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Scriptura 59 (1996), pp. 353-362

(Returned to original wording by author October 2, 2007)

The Dialectical Nature of Early Christian Discourse


Abstract
The topic of this address is the birth of Christian discourse during the first century of the common era. An analogy, if you will, can be the birth of the discourse of South Africa as a new nation. The strategy is to approach the birth of Christianity from the perspective of the kinds of discourses that interacted with one another over a period of a century (30-130 CE) to create a kind of speech that was perceived both to be distinct from the other Judaisms of the time and to have the nature of a discourse that was perceived to be complete in and of itself.

1. Introduction

I call the mode of analysis I use socio-rhetorical criticism (Robbins 1992, 1994a, 1994b, 1995, 1996a, 1996b). The goal is to analyze different modes of rhetorical argumentation with the aid of sociological and anthropological theories that help us to understand the multiplicity of earliest Christianity. While rhetorical analysis of discourse in classical Greece yielded three major kinds of social discourse--judicial, deliberative, and epideictic--rhetorical analysis of early Christian discourse yields six major modes: wisdom, miracle, apocalyptic, opposition, death-resurrection, and cosmic discourse. While the three classical modes of rhetoric emerged from the courtrooms, political assemblies, and civil ceremonies in the Greek city states, the six Christian modes of rhetoric emerged from activities of various groups of first century Messianites throughout a region extending from the eastern Mediterranean to Rome. The pluriform administrative and social structure of the Hellenistic-Roman world gave rise to a variety of valued social modes of discourse that, interacting with one another, acquired an identity of Christian discourse.

My thesis, then, is that six major modes of discourse in dialogue with one another throughout the first century of the common era produced the phenomenon we now recognize as early Christian discourse. Since people who use different discourses regularly come together in common places, I will not assign different discourses strictly to different locations. Rather, the goal is to get some basic perception of the nature of each of the discourses. It will be possible in the present context to draw only a broad outline of this approach to diversity within earliest Christianity.

2. Antecedents to our Analysis

It is instructive to begin with analysis of antecedents to the approach in this essay. Analysis of multiplicity in early Christian discourse goes back at least to Ferdinand Christian Baur during the first half of the 19th century. In a mode characteristic of much history writing,

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