Paula

Trust me, ladies, I could think of some better and more accurate acronyms. 😉 Just trying to keep it G-rated.

Now back to Chris’s Chiasmic Chaos:

A (9-10) Christian “women” (plural)
B (11-12) “a woman” (singular indefinite noun) –it means any Christian woman.
C (13) “Eve” (generic / representative woman)
C’ (14) “the woman” (generic / representative woman)
B’ (15a) “she” has the antecedent “a woman”
A’ (15b) “they” has the antecedent “women,” Christian women in context

But if there is any actual chiasm, it is this:

A (8) How men must pray and behave
A’ (9-10) How women must pray and dress

He is force-fitting his interpretations into the text in order to construct a chiasm where there is none. In other words, his chiasm depends completely on interpretation, whereas a real chiasm is in the very structure of the words. It also would have at its center a point being built up to, the main point being argued. Yet he and many others make the end (his A’) another central point. While it’s true that chiasms can overlap, it’s also true that one can make a tangled mess out of a text in an effort to see chiasms where they aren’t.