Rhetoric and the Composition of the Letters of Paul
by
James D. Hester
Crawford Professor of Religion, Emeritus
University of Redlands
Redlands, CA
Introduction
The genesis of the topic of this paper goes back some 25 years to the Seminar on the Form and Function of the Pauline Letter that was conducted under the auspices of the Society of Biblical Literature in the early 1970s. In that forum, scholars including Robert W. Funk1, Nils A. Dahl*, Hans Dieter Betz, M. Luther Stirewalt2, John L. White3 and Chan-Hie Kim4 introduced some of us to ancient epistolography, and in that forum we explored the complexities of the letter form used by Paul. It was also there that Betz proposed, building on a paper that he had done while on sabbatical in Sweden, that the argumentative structure of Galatians could be analyzed by using speech genre and style from categories found in Greco-Roman rhetoric.5
That proposal, which was yet another development in rhetorical critical study of Hebrew and Christian scriptures in the line of work already done by Amos Wilder6 and James Muilenberg7, was the catalyst for a flood of works describing rhetorical analysis of New Testament texts, and in particular the letters of Paul.
It didnt take long for reaction to occur. David Aune8 and Hans Hübner9, for example, in reviewing Betzs commentary on Galatians, werent convinced that genre analysis worked, particularly when Betz couldnt fit the last chapters of Galatians into the topics found in forensic speeches and described Galatians as a magical letter. But cautionary voices were muted a bit when George Kennedy, the great classicist and historian of rhetoric, weighed in on the side of rhetorical analysis of the New Testament with his book, New Testament Interpretation through Rhetorical Criticism.10 Thus it was by the first third of the 1990s, the Rhetorical New Testament Project of Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, and Duane Watson of Malone College, could independently identify over a thousand articles, essays and monographs that used some kind of primarily ancient rhetorical analytical method in the study of New Testament texts.11
The Seminar also contributed to the already established interest in studying the form and function of the Pauline letter. Scholars had long since recognized that the model for Paul's letters was to be found in the Greek letter writing tradition12, and some important studies of the that tradition were known and used by a handful of New Testament scholars, but the work of the Seminar made it clear that earlier studies needed to be expanded and updated.*
That task was taken up, in part, by the Ancient Epistolography Group, which worked for six years on collection and analysis of Cuneiform, Aramaic, and Greek letters. They attempted to identify and describe epistolary types and sub-types; conventions and formulae in the opening, body and closing sections of letters; and, epistolary clichés. In the end, they were not able to investigate, as planned, letters embedded in other literature or letters appended to other literature.13
Heightened interest in the study of letters has meant that in the last 25 years several major studies of ancient letter writing have appeared in English that significantly enhanced our understanding of that means of communication. Major studies of the Greek letter tradition, including New Testament letters, have been done by David Aune, William Doty, Jerome Murphy-O'Connor, Stanley Stowers and John L. White, and dozens of articles have analyzed parts of the letter and formulae used in those parts. 14
In this essay I want to describe two ways to understand the composition of Pauls letters: on the one hand as a product of Greco-Roman, or, if you will, Hellenistic culture, a process informed by the practice of letter writing as illustrated primarily in the private letter tradition; and on the other hand, as a product of a theory of argumentation, shaped by Paul's understanding of the world and situation of his audience. That theory of argumentation allowed him to create what we should understand to be a new type of letter, a hybrid product of epistolary and rhetorical theory, that is highly contextual in its argumentation.
Historical Background: Development of the Letter
Correspondence as such seems to have developed in the ancient near and middle east as oral messages delivered by couriers.15 As written correspondence was formulated, the writers name was sometimes appended to the beginning of the message, but the absence of the identity of sender and recipient on many letters suggests that the messenger greeted the recipient in the name of the sender and then read the message, perhaps adding to it or providing explanation if requested.
Early letter writing was carried out in order to maintain communication between kings and is often referred to as "diplomatic" correspondence.16 In addition to maintaining friendly contact17, royal correspondence was also used to convey military orders or transmit reports. Letters could also be used to address issues of management of internal affairs.
Postal service was first developed in Mesopotamia in the 6th century BCE, but it was used for official purposes, and ordinary citizens from that time through the end of the Roman empire had no organized delivery system available to them.18 While official postal service was speedy and efficient, private delivery was haphazard and unreliable, depending on the integrity and goodwill of unofficial messengers from friends to river boat captains and disinterested travelers passing through on the way to the territory of the intended recipient. 19
Once the letter form had developed to the point that it was not dependent on a messenger to supply parts of its formulae, a fairly standard arrangement of topics, found even in letters from the ancient near east in Cuneiform or Aramaic, was set. Refreshingly free of jargon, the major parts of a letter are referred to as the letter opening, body and closing.
The opening contains the greeting, which usually identifies the sender and recipient, and a word of greeting. This is usually followed immediately by a so-called "health wish," which typically expresses hope for the good health of the recipient, undergirded by assurances that the sender has offered prayers in support of that hope. Expressions of joy or frustration, both of which act to maintain contact by reminding the recipient of an earlier circumstance shared by the sender and receiver, are sometimes substituted for the health wish.
The body contains those topics that express the purpose of the letter.20
The closing can consist of a single word, "farewell," or be left off entirely. In some letters, however, it can serve as a kind of epilog that summarizes or re-states the major topics found in the body. It might also contain greetings (ajspavzesqai) for persons other than the recipient, and occasionally a date.
This arrangement became so standardized during the Hellenistic era that Doty tells us that Theophrastus said one of the traits of Arrogance is that he "deviated from normal letter practice"!21
The discovery in the late 19th century in Egypt of thousands of private letters written on papyrus provided a source of non-literary, private correspondence for scholars to analyze. The creation of sheets of papyrus had provided the ordinary citizen a cheap and widely available medium on which to write messages and so enabled the practice of letter writing outside of official circles.22 Private letters were used typically to handle business matters and to maintain lines of communication with ones family. If one were illiterate, he could turn to secretaries who could transcribe his message and would include a formula of authentication to guarantee that the recipient would view the secretarys work as a reliable expression of the intent of the author.
In the Greek papyrus letter tradition, there are formulaic words or phrases associated with each section of the letter. For example, the simplest form of greeting consists of three words -- two if the name of the sender is left off! The name of the sender in the nominative case, the recipient in the dative, and the infinitive form of the verb, "greet," caireivn.23 White has noted that it is customary to argue that placing of the name of the recipient first in the formula may indicate that the sender considered himself to be in an inferior relationship to the recipient or was asking a favor of some kind.24 However, custom varied, and there are clear instances of greetings in which a letter from a superior would open by addressing the recipient before identifying the sender. The greeting could be elaborated by adding attributive terms to the names, such as phrases to indicate family kinship or relationships, or by qualifying the verb.25
Depending on the type of letter, the body may be introduced with the use of a disclosure formula or some expression of knowledge shared by the correspondents or an event experienced by them that the writer wants to make sure the recipient remembers. In Pauls letters, for example, you find phrases like, "You know..." (I Thessalonians 2:1), "I want you to know...," (Romans 1:13; Philippians 1:12); or, "we do not want you to be ignorant..."(II Cor 1:8) Another common introductory formula is connected to letters that function as petitions. In Paul one finds an "appeal " formula in I Corinthians (1:10) and Philemon (9). Terms of reproach or rebuking formulas appear most often in letters whose purpose is maintenance of contact. The use of qaumavzw in Galatians 1:6 is analogous if we assume that one of Paul's concerns in writing is the breakdown of communication between himself and the churches of Galatia. Expressions of joy and reference to previous instructions also introduce the letter body.26
The single most characteristic formula of the letter closing was the use the word ejrrwvso, "Farewell." White reminds us that this and other terms used in the final greetings can function as a kind of extension of the health wish.27 Another common term is, "Prosper," again implying a hope for the welfare of the recipient. Almost all of the other statements found in the closing are determined by the selection of topics made by the writer and cant be standardized. 28
Following the closing notes associated with docketing of the letter or the statement of a scribe noting his involvement because the senders were illiterate are often appended.29
Classification of Letters
Without elaborating on the function of official letters, and focusing attention on the Greek familiar letter alone, it is widely agreed that letters functioned as a substitute for the presence of the writer.30 A letter is, "a written means of keeping oral conversation in motion."31 Letters served to overcome the distance between sender and recipient and helped to convey a message that otherwise would have been delivered in person.32
In most instances letters were intended to nurture friendly relations (filofrenhvsi") with the recipient. When written between family members, they often have no discrete topic other than reporting recent activities or letting people know that the writer is well. But, letters could also be used to disclose or seek information, to make a request, or give instructions. Thus White describes the three main purposes of a letter as being: maintenance of contact; sharing or seeking information; and conveying requests or commands.33
Those general functions form the basis of different types of letters found in the non-literary letter tradition.
It is widely recognized in scholarship today that Adolf Deissmanns classic distinction between "real" and "non-real" letters, or "letters" and "epistles," was based more on his goal of demonstrating that Paul's letters were more like non-literary papyri letters than those written by the philosophers and the rhetoricians. He wanted to distinguish between letters that represented "conversation" and those that were self-consciously "literary."34 He also tried to distinguish between letters that came from and dealt with "real life," and those that reflected universal topics meant for general audiences.
Deissmann's classification simply wasn't nuanced. He failed to take into account types of letters that are very real indeed despite their tendency to use epistolary conventions and vocabulary typically found in "literary" letters. He didn't appreciate the fact that private letters could be written with a more "public" audience in mind and that they could also be conventional and stylized.35
Recent scholarship, acknowledging the existence of literary letters, has created more useful categories based more on function than style. William Doty has suggested that there were five types of letters in the Greek letter tradition: Business Letters, Official Letters, Public Letters, "Non-Real" Letters (i.e., things like magic letters, heavenly letters, letters embedded in novels or historical narratives), the Letter Essay or Discursive Letter. In the "Index to Letter Writing" in Light from Ancient Letters, White lists: Administrative, Consolation, Contrition, Diplomatic, Family/Friendship (with a sub-type for Soldier's letters), Invitations, Literary, Memoranda, Petitions, and Recommendation. Stanley Stowers describes six types: friendship, family, praise or blame, hortatory, mediation, and apologetic.36 To those six David Aune adds: private, official, and literary letters.37 An overview of these lists suggests that a synthesis of Stowers' and Aune's classifications would be inclusive enough to categorize most letters found in the tradition. On the other hand, that synthesis should also include Doty's category of "Non-Real Letters."38
Epistolary Theory
Education in the art of letter writing was a part of rhetorical education, provided mainly during early stages of education by the grammarians.39 The rhetorical handbooks do not devote much attention to it, assuming, apparently, that the occasions for writing would be analogous to those of speaking and thus models for letters could be developed by example from one or more of the genre of speeches. Given the function of letters in maintaining and nurturing friendly relations, the genre most suitable for models would have been the epideictic.40
The earliest handbook on epistolary theory is that one falsely attributed to Demetrius of Phalerum, Typoi Epistolikoi. Dating of it is difficult, but Abraham Malherbe suggests that it may have originated in pre-Christian times.* It is a commentary on twenty-one kinds of letters and was designed to be used by professional letter writers as examples of styles appropriate to a variety of situations, or what might be called in modern rhetorical parlance, exigencies.41 Types include: friendly, commendatory, blaming, reproachful, consoling, censorious, admonishing, threatening, vituperative, praising, advisory, supplicatory, inquiring, responding, allegorical, accounting, accusing, apologetic, congratulatory, ironic and thankful.42
Assigning authorship of Typoi Epistolikoi to Demetrius may not be surprising when one considers the fact that the first extensive discussion of letter theory is found in De Elocutione, attributed to Demetrius and dated from the first century CE. Having expounded on the virtues of clarity and brevity in writing in that treatise, the author then says:
We will next treat of the epistolary style, since it too should be plain. Artemon, the editor of Aristotles letters, says that a letter ought to be written in the same manner as a dialogue, a letter being regarded by him as one of two sides of a dialogue. There is perhaps some truth in what he says, but not the whole truth. The letter should be a little more studied than the dialogue... [De Eloc.:223].
He goes on to recommend that writers avoid including what might be considered oratorical displays in letters; that letters be relatively brief and reveal glimpses of character; and that the letter writer feel free to ignore concerns about structural features. Two statements seem most representative of his instruction: "A letter is designed to be the hearts good wishes in brief; it is the exposition of a simple subject in simple terms." And, "... the letter should be a compound of these two styles, the graceful and the plain." [De Eloc.: 223 - 235]
It may be that Apollonius of Tyana had this view of the style of a letter in mind when he wrote, during the same approximate time period, to Skopelianos the sophist indicating that one of the five kinds of speeches was "epistolary," that is, presumably, plain and graceful in style.
This view of letter writing is reiterated in Cicero, who nonetheless acknowledges that public letters may need a somewhat more refined style than private ones.43
It is evident, therefore, that there is a fairly consistent view among early theorists that two things should be true for the letter. On the one hand, its form should fit the occasion, with topics and formulae developed for everything from petition to consolation, from official correspondence to attempts to maintain contact among family members. On the other hand, the style of a letter should be, in so far as it meets the requirement of the occasion, conversational and unaffected. What that means for the critic is that the type of letter can often be identified by an analysis of topics and formulae, while style becomes a secondary consideration.
Over time epistolary theory became more elaborate. Forty-one types of letters are described in the handbook attributed to Libanius, Epistolimaioi Characteres, dated from the 4th to the 6th centuries CE, and major treatises in the art of letter writing appeared in the 11th and 12th centuries, reaching a high point in the early 13th century. These manuals described the parts of a letter based on analogies from Cicero's parts of a speech. 44 It would seem that both rhetorical genre and topics dominated the art of letter writing during and after the so-called Second Sophistic.
The Composition of the Pauline Letter
It would be incorrect to insist that Pauls letters are a different type from those listed in the handbooks. After all, more than anything else the handbooks simply provided examples of how letter writers might respond to a variety of situations that could be addressed by means of a letter. Moreover, Paul paid attention to formal conventions and topics associated with letters and, like other more "literary" letter writers, did not hesitate to modify those conventions to serve the purpose of his argument.45 However, it is clear, and a source of continuing frustration for scholars, that his letters are not like others, whether from the tradition of literary letters, official correspondence, or the private letter. They cannot be neatly categorized.
Structurally they are more complex, with at least four, perhaps five, major sections found in most: the opening greeting, which typically uses cavri" as a substitute for caivrein and as a substitute for the health wish; the thanksgiving period, which I take to be distinct from the opening itself; the body; a section of teachings or moral exhortations; and the closing greeting.46 (Obviously no external address, docketing notes, or dates are present in the manuscript tradition.)
The opening greeting can be extensively elaborated, cp. Romans 1:1 - 7, e.g., and often makes mention of his office or role in the life of his mission, i.e., "servant" of those to whom he writes.47 It concludes not with a conventional word of greeting but with kind of benedictory declaration of grace that supplants the health wish. In five of the seven undisputed letters Paul includes the names of others as sending the letter. It is my contention, building on an argument made in one session of the Seminar on Paul by M. Luther Stirewalt, that those mentioned either by name, or with the designation "brothers", should be understood to be the carriers of the letter.48
The greeting is followed by a thanksgiving period that usually contains reference to the topics that will be elaborated upon in the body.49
The body is designed to do more than maintain friendly relations, make a request, seek information, or give an order. In fact his letters may seek to do all those things and more! The body can have three parts to it, with opening, transitional and closing formulae marking the trajectory of the development of the message.50
Assuming that the letter is not primarily parenetic in function, Paul follows the body of the letter with a section of moral exhortations or instructions.
The closing greeting is often extensively elaborated and usually serves as a kind of epilogue.51 Paul tends to ignore or adapt standard conventions and uses instead benedictions, greetings to various people, a personal "signature," doxology, exhortations and recommendations, or some combination of these.
The function of the letter as representing the writers presence is given high prominence by the probability that the letter carrier was Pauls emissary and played an important role in its presentation to the audience, and by the inclusion of what Funk calls the "travelogue" as a discrete topic appearing at the end of the body of the letter.52 There is a hint of Pauls importance or official status in that he used a secretary not because he was illiterate and needed such help, but because he was busy!53
No matter to whom it can be attributed -- Paul or his secretary -- the fact is that the style of his letters is hardly plain, with dialog becoming diatribe and periods, enthymematic reasoning and amplification in evidence throughout.
Finally, whereas the letters of Cicero were anywhere from 22 to 2530 words long, averaging 295 words; those of Seneca, 150 to 4130, averaging 955; the seven undisputed letters of Paul run from 335 for Philemon to 7111 words for Romans, averaging 3442 words with Philemon, 3959 without!54 Clearly Pauls letters fail the stylistic test of brevity.
What frustrates and bedevils modern scholarship is how to explain how Pauls letters came to be what they are. It is to that task I turn now.
Composition: Rhetorical Description
Over the past two decades there have been attempts to understand and describe the integration of the Pauline letter form with the basic form of speeches.55 These attempts usually deal with things like identifying the letter structure and the parts of a speech and then arguing that the elements of the letter structure and the formula that are associated with them are a harmonious part of the rhetoric of the letter. They are based largely on literary-historical methods or on what might be loosely described as a variation of neo-classical rhetorical analysis.56
Such analyses are problematic for me at at least three levels. In the first place they tend to limit rhetorical analysis to description of dispositio or arrangement, which then is used for claims of identification of genre (forensic, deliberative, epideictic or "mixed").57 Or, they reduce our understanding of rhetoric to the formulaic application of structural elements determined by the identification of place (or, perhaps, occasion) -- i.e. is the argument designed for the law court, assembly or public ceremony? -- and function -- i.e., is the alleged purpose defense, deliberation, or examination of values. Finally, they focus heavily on analysis of style, which is usually identified through its association with genre, an analysis that is in the end circular.58
While those are clearly important considerations for rhetorical criticism, they are as clearly derivative of other, earlier rhetorical moments. These moments -- the exigence, audience, speaker and rhetorical situation -- are the engines which drive the inventional process. These moments exist within a context of cultural variables that may or may not be shared completely by both speaker and audience. They come to expression in a coding system that may or may not be able to represent details of the argument clearly. They use a channel of communication -- in the case of Pauls letters both the text itself and the interpretation the letter carrier may have given it -- that cannot necessarily shield out all the noise that affects the transmission of the message that the speaker/author has chosen to communicate. All of these and others occur and give shape to how the argument is presented, the nature of its content, and the way in which it is elaborated. And so, before the rhetorical critic should move to issues of genre and arrangement, she must try to reconstruct the inventional process.
In what follows I am going to try to describe a kind of inventional strategy that we may be able to ascribe to Paul, using both ancient and modern rhetorical theories.
Without developing an elaborate defense for this premise, let me just say that I look to Aristotles theory of invention simply because I believe it to be foundational for almost every theory that appears subsequently, even when those theories view invention differently. Aristotle defined the art of rhetoric as the discovery of all available means of persuasion. Given situation, place and audience, it was the speakers task to bring the audience from one understanding of something to the speakers view of it, to gain the audiences adherence to the propositions presented by the speaker.
According to Aristotle, the most effective tool in argumentation was the enthymeme, a rhetorical syllogism which depended on the audience to supply one or more of the premises. In other words, the speaker had to discover and then create a syllogism that he could be confident could be completed by the audience, who drew from its stock of knowledge either the major or minor premise to complete it, thus becoming persuaded because of the truth they recognized in the syllogism. Unlike dialectical reasoning, rhetorical logic was situational and contextual.59
By the time Quintilian wrote Institutionis Oratorioae at the end of the first century CE, the definition of rhetoric had changed and with it the central element of inventional theory. For Quintilian rhetoric was the art of speaking well and, refining Ciceros theory of topics, invention was, for the most part, the effective exercise of memory. Common places were conventional wisdom not unlike maxims, principles that could be elaborated, or techniques that had proven successful in times past. The good speaker was to be so attuned to the audience that if the argument he was developing appeared to be unsuccessful, thinking quickly on his feet he could dip into his stock of common places and re-direct it.
What is important to recognize in both of these theories of invention is the central role the audience plays. Indeed even in Aristotles three modes of persuasion -- logos, ethos, pathos -- the audience is central to two and involved in the other. In logos, reasoning is completed by the audience; appeal is not made to foundational truths. In pathos, the speaker must discover and tap into the emotion of the audience; he is not displaying his own. Even in ethos, the audience must recognize the traits of character in the speaker that they agree are admirable.
Modern rhetorical theory has increased our awareness of the fact that the speaker himself is a part of the audience. In situational or functional theories of rhetoric the point is made that the speaker comes out of the audience in order to offer a potential resolution of an exigence by means of discourse. Lloyd Bitzer calls this circumstance a "rhetorical situation," which he defines as "a complex of persons, events, objects and relations presenting an actual or potential exigence that may be completely or partially removed if discourse..." can modify behavior or illicit action.60 The rhetorical situation also contains what Bitzer calls "constraints,"
...persons, events, objects. relations, rules, principles, facts, laws, images, interests, emotions, arguments, and conventions. Having the power to influence decisions and action needed to modify the exigence, these constraints are parts of the situation and influence both rhetor and audience. The rhetor's central creative task is to discover and make use of the proper constraints in his message in order that his response, in conjunction with other constraints operative in the situation, will influence the audience.61
In other words, the rhetorical situation is central to the inventional task.62
For Bitzer the audience is also integral to the process of argumentation. Discourse seeks to modify an exigence, something viewed by audience and speaker as a problem, something other than what it ought to be. The ability to modify the exigence lies with the audience. Put differently, an argument cannot be effective if it addressed to an audience that has no ability to modify the exigence.63 Just as in classical rhetoric the response must be "fitting," so in situational or functional rhetoric, the audience must be able, capable, empowered by its circumstance to be able to affect its environment.64
In their book, The New Rhetoric, Chaim Perelman and his associate Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca define "audience" as all those whom the speaker seeks to persuade.65 They share Aristotle's view of the function of the audience, for it is the audience who processes the argument, rendering judgment on its effectiveness. The audience is an essential component of the process of argumentation. On the other hand, the speaker is the one who defines the audience.66
Audiences are basically one of two types: particular and universal. A particular audience is, "...those appealed to upon the basis of their value system."67 This value system is based on the experience and the group affiliation of the audience, and the appeal made by the speaker will based on his understanding of their beliefs and values.68
The "universal audience" is in fact a creation of the mind of the speaker, his conception of an audience most reasonable and most competent with respect to the issues under discussion.69 It is used by him as the final arbiter for values or truths that he believes are shared by both him and the particular audience. It is "universal" in that it shares the universe of values common to the them, not in the sense of foundational or timeless. Because it transcends the particularity of the rhetorical situation, it can serve as a group to whom an appeal can be made for agreement in adherence to values advocated by the speaker. In other words, for Perelman the premises of an enthymeme are supplied not by the particular audience, nor by some kind of elite audience "endowed with exceptional and infallible knowledge"70, but by a more competent audience, who has a more inclusive world view, asked to pass judgment on the truth of what the speaker is saying. And, importantly, the speaker must be a member of the universal audience; because the universal audience is final judge and arbiter of what the speaker is arguing, and because the speaker is a part of that audience, the argument itself cannot be manipulative.71 To be so would be, among other things, self-deceptive!
Perhaps the most intriguing claim Perelman makes is that for the speech to be efficacious, the locus of argumentation must move from particular audience to universal audience.72 If the universal audience can be shown to support, or to have been persuaded by, the propositions advocated by the speaker, or to share the values and beliefs of the speaker, and if the speaker can be shown to be a member of the both particular and universal audiences, then the particular audience, who lack the competence to render a reasonable judgment because of the parochial nature of their experiences, etc., must accept the propositions posed by the speaker or recognize that it shares the values of the speaker and, therefore, increase their adherence to his, and therefore by definition the universal audiences, beliefs or accept his resolution of the exigence they both face. In other words, the process of persuasion consists in adjusting and transforming the particularities of an audience into a universal dimension.73
Another inventional source is the argumentative situation. Perelman defines it as the goal the speaker sets for himself and the arguments he may encounter in trying to reach that goal.74 These are related components because the topics the speaker chooses in the construction of the argument in order to reach the goal of adherence will be affected by the arguments he encounters in response to his. Perelman illustrates this by pointing to the preference of the Romanticists for the loci of quality in response to their recognition that the Classicists preferred the loci of quantity, but another way of thinking about it is Quintilians expectation that the well-educated orator could react to the effects his argument was having on the audience and adjust his speech to meet the new expectations created in the audience by it. The argumentative situation moves along a trajectory from exigence to resolution, or from opposition or skepticism, to adherence.
In constructing an argument, therefore, a speaker is confronted by three different kinds of situations: the audience situation, which can be generally described as the complex of social, political, cultural and religious forces in which the audience exists and which shapes their world view, or, to use Bitzer's term, "constraints"; the rhetorical situation; and the argumentative situation, which takes shape and direction within the processes of argumentation. The speaker must also keep in mind two different audiences: the particular and the universal. The real art in rhetoric is the discovery of the means of persuasion that takes advantage of the resources of the audience situation in its effort to modify the exigence confronting a particular audience, and makes use of the speakers imagination in order to anticipate the reaction of that audience as they are being persuaded by means of persuading the universal audience.
Combining features of epistolary theory and rhetorical theory to use in an analysis of Paul's letters produces what Johannes Vorster has called an "interactional model"75 for doing rhetorical criticism. This model keeps in sharp focus the fact a letter was situational and assumed that the recipient would do something as a result of having received it. Understood rhetorically a letter did not just convey information but, even when its purpose was as simple as maintaining contact, prompted decisions to be made. This was true even when the audience was a single interlocutor. The sender expected, at the minimum, a reply at some time in the future. In other words, an analysis of letter structures and speech dispositio are not enough to understand the process of persuasion of which a letter is a part.
Inventional Strategies in the Composition of the Letters of Paul
Keeping in mind that the primary purpose of private letters was to maintain friendly contact over distance, it is evident that when Paul was confronted with one or more exigencies involving one of his churches, he would turn to the letter as the medium of communication. On the other hand, it is also apparent from the letters we have that he needed to do more than fulfill the conventional purposes for which letters were used. He needed to develop discourse to modify behavior or to prompt action. Given the audience and rhetorical situation it seems likely he would turn to conventions and topics associated with Greco-Roman rhetoric to help him in the process of addressing the exigence, so he had two tools he could use: epistolary theory and rhetorical theory. He also had the advantage of having available trusted messengers who could be relied upon to interpret his thought.
He was faced with some very important constraints, however. Epistolary theory advocated careful wording and clarity of style in order to avoid misunderstanding that can arise when you cant see your audience. Furthermore, private letters rarely attempted to deal with more than one topic, and in most cases Paul had to deal with more than one exigence thus needing to elaborate on more than one topic. That meant that in all likelihood Paul had to mix letter types and very possibly instruct the letter carrier to elaborate on points when questioned about them, thus leaving himself open to misunderstanding.
Understanding the complexity of the interactional situation Paul faced in each of his letters is complicated. It would seem in some cases as though Paul quite deliberately privileges one or more exigencies defined by him but not fully experienced by the particular audience he had in mind. This is clearly the case for the Roman letter; the rhetorical situation there was less situated in his plans for the future or his need to describe his understanding of the gospel to those who didn't know him than it was in his recent experience with the Corinthians. It is also true for his argument for the Collection; it was the exigence of the audience in Jerusalem, and not the churches making the contribution, that Paul had to modify, and the contributors had to be persuaded by appeals to a universal audience whose values and beliefs came out its experience with the gospel as Paul had preached it. There are other places where an aspect of an exigence important to his audience has a whole other importance for him; you can see that in the Corinthian correspondence or in Philippians, for example. In Galatians the exigence is experienced by the universal audience because there is more than one particular audience, all of whom are failing to adhere to the values of the universal audience in which Paul firmly places himself.
The multiplicity of audiences that could be a part of any given rhetorical situation meant that the argumentative situation in any one letter became more complex. Paul had to try to imagine the effect of his argument on both the particular audience and the universal audience and then make appropriate adjustments in its trajectory. (Examples of these changes can be seen in Galatians 3:1, I Thessalonians 4:1, and Romans 9:1, to cite some of the most evident.) This means that he might have to use enthymematic reasoning in one section of the argument, thus making appear to be more forensic-like, or argument from example in another, thus making it appear more deliberative. He might select topics from the genre of Greco-Roman speech, or from rabbinic argumentation, or even from arguments becoming common in the emerging Christian paideia.76 These selections had to be made on his judgment of the degree of persuasion he had accomplished at the point he wanted to adjust the focus of his argument, and they had to be made without being able to do more than imagine the effect his arguments were having. It is at these points in the shift in the argumentative situation that we see Paul's "art" at work.
A given rhetorical situation could be made complex by the audience setting. In Corinth, for example, there was more than one audience that had to be persuaded, but before that could happen one or more of these audiences had to be made competent to make a "reasonable" choice. For the Galatians one letter had to be addressed to audiences whose physical location and, most probably, spiritual understandings were different. Philemon, whose purpose can be thought of as maintaining friendly contact and whose topic can be described as an appeal for "family" members to the reconciled, clearly has a public tone to it and was undoubtedly meant to be read to the church meeting in Philemon's house; it has two audiences and expects action from both Philemon and the church. Again, more could be illustrated, but these few examples make the point.
There is ample evidence of the fact that Paul was conscious of his need to persuade a particular audience by appeal to the values of universal audience and by his membership in that audience. For example, in many places the use of "we" is clearly rhetorical. Depending on context "we" can refer to the particular audience, or at least to experiences he shared with that audience, or to the universal audience. Note the intermingling of audiences in I Thessalonians 2, for example, where in one sentence Paul can refer to the fact that "we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the gospel,"(2:4) a reference to the universal audience already defined as a group worth of being imitated (1:6 - 10), and then almost immediately speak of his ministry among the Thessalonians, using "we" as the signifier (2:7). It is a powerful rhetorical device that links particular and universal audience through the agency of Paul! This interplay of audiences continues until the argumentative trajectory shifts at 4:1, when he takes up the practical side of the values of love, hope, and faith.
Finally, because issues of character are important exigencies in so many of the authentic letters, the establishment of his ethos often takes precedence as a mode of persuasion even in letters to those he knows well, the Thessalonians or Philippians, e.g.; and the topics of honor and shame, or blame and praise, are more common than those associated with logos; arguments in the Galatian and Corinthian correspondence are obvious examples of this, as are those found in I Thessalonians 2 and 3.
It is only after we have considered issues of invention that we can turn to analysis of the argument. Inventional strategy comes to expression in use of the private letter genre but also in forms, formulae, topics, tropes, figures of speech, elements of style, and issues of arrangement characteristic of Greco-Roman rhetoric. These derive their importance from the strategy of persuasion to adherence. They serve that strategy, and our analysis of them must look first to the that strategy and only secondarily to the handbooks, which, even when they were written, were understood to be inventional in purpose.
Finally, when we try to describe the general content of Pauls arguments, we must be careful to keep before us the fact that the messages Paul chose to communicate to a variety of audiences are by definition situational and pragmatic, and that the task of harmonizing them requires us to construct a universal audience for the corpus.77
Closing
It would seem that a number of recent attempts to describe the form and function of the Pauline letter beg the question of the inventional strategies, the earlier rhetorical moments, that inform issues of form and function. If modern rhetorical theorists are correct, rhetorical criticism of the letters of Paul should include description of evidences of not only the audience situation, often the provenance of historical critical and other methods loosely associated with it78, but also the rhetorical and argumentative situations. However, description of the interaction between and among those situations requires a description of problems that Paul faced associated with producing a universal audience and its value system in order to make effective use of the formulae of a letter and the topics of an argument. Then the critic must describe the argumentative interaction between letter form and discourse making it clear that both the epistolary and rhetorical theories available to Paul are resources in service of his inventional strategy and desired argumentative outcomes. In other words, the rhetorical critic must make it clear that ancient epistolary and rhetorical theories form only a part of the inventional resource used in pursuit of the goal of resolving the exigence confronting Paul and his audience in any given letter. To describe the practical evidence of those theories does not exhaust the rhetoric of a letter.
1 Perhaps his best known early analysis of the form and function of the letter is found in Language, Hermeneutic and Word of God (New York, 1966), Chapter 10, "The Letter: Form and Style."
2 In my opinion, his article on "Letter", pp. 538 - 540, in The Interpreters Dictionary of the Bible (Supplementary Volume, Abingdon, 1976) is among the best brief introductions to epistolography in late antiquity available to students of the New Testament.
3 Stirewalt produced a number of important studies, many of which did not find their way into broad distribution, on epistolography. He argued that the "Letter Essay" might be one letter type analogous to the letters of Paul. See "The Form and Function of the Greek Letter-Essay," in The Romans Debate: Revised and Expanded Edition (ed. K. P. Donfried), Peabody, MA, pp. 147 - 177. Some of his work was published under the title, Studies in Ancient Greek Epistolography (SBL Resources for Biblical Study, 27), Atlanta, 1993.
4 White's dissertation was published under the title, The Form and Structure of the Official Petition (Missoula, 1972). He later chaired the Society of Biblical Literature's Ancient Epistolograghy Group.
5 His dissertation, The Familiar Letter of Recommendation (SBL Dissertation Series 4, 1972) has become one of the standard references in study of the genre of the Greek papyrus letter.
6 That paper appeared as, "The Literary Composition and Function of Paul's Letter to the Galatians, " New Testament Studies 21 (1975), pp. 353 - 379. The full implications of the analysis were worked out in his commentary on Galatians for the Hermeneia series, Galatians: A Commentary on Paul's Letter to the Churches in Galatia, Philadelphia, 1979. He also used rhetorical analysis for his understanding of the arguments in II Corinthians 8 and 9, in another commentary for Hermeneia, 2 Corinthians 8 and 9: A Commentary on Two Administrative Letters of the Apostle Paul, Philadelphia, 1985.
7 See, e.g., "Scholars, Theologians, and Ancient Rhetoric," Journal of Biblical Literature 75 (1956) 1 - 11; or, Early Christian Rhetoric: The Language of the Gospels, New York, 1964 (re-issued with a new introduction by Harvard University Press, 1971).
8 "Form Criticism and Beyond", Journal of Biblical Literature 88 (1969) 1 - 18.
9 Religious Studies Review, 7 (1981), pp. 324 - 325.
10 "Der Galaterbrief auf der Hintegrund von antiker Rhetorik und Epistolgraphie", Theologische Literaturzeitung, 109 (1984), pp. 241 - 250.
11 (Studies in Religion, Charles H. Long, editor) University of North Carolina Press, 1984.
12 The Project's data base is maintained by Pro-Cite Bibliographic software at the Institute. Watson, and his collaborator Alan Hauser, published their database under the title, Rhetorical Criticism of the Bible: A Comprehensive Bibliography with Notes on History and Methods, Leiden, 1994. In a section entitled, "Notes on History and Method," (pp. 101 - 125) Watson describes the use of the rhetorical critical methods by NT scholars from Augustine to the modern era. His overview deals mainly with work done by those representing historical or classical criticism, however, and only very briefly mentions literary critical or socio-rhetorical critical studies.
13 That judgment was confirmed by studies done by Stirewalt, and later by the Ancient Epistolography Group of SBL. While examples of Jewish and other ancient near eastern letters are extant, analysis of them makes it clear that Greek letter writing traditions were dominant. That point will become important later in this paper.
14 Among studies widely regarded as ground breaking are Adolf Deissmann, Light from the Ancient East (reprint of trans. of 4th German edition, Grand Rapids, 1978, and Paul: A Study in Social and Religious History, (W. E. Wilson, trans.) London, 1928; F. X. J. Exler, The Form of the Ancient Greek Letter: A Study in Greek Epistolography, Washington, DC, 1923; Heikki Koskenniemi, Studien zur Idee und Phraseologie des grieischen Briefen bis 400 n. Chr. , Helsinki, 1956; and, C. Bradford Welles, Royal Correspondence in the Hellenistic Period, New Haven, 1934.
15 A review of their work was published in 1981 as an issue of Semeia, no. 22, with John L. White as guest editor. Specific articles in this issue will be referred to below.
16 David Aune, The New Testament in Its Literary Environment (Library of Early Christianity, 8, Wayne Meeks, editor) Westminster Press, 1987; William Doty, Letters in Primitive Christianity (Guides to Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Series, Dan O. Via, editor) Fortress Press, 1973; Jerome Murphy-O'Connor, Paul the Letter Writer: His World, His Options His Skills (Good News Studies 41) Collegeville, MI: The Liturgical Press, 1995; Stanley Stowers, Letter Writing in Greco-Roman Antiquity (Library of Early Christianity, 5, Wayne Meeks, editor) Westminster Press, 1986; John L. White, Light From Ancient Letters (Foundations and Facets, Robert W. Funk, editor) Fortress Press, 1986. The numbers of articles preclude any listing here; see references below, and bibliographies in the monographs cited, for representative studies.
17 John L. White, "Ancient Greek Letters," Greco-Roman Literature and the New Testament, David E. Aune, editor; Scholars Press, 1988: p. 87. Brent Knudson, "Cuneiform Letters and Social Conventions, Semeia 22 (1981), p. 16, points out that cuneiform letters are the descendants of oral communication.
18 According to Ernst Ruess, Cicero's Letters (Macmillan Company, 1912), p. xi, ancient tradition attributed the first letter to Queen Atossa, mother of Xerxes.
19 Doty, "Imaginings at the End of an Era", Semeia 69/70 (1995), p. 92, notes the most recent scholarship assumes the position argued by Koskenniemi, Studien zur Idee und Phraseologie des grieischen Briefen ,that letters were designed to cultivate friendship. Stowers, Letter Writing, pp. 28 - 31, argues that while that purpose may have been prominent in Greek society, by Roman times the "ethos of family" is more characteristic and themes not typically associated with Greek male friendships are widely encountered.
20 Stephen R. Llewelyn, "Sending Letters in the Ancient World: Paul and the Philippians," Tyndale Bulletin 46 (1995), pp. 339 - 349, describes the major features of Persian, Hellenistic and Roman official postal systems, including the establishment by Augustus of professional letter carriers traveling by wagon, assuring that official letters would not pass through a number of hands on their way to the recipient.
21 White, "Ancient Greek Letters," p. 87. See also Light from Ancient Letters where he provides numerous examples of letters mentioning the character of the postal system and the messengers.
22 Stowers, Letter Writing, p. 22, makes the interesting argument that modern epistolary theorists tend to focus their analyses on formulae in the opening and closing sections of the letter and have little to say about the body. He claims that ancient theorists took the opposite view. They said little about those two sections and tended to treat the letter "holistically." John L. White, "Introductory Formulae in the Body of the Pauline Letter," Journal of Biblical Literature 90 (1971), p. 97, makes something of the same point, noting that careful attention has been paid to the analysis of formulae in the opening and closing elements of Paul's letters and then remarks that the same care needs to be addressed to the main argument(s) in the body of his letters. Stowers solution to the need to see letters as a unit is to turn to identification of them within rhetorical genre, thus tying their function to that of the three classical categories of oratory: forensic, deliberative and epideictic. He seems to associate most with the epideictic. We will see below the limitations of that approach.
23 Doty, Letters, p. 14.
24 Murphy-O'Connor, Paul the Letter Writer, describes the materials used in writing letters, particularly the production of papyrus sheets, in a section entitled, "The Tools of a Writer's Trade," pp. 1 - 6.
25footnote* According to Kim, Recommendation, pp. 11 - 12, who cites Exler (Form of Ancient Letter, p. 60), the basic greeting form -- A to B, greetings -- was used for almost 600 years, from the 3rd century BCE into the 3rd century CE
26 "Greek Documentary Letter Tradition," Semeia 22 (1981), p. 94.
27 See the examples listed by Kim, Recommendation, pp. 14 ff.
28 Full analysis of body opening and closing formulae are provided by John L. White in his dissertation, The Body of the Greek Letter , and "Introductory Formulae in the Body of the Pauline Letter." These formulae are widely illustrated in White's, Light From Ancient Letters; consult the "Index of Letter Writing", pp. 237 ff. All the formulae can be categorized under the topics of contact, petition, or commendation.
29 "Documentary Letter Tradition," p. 14.
30 Jeffrey A. D. Weima, Neglected Endings: The Significance of the Pauline Letter Closings (JSNT Supplement Series 101, Sheffield, 1994) has done an extensive review of closing formulae in both the common letter tradition and the Pauline letters and argues that the typical Pauline letter closing functions as an epilogue, adapting conventional formulae to the purpose of pointing back to arguments made in the body of the letter. That is rhetorical move not found in the ordinary papyrus letter.
31 White, Light, both in the numerous letters he translates and in commentary on pp. 216-217, provides rich illustrations of these.
32 White, Light, pp. 191 - 192, reviews Stirewalt's argument in "Uses of Letter Writing ," that the "familiar" letter in fact develops from the tradition of official letter writing; White accepts Stirewalt's contention.
33 John L. White, "The Greek Documentary Letter Tradition Third Century BCE to Third Century CE,"Semeia 22, p. 91
34 Jeffrey T. Reed, "Discourse Features in New Testament Letters," Journal of Translation and Textlinguistics, 6 (1993), p. 230 - 232, claims that the primary function of ancient letters was ,"to bridge the spatial separation between communicants." That function, according to Reed, drives the elements of epistolary forms, including the content of the letter opening, the topics in the body, and the need for a closing greeting. These "obligatory elements" are supplemented by "optional elements" added to the letter when the writer wants the letter to do more than simply "bridge spatial separation."
35 White, "Ancient Greek Letters", p. 95. See also, "The Greek Documentary Letter," p. 95; and, "Greek Letter Writing," p. 198.
36 See, e.g., his argument in Paul, pp. 7 - 15.
37 For fuller discussions of Deissmann's analysis, see, e.g., Murphy-O'Connor, Paul the Letter Writer, p. 44; Stowers, Letter Writing, pp. 17 - 20; and Greg Bloomquist, The Function of Suffering in Paul, (JSNT Supplement Series 78) Sheffield, 1993; p. pp. 72 - 73.
38 In chapters on each of these, Stowers provides descriptions of sub-types found in each category.
39 Aune, The NT in its Literary Environment, p. 161, reports that A. N. Sherwin-White, in his translation of the letters of Pliny (Oxford, 1966), lists eight types: public affairs, character sketches, patronage, admonitions, domestic affairs, literary matters, scenic, and social courtesy.
40 J. Schneider, "Brief," Reallexicon für Antike und Christentum (Stuttgart, 1954), II, p. 564 - 585, describes seven letter types: Public, Teaching, Poetic, Magic, Heavenly, Love, and Pseudonymous.
41 Abraham J. Malherbe, "Ancient Epistolary Theorists," Ohio Journal of Religious Studies 5 (1977), p. 12. See also Stirewalt, "Chreia and Epistole," in Studies in Ancient Greek Epistolography, pp. 43 - 66, who illustrates how the chreia elaboration exercise described in the progymnasmata were also used in writing epistole, non-real letters used in school exercises.
42 For a fuller discussion of education in letter writing, see Stowers, Letter Writing, pp. 27 - 35, and "Greek and Latin Letters," The Anchor Bible Dictionary, Vol. 4, p. 291.
43 Malherbe, Epistolary Theorists, p. 4.
44 Malherbe says that this kind of handbook was not intended for use by grammarians to instruct students or to teach epistolary theory as such (Theorists, p. 7). If he is correct, then caution should be used in comparing the styles found in them to those found in the papyrus letters in an attempt to classify a particular papyrus letter.
45 White, Light, p. 203, argues that only four of the types listed by Demetrius -- friendly commendatory, petitionary and consolatory -- correspond to types found in the papyrus letter tradition.
46 Ad Fam. 15,21,4
47 James J. Murphy, Three Medieval Rhetorical Arts (University of California Press, 1971), p. xv - xvi. Murphy includes an translation of a letter writing manual published by an anonymous author in Bologna in the 12th century.
48 For a fuller illustration of this point, see, e.g., Abraham Smith, Comfort One Another: Reconstructing the Rhetoric and Audience of I Thessalonians (Louisville, 1995): pp. 43 - 46.
49 Doty, Letters, pp. 32 - 33, and White, "Ancient Greek Letters", p. 97, provide descriptions of the structure and major characteristics of each part. Surprisingly, few other major studies, aside from Murphy-O'Connor, bother to review it.
50 For an epistolary and rhetorical analysis of Romans 1: 1 - 7, see, Samuel Byskrog, "Epistolography, Rhetoric, and Letter Prescript: Romans 1.1-7 as a Test Care," Journal for the Study of the New Testament 65 (1997), pp. 27 - 46. Byskorg describes one potential rhetorical effect -- establishment of ethos -- of this particular kind of elaboration of the opening greeting.
51 Murphy-O'Connor, Paul the Letter Writer, makes an elaborate argument to the effect that those listed in the opening greeting should be understood to be "co-authors" of the letter. Among other things he points out in support of this is the use of "we" in various passages. I am not convinced. The inclusion of names in the greeting mostly likely serves as a truncated form of recommendation or introduction formula, and the "we," as I will argue below, is a rhetorical device.
52 The classic study of the Pauline thanksgiving period is Paul Schubert, The Form and Function of the Pauline Thanksgivings (Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft) Berlin, 1939. See also, Jack T. Sanders, "Transition of the Opening Epistolary Thanksgiving to the Body in the Letters of Paul," Journal of Biblical Literature 81 (1962), pp. 348 - 362. Recently Jeffrey T. Reed, in an article entitled, "Are Paul's Thanksgivings Epistolary?", Journal for the Study of the New Testament 61 (1996), pp. 87 - 99, has argued contra P. Arzt ("The 'Epistolary Introductory Thanksgiving' in the Papyri and in Paul," Novum Testamentum 36 [1994], pp. 29 - 46) that although the subject of the thanksgiving period in Paul doesn't conform in detail to those found in the familiar papyrus letter, the form, etc., does, and the Pauline variation can be accounted for by, on the one hand, the flexibility of epistolary conventions and, on the other, adaptation of conventions to meet the need to communicate to a given audience.
53 Stowers, Letter Writing, p. 20 - 22, remarks that in contrast to ancient epistolary theorists, who had little to say about opening and closing formulae, modern authors have spent little time and effort on the analysis of the letter body in Paul. He attributes this to their focus on "epistolary" features rather than on the form and function of the letter as a whole.
54 Weima, Neglected Endings, provides a full analysis of this use of the endings in Paul's argument.
55 Funk, Language, pp. 264 - 270.
56 E. Randolph Richards, The Secretary in the Letters of Paul, (WUNT 42) Tubingen, 1991, pp. 169 - 189, presents a detailed discussion of evidence for Paul's use of a secretary.
57 Martin R. P. McGuire, "Letters and Letter Carriers in Christian Antiquity," The Classical World 53 (1960), pp. 148 - 153, 184 - 186, 199 - 200, gives the numbers for the classical writers; his count of the Pauline letters includes the 13 traditional letters, which he reckons as averaging 2500 words. Murphy-O'Connor, Paul the Letter Writer, p. 121, also provides a word count of each of the letters traditionally attributed to Paul, including Hebrews(!). According to his count, the average length of the seven undisputed letters is 3442. On the basis of a computer count I did, I corroborated his figures for the undisputed letters. Aune, The NT In Its Literary Environment, p. 205, gives word counts for each of the letters; using his figures, the average count for the undisputed letters is 3427. The difference could be explained by the use of different editions of the Greek text. In any case, it is hardly a significant variation!
58 For a useful overview of major representatives of these attempts, see Duane F. Watson, "Rhetorical Criticism of the Pauline Epistles since 1975, Currents in Research: Biblical Studies, 3 (1995), pp. 219 - 248. Watson, Rhetorical Criticism of the Bible , p. 120, describes the controversy engendered by these attempts as a "vigorous debate" over the extent to which ancient rhetorical theory influenced the writing of letters. Among the more important voices cautioning against simple use of classical rhetorical theory in the analysis of Paul's letters has been that of C. Joachim Classen; see, e.g., "St. Paul's Epistles and Ancient Greek and Roman Rhetoric," Rhetorica 10 (1992), pp. 319 - 344. Another is Jeffrey T. Reed, "Using Ancient Rhetorical Categories to Interpret Paul's Letters: A Question of Genre," in Rhetoric in the New Testament,, p. 293 - 324.
59 Lauri Thurén, The Rhetorical Strategy of 1 Peter, Abo, 1990, pp. 50 - 51, warns of a "quasi-ancient conception of rhetoric" that appears in many studies and labels the misuse of classical rhetorical handbooks as analytical sources, "...one of the most perilous fallacies in the growing interest in rhetorical criticism." Later he describes such analyses as guilty of "oversimplification." (p. 52) Weima, Neglected Endings, pp. 23 -2 27, briefly describes the problems arising from the failure of what he calls and "epistolary camp" and the "rhetoric camp" to effect a synthesis of methods. However, in his own study he adopts what is essentially a neo-classical analysis.
60 Kathy Eden, Hermeneutics in the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and Its Humanistic Reception (New Haven, 1997), pp. 28 - 32, shows that both Cicero and Quintilian picked up on and elaborated the Greek rhetoricians view that arrangement is not fixed but must always respond to the speaker's understanding of the circumstances of the case. The most effective arrangement is "economical." She cites at length Quintilian, 7.10.11 - 12.
61 Stanley Porter, "Rhetorical Categories in Pauline Literature," in Rhetoric in the New Testament, eds. Stanley Porter and Thomas Olbricht, Sheffield, 1994, pp. 101 - 122, after reviewing arguments of those who give priority to the classical rhetorical tradition as the source for analyzing Paul's letters, insists that stylistic matters were the only things discussed concerning epistolary material in the handbooks. Therefore, he says, rhetorical criticism, properly conceived, should deal only with stylistic elements found in the letters. His discussion leaves out reference to genre issues, other than those that are raised by the critics whom he reviews.
62footnote* Still among the best explanations of what Aristotle meant by a rhetorical syllogism is Lloyd Bitzer, "Aristotle's Enthymeme Revisited," Quarterly Journal of Speech 45 (Dec. 1959), pp. 399 - 408. Compare Richard Lanigan, "Enthymeme: The Rhetorical Species of Aristotle's Syllogism," Southern Speech Communication Journal 39 (1994), pp. 207 - 222; and Lanigan, "From Enthymeme to Abduction: The Classical Law of Logic and the Post-Modern Rule of Rhetoric," in Lenore Langsdorf and Andrew Smith, ed., Recovering Pragmatism's Voice, Albany, 1995, pp. 49 - 70.
63 Lloyd Bitzer, "The Rhetorical Situation," Philosophy and Rhetoric 1 (1968), p. 6.
64 Lloyd Bitzer, "Functional Communication: A Situational Perspective," in Rhetoric in Transition, ed. Eugene White, State College, PA, pp. 23 - 24.
65 Dennis Stamps, "Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation," in Rhetoric and the New Testament , pp. 193 - 210, envisions the effect of the rhetorical situation slightly differently. He says that "...a text presents a selected, limited and crafted entextualization of the [rhetorical] situation." (p. 199) He goes on to argue that Paul's letters should be analyzed as a kind of epistolary narrative, viewing the rhetorical situation as part of a story. The problem with that proposal is that it empowers the kind of linearity that Bitzer's critics worried about, and it virtually ignores the central role of exigence and the audience's perspective of it. It may privilege the "speaker" in situations when that isn't warranted.
66 Critics of Bitzer's definition of the rhetorical situation typically pointed to its tendency to imply an objective condition rather than a condition perceived by the audience and speaker, which may or may not be real or actual. Bitzer modified his notion of exigence to meet the objections of his critics, but for some his modifications still didn't credit the existence of the exigence to the perception of the audience or sufficiently acknowledge the ability of a speaker to create an exigence. Nevertheless, the rhetorical situation and the exigence should be understood as being objective because they are made real by the speaker and audience; they are simultaneously objective and subjective. For that reason, the rhetorical situation cannot be fully described by historical criticism. For a more complete description of this point see, Craig R. Smith and Scott Lybarger, "Bitzer's Model Reconstructed," Communication Quarterly 44 (1996), pp. 197 - 213.
67 Bitzer, "Functional Communication," p. 23. Smith and Lybarger, "Bitzer's Model," pp. 209 - 210, argue that in any communication there are in fact multiple audiences and multiple exigencies, and, therefore, there are audiences who lack the power to modify an exigence. Recognition of that fact allows for the situation model to be used in ideological criticism.
68 Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation (Notre Dame, 1969), 19.
69 Chaim Perelman, "The New Rhetoric and the Rhetoricians: Remembrances and Comments," Quarterly Journal of Speech 70 (1984), p. 191.
70 John R. Anderson, "The Audience as a Concept in the Philosophic Rhetoric of Perelman, Johnstone and Natanson," The Southern Speech Communication Journal 38 (Fall, 1972), p. 41.
71 Because of his interest in arguing for the essential relationship between rhetoric and philosophy, Perelman does not devote a great deal of space to describing the particular audience. He comments in "...Remembrances and Comments," p. 191, that he understands Aristotle's Rhetoric to be concerned with "...the means of persuading particular audiences."
72 Chaim Perelman, The New Rhetoric and the Humanities: Essays on Rhetoric and its Applications, Boston, 1979, pp. 48, 58.
73 The New Rhetoric, p. 35.
74footnote* Perelman, "...Remembrances and Comments," p. 194.
75 James L. Golden, "The Universal Audience Revisited," in Practical Reasoning in Human Affairs, J. L. Golden and J. J. Pilotta eds., Dordrecht, 1986, p. 297, quotes the Committee on the Nature of Rhetorical Invention in their statement on the universal audience: "...the task is not ... to address either a particular audience or a universal audience but in the process of persuasion to adjust to and then to transform the particularities of the audience into universal dimensions." He goes on to say that Perelman agreed with this description of the inventional use of the universal audience.
76 Perelman, "...Remembrances and Comments," p. 192, quotes with favor this characterization of his position found in The Prospect for Rhetoric, ed. L. Bitzer and E. Black (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1971), p. 235.
77 Perelman, New Rhetoric, p. 96.
78 Johannes Vorester, "Toward an Interactional Model for the Analysis of Letters," Neotestamentica 24 (1990), pp. 107 - 130. Vorester's model is more complex and more dependent on modern theories of communication than the one I have sketched out above. He combines Perelman and Bitzer with pragmatics inherent in conversational analysis, speech-act theory and a reconfiguration of topos theory in the context of inventional strategies. Dennis Stamps, "Rhetorical Criticism and the Rhetoric of New Testament Criticism," Literature and Theology 6 (1992), pp. 268 - 279, argues that rhetorical criticism can't be seen as a variation of historical-literary criticism but as part of hermeneutics. That is the thrust of Vorster's point as well.
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