Matthew Outline.pdf

Since I am currently exploring the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew, it has become important to view the Sermon within its context in the Gospel. I am sure there is more to say on this topic, but I hope this tentative draft will help serve the immediate purpose. While there are other outlines of Matthew’s Gospel that propose a chiastic structure, this outline attempts to adhere to “basics" in terms of recognizing the alternating sequences of narrative and discourse sections while also paying attention to linguistic time markers (orange font) that help delimit the various pericopes. These latter time markers become especially important when they occur in otherwise unexpected places such as mid-discourse (e.g., in the 2nd discourse, between Matthew 10 and 11) or mid-narrative (e.g., in the 4th narrative, after Matthew 16:20). This outline features seven main sections of Matthew's Gospel, i.e., as long as we just count the letters A through D (and view X as within the central section D). This outline also shows how each main section breaks down, mostly into discourse-narrative pairs. I have also shown some of the more notable verbal and thematic repetition that occurs (in green font).