Hey, Jude

We had big old rain yesterday, as may have been covered on the news. It didn't go on for too long but was pretty hard while coming down. To give you an idea of how hard it was coming down; we have a locust clinging to our living room window that has been there since the initial downpour at dinner time yesterday. It's still there because it appears to have had a couple of its legs knocked off. There hasn't been any more flooding on campus that we know of.

I've really been getting into something that looks like it will be worthwhile but challenging and time consuming. In my discourse class, I have the option of doing either a term paper or a final exam. I originally thought that I might just do the final exam, for simplicity's sake. The term paper is more an option for those who are currently working with a language project and have immediate need for the discourse analysis skills that we're learning. I don't actually have a project that I'm working on but I do have something that I've been curious about for a while: The Message paraphrase of the Bible.

Here's how The Message promo describes it:

But more than that, it was meant to be understood. It was first written in the language of the people—of fishermen, shopkeepers, and carpenters. The Message gets back to that: You can read it and understand it. In The Message Remix, there are new verse-numbered paragraphs that will help you study and find favorite passages. Or, you can just read it like a book and let the narrative impact you. After all, it is God’s story, with its heroes and villains, conflicts and resolutions. Either way, it’s God’s Word—the Truth—in a user-friendly form.

The promo states that it is useful for 2 things: studying favorite passages and being impacted through narrative reading. I have had bad vibes about relying on passages in The Message as accurate representations of the source text, in terms of either notional or surface. However, my vibes have been largely unsubstantiated. Suddenly, after reading Longacre's analysis of 1 John, I see a method for discerning whether this is actually the case. If it is a narrative, then it has peaks. The peaks, whether they are action or didactic, should correspond to those in the source text (Greek) but represented in the peak structures of the language of translation (English).

Finally, I may put to rest my itching suspicions, one way or another. Is it the conspiracy theorist in me that responds to this paraphrase or the global observationist? As long as the quest doesn't become overwhelming in its scope, this may be my season to answer that question.

Along those lines, I have done an initial clause-charting of Jude, in The Message form. I am stymied in my participant referent color-coding by verses 22-23: are the "they" in these verses the same "they" referred to in the entirety of the preceding text? Jude gives pretty scathing descriptions of the "some people" (v4) throughout the letter. He describes what their plan is (v4). He gives the historical examples of that type of person which precede this current type; the fallen angels (v6) and Sodom and Gomorrah (v7). He outlines their sin-systems (v8, 10, 12, 16, 18-19). He even paints a sad metaphorical picture of them (end of v12). Can it be that, at the end, Jude reorients the reader to these "some people" by instructing us in a Christian approach to "them", despite their aforementioned sins and character flaws? At this, my first look at Jude in The Message from a discourse perspective, it appears that the ba-dam-ching (it's a technical term, really) occurs after the phrase "but not soft on sin" (v23). All preceding text provides supporting evidence for that conclusion. Just a theory. I'm working on it.

I'd love to hear any perspectives on this.