From the Anterior to the Posterior Focus in Studying Religious Texts: Rhetorical Arrangement and Ancient Letters Revisited

By Philip L. Tite

Bulletin for the Study of Religion

As an historian of early Christianity, I love reading written works from late antiquity. I have a particular fascination with ancient letters, be they communications between ordinary people doing their daily business or personal interactions with friends, family, or others (e.g., the Greek papyri letters from Egypt), or letters that were produced by and circulated among early Christians. In my recent research on an apocryphal Pauline letter from the second century, I struggled with the theoretical problems attached to the application of rhetorical methods to the critical interpretation (and explanation) of early Christian letters.

Although biblical scholars have made varied attempts to apply rhetorical arrangement to critical analyses of such texts, the function of arrangement has tended to take secondary place to that of imposing a set literary outline onto the compositional organization of a letter’s discussion. For those applying rhetorical arrangement to the Pauline corpus, the argument has been that Paul’s letters are really speeches that are only framed by epistolary opening and closing formulas. Two difficulties arise in my mind with regard to such attempts to discern such an organization of, for instance, a Pauline letter. First, as Stanley Porter, Carl Joachim Classen, and others have argued, the epistolary nature of the text is ignored, while, simultaneously, the content of the letter is forced into a framework that is largely alien to the epistolary medium of communication. Thus, the fact that these are letters being studied tends to be obscured if not divorced from analysis. In my mind, a rhetorical analysis needs to play a secondary, or, more aptly, a complimentary role to the epistolary analysis of such texts. Second, the rhetorical qualities of ancient discourse (however framed or delivered) are obscured by the fixed structural agenda that such studies tend to create. It is as if identifying compositional units is the end product of such work, rather than as a step toward discerning the broader, and more important aspect of rhetoric: i.e., rhetorical discourse attempts to persuade an audience, reader, or recipient to accept the author/rhetor’s position or to dissuade acceptance of an opposing position. Discursive interaction, not simple literary analysis, should be the focus of any rhetorical analysis.
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