Jews and Gentiles in Romans 1–3: Clues from Cohesive Chains and Grammatical Metaphor

Abstract

In this dissertation, I explore to address the problem of the identity of Paul’s interlocutor(s) in Rom 1–3 and the subsequent issue of whether Paul only includes non-Jewish Gentiles as recipients of his gospel teaching. In order to deal with the research question in a linguistically informed manner, I draw from Systemic Functional Linguistics and use two related notions of cohesive chains and grammatical metaphor (nominalization). By applying both methods to the text, I identify twenty-three active cohesive chains and five most important instances of nominalization in the text. Based on the linguistic data elicited solely by examining the interaction patterns among the chains and by explicating the various textual effects that nominalization brings about, I conclude that the linguistic evidence points to the possibility that the interlocutor is an ethnically Jewish man and Paul thus does not exclude his fellow Jews from his presentation of the gospel in Rom 1–3.