. The thesis shows, as Biays did with Romans and Miller did with James that Hebrew parallelism occurs so frequently in the words of Jesus it is a major literary characteristic. However, this statement is made concerning only the words of Jesus which appear in Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

Keywords

Comparison, Religion, Jesus in history-thought-and culture, Bible, Literature, Ministry

Advisor

Dr. Samuel M. Hamilton

Date of Award

Summer 1966

Document Type

Thesis - campus only access

Rights

© The Author(s)

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