"Where Is the Voice Coming From?": Querying the Evidence for Paul's Rhetorical Education in 2 Corinthians 10–13

Although it would be an exaggeration to speak of a consensus, a majority of scholars now sees Paul as a man of relatively high social status. Most often cited as evidence for such status is Paul’s putative education in formal rhetorical theory. The prevailing logic consists of two propositions: First, Paul’s letters can be analyzed according to the dictates of Greco-Roman rhetoric; therefore, Paul must have been well educated in rhetoric. Second, rhetorical education was available only among the wealthy elite; therefore, Paul must have been brought up in such circles. A number of scholars have observed that such argumentation fails to consider the extent to which rhetorical ability exists independently of formal education. But despite this general observation, there has been no attempt to determine whether the specific rhetorical competencies to which Paul’s letters attest admit of informal acquisition. In this study, I use insights from comparative rhetoric and sociolinguistics to get methodological leverage on this problem and thus to reevaluate the evidence for Paul’s rhetorical education. Using 2 Cor 10–13 as a test case, I demonstrate that Paul’s use of rhetoric provides no evidence of formal education; on the contrary, his persuasive strategies are instances of informal rhetoric. After undertaking a history of scholarship in part 1, in part 2 I reassess recent claims of Paul’s conformity with formal rhetorical conventions in 2 Cor 10–13. Here I demonstrate that many alleged parallels derive from misleading treatment of the rhetorical sources and cannot be sustained. Convincing parallels are few—I isolate four—and rather general; nevertheless, they do merit further explanation. I seek to provide such explanation in part 3 by offering a basic theory of informal rhetoric and its acquisition, and demonstrating the use, by speakers with no knowledge of formal rhetorical theory, of precisely those rhetorical features found both in Paul and in the ancient rhetorical sources. Finally, in part 4, I begin a redescription of Paul’s persuasive voice: Paul’s prose style, his self-description in 2 Cor 10:10 and 11:6, and his “foolish boasting” reveal him to be a speaker at once abject and defiant.

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.