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  • From: "David Amador" <TheVoidBoy AT sprynet.com>
  • To: "Corpus-paul" <corpus-paul AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: II Corinthians
  • Date: Tue, 18 May 1999 13:57:00 -0700


Thank you for your posting and thoughtful response. I have a couple of
quick comments in an effort to answer your concerns:

> I think rhetorical criticism complements and is some ways is a necessary
>part of historical criticism. And since words, sentences, paragraphs,
>(rhetorical strategies,) and entire pieces of correspondence have meaning
>only in a context, some historical analyses are necessary if there is to be
>a good use made of rhetorical criticism.

Yes and no. This is a typical answer of exegetes: If pieces of
correspondence have meaning only in a context, then the historical context
must be addressed. While this is certainly one 'context', and a 'context'
appropriate for certain kinds of discourse traditions (e.g., modern biblical
historical criticism), it is not the only context. Indeed, the whole
concept of 'context' is a question of authority and control of
interpretation. The question always arises: which 'context'? We, as
historians of Paul, even if we (very problematically) use Acts as a source
(which is a very dubious source of information) have very little and almost
no historical 'context' in which we might play out the composition and
reception of a given letter of Paul. Even with respect to the Corinthian
correspondence, from which we can derive a great deal of information, there
are gaps in the record.

This is made even more problematic by the question of the author's
inventional strategy - just because Paul reports certain things to be the
case, doesn't make his report accurate or even "true". It certainly does
not represent the community's viewpoint, or his "opponents", or the
"super-apostles", or the individual who was castigated and condemned by him.

So the function of "unprovable" hypotheses regarding the reconstruction of
events is made so problematic, that there is no way by which we might
'control' interpretation by reference to history. That is what I mean by
"unprovable" - the reconstructions are offered in an effort to get a handle
on how to interpret Paul (authorial intentionality being the key here), but
they only succeed in just that: controlling Paul. They are methodologically
self-serving.

Rhetorical criticism and historical criticism have gone together,
traditionally (within a portion of the last 40 years or so). Edward PJ
Corbett and others created a whole school of rhetorical interpretation that
worked closely with historical criticism in an effort to lay out as much
detail of the context of the composition, performance and respose of a given
performance. We cannot do any of this.

There are other, more interesting 'contexts', just as valuable for research
and discussion, and much more relevant to an understanding of Paul: the
'contexts' generated the materiality of the text. This is not an emphasis
upon 'history', but 'historicity' - the 'contexts' of interpretive
discourse; the 'context' of religious traditions; the 'context' of
socio-political and economic ideologies and structures; the 'context' of
literary-industrial complex. And it is *these* contexts which render
answers to the question, "so what?" much more readily that historical
reconstruction.

>Sometimes it even works the other way: some historical
>conclusions have been arrived at through the use of rhetorical analysis;
>e.g. that 2 Corinthians is a unity (though I disagree with that analysis).

Yes, my rhetorical analysis could help us with a particular historical
conclusion. That is only part of my interest, however. Since historical
criticism cannot answer the question of the exigence and inventional
strategy of the current letter without splintering it into fragments and
hypothesizing all sorts of interesting "events" that gave rise to this text,
that insertion, etc.; since it cannot describe the exigence and inventional
strategy of the current letter without appeals to "letter length" (?!) and
other random acts of conservatorship; since historical criticism in not in
the position to tell me about the rhetoric of the letter, I have been
proposing precisely a methodologically rigorous means by which to propose
precisely what historical criticism has been unable to do.

The problem has been, historical criticism, like all methodologies, assumes
that since it can't do certain things, then the evidence it is working on is
at fault. Since it can't describe an exigence and inventional strategy that
could give rise to the letter as it stands, letter cannot be as it stands.
Until historical critics develop methods that can adequately integrate the
insights of modern communication theories and the immense study of
persuasion developed throughout the history of the West, all claims to
fragmentation are without a substantial basis.

>A brief look at the different and
>contradictory rhetorical analyses of any NT text show that such work
>produces hypotheses which are "unprovable" (whatever that may mean in the
>former posting) in the same sense that historical hypotheses are
>unprovable. Similarly, when one has traced an argument through a Pauline
>letter (which I would hope critics do even if they do not employ the
>language and tools of rhetorical criticism) the question is still So what?!

The 'so what?' of my posting is: historical critical analysis of II
Corinthians is based on faulty premeses regarding communicative and
argumentative dynamics, hence its conclusions regarding multiple sources is
wrong. That is all I set out to do.

The 'so what?' of rhetorical analyses depend upon the audience to whom such
analyses are addressed. And this question becomes immediately relevant each
time contradictory rhetorical analyses are generated - that a given analysis
is 'unprovable' is not the issue. That it is persuasive, powerful, answers
important questions, and is relevant to the concerns of the audience and
move them to action, THAT is the impact of rhetoric, and is all a resounding
answer to 'so what'? If it isn't, then the rhetor has utterly failed in
her/his task altogether.

The broader question of 'so what?', with respect to rhetoric, however, is
that a text like 2 Corinthians continues to have an important persuasive
impact upon us. This is something historical criticism can never address,
by dint of its limited purview - to limit the meaning of the text to a
singular moment in time 1900 years ago upon a community half way around the
world.

-David





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