I mentioned that I first got interested in the textual problem of Luke 22:43-44 (“the bloody sweat”) when I was taking a graduate seminar at Princeton Theological Seminary, my first year in the doctoral program. The seminar was devoted (the entire semester) to the Greek exegesis of Luke. My fellow student, Mark Plunkett, presented a seminar paper in which he dealt with the passage. He was not at all interested in the textual question of whether vv. 43-44 were original. He was assuming that there were not, but it had nothing to do with his presentation. In his presentation he argued that there was a clear structure to the passage of Jesus’ prayer before being arrested (in Luke’s source this takes place in the Garden of Gethsemane, but Luke doesn’t say so) and he made a convincing argument (to my mind). And then I realized that the structural argument was relevant to the textual problem of whether the verses were original or not. While we moved on to other things in the seminar that afternoon, and someone else was talking, I leaned over to Mark and told him what I had just realized, and told him we should write an article on it. He had the structural argument, and I knew the textual situation with the manuscripts and so on. Neither of us had never written an article before. So we decided to do it.
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Very interesting. Are there other chiasmus that are found/directly related to any texts found in Nag Hammadi. What period can the chiasmus be dated? Is there any obvious correlations?
None that I know of. But I have’nt studied the Nag Hammadi texts carefully enough in Coptic to know for sure.