Hosted By
“I, brethren, when I came to you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom.” When I first read those words from St. Paul, they inoculated me against certain kinds of inquiry. St. Paul must not have been an orator the way we think of orators, because he didn’t rely on eloquence when he spoke. His education, therefore, must have been irrelevant to his epistles. And certainly we won’t learn anything by attending to the rhetorical form when we take on his writings. But here’s some good news for you, listeners: Ben Witherington and Jason Myers are here to get those ideas off the table. The second edition of their book New Testament Rhetoric demonstrates that not only Paul but all sorts of New Testament writers exhibit familiarity with and formation through ancient canons of rhetoric, and Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome them to the show.
In the sixteenth century, Desiderius Erasmus revolutionized homiletics by bringing the insights of Ciceronian and later humanist rhetoric to bear on preaching, and historians...
With the obvious exception of Plato’s Phaedrus, really old books don’t spend much time on technology. Perhaps the tools didn’t change fast enough. Perhaps...
My own tradition within the Church was an early adopter of the motto “No creed but Christ.” For what intentions are worth, my forerunners...
