zettelkasten

The monomyth is the most general or universal narrative pattern in the Bible. It takes more specific forms as well, including these:

1. The quest, in which a hero struggles to reach a goal, undergoing obstacles and temporary defeat before achieving success.
2. The death-rebirth motif, in which a hero endures death or danger and returns to life or security.
3. The initiation, in which a character is thrust out of an existing, usually ideal, situation and undergoes a series of ordeals as he or she encounters various forms of evil or hardship for the first time.
4. The journey, in which characters encounter danger and experience growth as they move from one place to another.
5. Tragedy, or the more specific form of the fall from innocence, depicting a decline from bliss to woe.
6. Comedy, a U-shaped story that begins in prosperity, descends into tragedy, but rises to a happy ending as obstacles to success are overcome.
7. Crime and punishment.
8. The temptation, in which someone becomes the victim of an evil tempter or temptress.
9. The rescue.
10. The suffering servant motif, in which a character undergoes undeserved suffering for the benefit of others.
11. The Cinderella or rags-to-riches motif, in which a character overcomes the obstacles of ostracism and poverty.
12. The movement from ignorance to epiphany (insight, illumination).
    p. 49
    

In the gospel of John, the type scene of the misunderstood statement occurs nine times and consist of three elements: Jesus makes a pronouncement, a bystander expresses a misunderstanding of the utterance, and Jesus proceeds to explain the meaning of the statement. In the book of Acts, the following cycle of events is repeated: God raises up leaders who preach the gospel; they perform mighty works; crowds are drawn and many hearers are converted; opposition and persecution arise against the leaders; God intervenes to rescue them.
p. 51

With the genre and main idea of the poem identified, the next logical step is to lay out the unity and structure of the poem. Here the aim is to give an overview of the entire poem and to provide clear pathways through it. There are several dimensions to the structure of a poem. Every poem has its own topical units based on either changing ideas or changing images. It is important to mark out the successive units in a poem, thereby showing the flow of thought or feeling.
Structure also depends on the type of material that dominates a poem. There are four possibilities. If a poem is mainly a description of either a character or a scene, it has a descriptive structure. If it presents a sequence of ideas or emotions, it has an expository structure. Narrative structure occurs if the main material is a sequence of events. If the dominant element is an address by the speaker to a listener, the poem has a dramatic structure. Many poems consist of a combination of these, but there is great merit in choosing one of them as the way in which an explicator has chosen to organize the poem for a given occasion. We are not in quest for the one right way to formulate the structure. What we need is a clear path- way through the poem, even when it is selected from two or more options.
Other structural schemes may be important for a given poem. In the previous chapter I noted that lyrics tend to have a three-part structure. In the next chapter we will see that praise psalms have their own version of three-part structure and that lament psalms have five main elements. If a poem is strongly repetitive, in effect maintaining a single principle in different guises, the term repetitive structure is helpful. If a poem consists of a series of ideas that march by a process of logic to a conclusion, we can speak of logical structure. A poem that mainly lists various aspects of a topic can best be identified as structured on the catalogue principle.
Many lyric poems are written at the white heat of emotion. They follow the very flow of a speaker's consciousness and jump abruptly from one subject to another. It is futile to look for a logical flow of ideas in such a poem. The point of unity is that it is all happening in the mind and consciousness of the speaker. The best designation for such a structure is psychological structure. Many lament psalms furnish examples.
One of the most helpful things that was ever pointed out to me about poems was that most of them are organized around one or more contrasts. Perhaps this is the poetic equivalent of plot conflict in a story. In any case, one should always look for the principle of contrast in a poem. Psalm 1 is organized around a contrast between two ways of life. Lament psalms contrast the helpless victim and the oppressive foe, as well as portraying a tension between the speaker's emotional terror and confidence in God.
p. 209

The journey and quest motifs are obviously important in the pat- terns I have noted. The outward expansion of the church is not a random wandering but a purposeful quest to conquer the world with the Christian gospel. There is a strong sense of movement toward a goal. Of course, there is a surprise at the very end of the book. The story ends abruptly, with Paul's mission to Rome left incomplete. This open-ended conclusion is an impressive version of the technique of the serial story, with its premise "to be continued." The story told in the Book of Acts did not end but is still continuing.
All this emphasis on travel and geography helps to supply some of the master images that unify the story. Chief among these are the journey and the city. The journeys of the apostles and missionaries assume the symbolic force of "the Way" (see 9:2; 16:17; 18:26; 19:9, 23; 24:14, 22). The journey of Paul as a prisoner bound for Rome has the overtones of a Via Dolorosa (the way of sorrow; that is, the way of the cross), a journey of suffering for Christ. The image of the city also recurs in the story and is one of the things that gives the Book of Acts its modern flavor.
Along with the progressive element in the story, the book is struc- tured on a cyclic principle. The following pattern is repeated through- out the book in an ever-widening spiral: Christian leaders arise and preach the gospel; God performs mighty acts through them; listeners are converted and added to the church; opponents (usually Jewish) begin to persecute the Christian leaders; God intervenes to rescue the leaders or otherwise protect the church.2
Geography is a major organizing principle in the Book of Acts. I have already noted that the progression of the plot involves geographic expansion outward from Jerusalem. The story begins in Jerusalem and ends in Rome, and there is a symbolic importance in this strategy. Jerusalem represents the Jewish roots from which Christianity arose. Rome is the capital of the Gentile world. The geographical transfer that occurs in the Book of Acts is also a theological transfer.
The foregoing discussion of the structure of the book suggests why some commentators have ascribed an epic quality to Acts. The story has epic sweep. It is the story not of an individual but of a whole group. The epic sense of destiny breathes through the book. Equally epic is the expansion of the action over vast stretches of geography.
p. 421

The traits of both form and content that I have noted in the Christ hymns of the New Testament are epitomized in the hymn found in Colossians 1#1:15-20. This Christ hymn consists of two companion poems. The first exalts Christ's supremacy over creation, while the second extols his headship over the church. The impact of companion poems depends on our tracing the parallels between the two parts. hymn, everything in the first poem corresponds to something in the this second. In figure 2 the two poems are printed with lines that show the connections, and I leave it to my readers to ponder what those cor- respondences are.
The keynote of the companion poems is the idea of supremacy. The best index to this emphasis is the recurrence of the words all and everything: all creation, all things (a total of five times), in everything, all the fulness. et diw
The companion poems of Colossians 1 encapsulate the New Testa- ment forms I have discussed in this chapter. They are poetic in form. Their lines have the concise, memorable quality that we associate with the proverbial quality of New Testament literature. The passage shares the lyric quality of much of the New Testament and falls into the specific New Testament genre of the Christ hymn.
p. 451