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<\/a><\/p>\nWe have stressed before, and I would stress again that the speech was a far more widespread and influential phenomenon than the letter in the Mediterranean world in which our authors wrote.\u00a0 This is so not just because only 10-15% of the populus was literate (i.e. could read and write), but also because rhetoric, Greco-Roman rhetoric and its various forms and modifications (Attic, Asiatic, Jewish) had a much longer and more influential history than letter writing.\u00a0\u00a0 When letter writing comes into its own in the first century B.C. and thereafter, letter writers were constantly trying to figure out how to put discourse into a written form, and letters were constantly shaped by the rudiments, rules, and structures of rhetoric.<\/p>\n
You can see this so very clearly in the comments the leading exponents of letter writing make about what they are doing.\u00a0 Cicero is very blunt about the matter.\u00a0 He says that a letter is in effect a speech in written medium (ad Atticum<\/em> 8.14.1).\u00a0 To the speech would be added elements at the beginning and the end of an epistolary nature since the document had to be sent but otherwise we are most often dealing with the transcript of a speech, mentally composed following the long ingrained rules of rhetoric.\u00a0 We may compare this to what (Pseudo)-Demetrius says on the same subject\u2014a letter is half of a dialogue or a surrogate for a dialogue (De elocutione<\/em> 223).<\/p>\nIt is thus quite the wrong way around to talk about figuring out how rhetoric could be used in an epistolary mode.\u00a0 The issue was how letters could be written in a predominantly oral and rhetorical culture that might faithfully reflect the rhetorical nature of discourse, and especially the various forms of public discourse.\u00a0 It is of course extraordinarily difficult in a text-based and computer screen culture like ours to imagine thinking of oral communication as primary and a text as a secondary thing reflecting the patterns of oral speech, but that is how we must conceive of the world of the NT writers.\u00a0 One other point is germane\u2014 the Epistolary theorists came long after, and on the coattails of, the rhetorical theorists going all the way back to Aristotle and continuing through the New Testament era with figures like Quintilian.\u00a0 It is thus a mistake to turn to figures like (pseudo)-Libanius and others, who come from after our period and who are consolidating epistolary theory at a later date, as guides for how to read the New Testament and its rhetoric.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We have stressed before, and I would stress again that the speech was a far more widespread and influential phenomenon than the letter in the Mediterranean world in which our authors wrote.\u00a0 This is so not just because only 10-15% of the populus was literate (i.e. could read and write), but also because rhetoric, Greco-Roman […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":91,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/a><\/p>\n