Rhetoric: For New Testament Readers

For decades, especially as a result of George Kennedy’s relentless scholarship and teaching, rhetoric has percolated among some New Testament scholars and therefore creeps into preaching and teaching in local churches.

Ben Witherington has spent his life reading the NT in light of Kennedy’s theories of rhetoric, and alongside has developed some of his own theories.

In the wake of Kennedy is Baylor’s Mikeal Parsons, author with Michael Martin of a new book that I recommend for anyone who wants to grasp what rhetoric in the 1st Century world involved. It is called Ancient Rhetoric and the New Testament. Here’s an opening to whet your appetite to buy and read this book:

Literacy in the ancient Graeco-Roman world was inextricably bound to the theory and practice of rhetoric. It is conventional to speak of a tripartite educational system from Homeric times to its fullest expression in the Hellenistic period and beyond into late antiquity. At the primary level, (mostly) boys and (some) girls, ages roughly seven to eleven and presumably mostly of elite status (with an occasional slave or middling-class individual), learned their alphabets, copied lists and short passages (which they could not read), and learned to write their names, all activities aimed at acquiring some basic literary competence and improving handwriting. At the secondary level, aristocratic boys and (fewer) girls, roughly aged eleven to fifteen, continued to practice handwriting, often copying lists “made up of names of gods, Homeric heroes and even philosophers, [which] also supplied students with cultural knowledge.” But now the student began reading, especially Homer and the Greek poets. Study of grammar, noun declensions, inflection (running a sentence or saying through all the cases and numbers), culminated in elementary composition, which might include letters to parents. The third and tertiary level of rhetorical education in the ancient world was populated by an ever-dwindling number of students, now composed almost entirely of the male elite, who were in their mid- to late teens (fifteen to nineteen). The aim now was to prepare orators for declamation and a public life in the court system or politics, or both. The rhetorical handbooks attributed to luminaries such as Cicero and Quintilian were aimed at this last level of declamation.

Until recently, it was thought that these levels were idealized into uniformly discrete and self-contained units (in separate classrooms, if not separate spaces entirely). Raffaella Cribiore and others, working especially with the material remains (tablets, ostraca, papyri) of actual classroom activities, have demonstrated a fluidity in what, when, and how students learned. The implementation of the tripartite educational system varied from locale to locale.

What Parsons focused on was a kind of textbook that gave rise to standard and common approaches to speeches and writing: the progymnasmata.

Within this fluid structure, students would encounter the preliminary exercises, the progymnasmata, intended to facilitate the transition between the study of grammar and the engagement of rhetoric proper. Typically, these exercises were associated with the beginning of the tertiary level of education, though it is quite possible that the exercises were introduced at some point during the secondary level, and given what we now know of the fluidity of the educational system, the exact location of the exercises in the system might be viewed as somewhat irrelevant. After all, when the orator Quintilian was asked when a student should be sent to the rhetor, he responded “When he is fit!” (Inst. 2.1.7).

The progymnasmata were “handbooks that outlined preliminary exercises’ designed to introduce students who had completed basic grammar and literary studies to the fundamentals of rhetoric that they would then put to use in composing speeches and prose.” As such, these graded series of exercises were probably intended to facilitate the transition from grammar school to the more advanced study of rhetoric. Four of these progymnasmata from the first to fifth centuries CE, have survived. What is important about these writings is that some of the exercises in the progymnasmata are clearly intended to embrace both written and oral forms of communication. The epigraph by Theon at the beginning of this chapter makes that point clear: “Training in the exercises is absolutely necessary, not only for those who are going to be orators, but also if anyone wishes to practice the art of poets or prose-writers, or any other writers. These things are, in effect, the foundation of every form of discourse” (Prog. 70.24-30).

I am unsure NT authors had this kind of education and that they were using such handbooks, but what they did was absorbed and what they absorbed in part came from this Greek and Roman tradition.

All of that is to say that a New Testament writer could gain familiarity with and competence in a progymnastic form through any number of means (all of which are complementary and not necessarily exclusive of the others—but none of which is requisite for the correspondences we may see). Rhetoric, as they say, was “in the air,” and some of the air breathed by early Christian writers may well have been in the schoolrooms of the progymnasmatists. Our accounts of correspondence assume from the beginning the possibility of all of these factors, and the certainty of none.