Authors of the Synoptic gospels recorded the events and sayings for certain purposes. Telling stories is one of the earliest and most important forms both in ancient Israel and in the early church. Nevertheless, it is not an easy task to determine what a story is about. Regarding interpretation, there is a presupposition that texts cohere or hold together in a unified way. A text is made up of meanings and represents a choice amidst many options, and therefore, linguistic approaches provide text-based methods to analyze texts. Since language is a system of signals shared by a group, linguistic criticism can be a good way to find what a text really means. Linguistic approaches involve various categories and one of them is cohesion. Semantic relations between words, clauses, or passages stand as a means to identify how one element in a discourse is dependent on others, and this characteristic is labelled as cohesion. In this case, the devices of cohesion serve as a helpful tool to determine the subject matter or the topic of a given story. In order to trace the linguistic connections, one needs to identify the cohesive ties in a discourse, which involves identifying both organic and component ties, in a discourse. In this paper, therefore, cohesion will be the main concern so that different types of cohesive ties will be analyzed. After that, this paper will apply the prescribed method to Mark 2:1–12, the narrative of the paralytic, and argue that these cohesive features or patterns determine the subject matter or the topic of the discourse unit in Mark 2:1–12 as being that Mark states that Jesus has the authority to forgive sins.