Eberhard W. Güting and David L. Mealand, Asyndeton in Paul: A Text-critical and Statistical Inquiry into Pauline Style

This interesting volume is divided into an introduction and three parts.The introduction (pp.1-23) discusses asyndeton in relation to ancient rhetoric and modern linguistics, goes on to describe the text-critical methodology that will be followed, and then finally summarises the place of asyndeton within Paul's style.The kind of criticism that is adopted is a reasoned balance of external and internal criteria.It begins with the former, but it acknowledges the presence of error in even the best manuscripts: 'We need to analyse the tendencies of particular texts, and of groups of manuscripts, in order to recognize attempts to improve the text grammatically or stylistically' (p.8).The authors follow Zuntz in accepting that the critic's task is to recover the oldest available text of the Corpus Paulinum (p. 9) (Zuntz 1953: 12).There is some direct overlap with Zuntz's work, since the book examines the text of Romans and 1 and 2 Corinthians (Zuntz concentrated on 1 Corinthians and Hebrews).In addition, a few other passages are discussed; for example, 1 Thess.5.3 (p.38).2. The first section (pp.25-66) is concerned with the text-critical part of the book's title.It is called (in the running titles, though it is nameless in the table of contents) ' Asyndeton, text and style' .The first part of this states the main thesis of the section, that 'In nearly all instances secondary particles have asserted themselves in the shorter syntactical units presented by the tradition' (p.25).If I understand what is written here aright, there is also a tendency in the tradition to turn 'long and more complex sentence structures' into 'short energetical sentences' (p.25).These tendencies are then analysed in nineteen passages.The study then turns to a number of specific uses of asyndeta in Paul: in 'argument and statement' , 'instructions referring to alternatives' , 'paraenetic paragraphs' , 'interrogative sentences' , 'the interrogative formula ' , 'serial elements' , and 'contrasted elements' .There is then a brief (one page) summary of the section.3. The careful analysis which is conducted uses examples where the text is sure, in order to establish it where it is not.In addition, the tendencies of particular manuscripts can be a guide in certain places.For