Prior to the late twentieth century theologians very rarely gave explicit attention to the doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture. In the last fifteen years a handful of writers have begun to address this topic in more detail. This thesis traces the historical treatment of the doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture from the time of the Reformation of the sixteenth century up to the present. The scope of this study is restricted to the time period from the Reformation to the present because, “In the Reformation the Bible became the sole authority for belief and practice… it was basically a hermeneutical reformation, a reformation in reference to the approach to the Bible” (Zuck 1991:44). Prior to the Reformation, church fathers such as, Origen (185-254), Clement (155-216), Jerome (347-419), and theologians such as Gregory the Great (540-604), Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), typically interpreted portions of Scripture allegorically. This trend continued until men such as John Wycliffe and Martin Luther began to stress the necessity for a literal-historical-grammatical interpretation of Scripture. The emphasis on a literal interpretation re-emphasised Scripture‟s sufficiency for doctrine, correction, and instruction.

John 10 is a difficult chapter when considering its chronological order and apparent displacements. Some critics have held that chapter 10 is disordered and therefore have argued for its rearrangement. This thesis is an analysis of the discourse features investigating the unity and argument of chapter 10.

The research opens with exploring the historical views regarding the unity and argument of John 10 in the introduction. Following this is an examination of the literary components that make up the overall literary structure of John’s Gospel and how chapter 10 fits into its literary flow. This provides a foundation for a study of the semantic relations and the micro-level markers of cohesion and shift together with the macro-level markers of cohesion discussing discourse features in John 10. The objective is to discover what the discourse features reveal about the unity and argument of the chapter.

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