Some Comments on Hebrews Outlines
I’ve posted a few links to various outlines for the book of Hebrews, though there are, of course, plenty of others. For summary, here are the main links:
- Nathan Brown’s Outline
- My Outline (the one I’m revising)
- David Reed’s Rhetorical Outline of the Book of Hebrews
- David Alan Black: The Problem of the Literary Structure of Hebrews: An Evaluation and a Proposal
- Bob MacDonald The Conceptual Framework of the Book of Hebrews
Dave Black commends Vanhoye’s work on the chiastic structure. I have a kind of perverse difficulty with chiasms. I tend to be skeptical of them precisely because I keep seeing them all over the place. At the same time, this is the best I’ve seen.
Bob MacDonald’s contribution helps a great deal by color coding the material and helping one to see the connections.
For a flat outline, David Reed’s outline is clear. I see it’s strengths as making the warnings stand out and connecting the doctrinal sections and exhortations. One outstanding characteristic of David’s outline is the presentation of Old Testament sources. I’m going to mention one of these in my next post.
What I’m aiming for, however, is to make the themes that carry through the book clearly visible in the outline presentation. I’m going to try a flat outline plus color-coding and see how that works.
So I’ll be commenting on all this some more as I play with it.
