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Burton L. Mack in A Myth of Innocence (1988) was the first to attempt a rhetorical historiography of early Christianity. Using source analyses performed by form critics, plus Bultmann's view of the Hellenistic cult of Christ, Mack distinguished five different early Christian groups on the basis of: (a) miracle catenae; (b) collections of parables; (c) the Q gospel; (d) controversy chreiai; and (e) the Christ cult. Mack has taken this work further in Who Wrote the New Testament? (1995), describing early Christianity through five major discourses: (a) teachings from the Jesus movements; (b) fragments from the Christ cult; (c) Paul and his gospel; (d) Gospels of Jesus the Christ; and (e) visions of the cosmic Lord. My analysis is a modification of Mack's work, using insights from Greco-Roman rhetoric, Mikhail Bakhtin's writings, sociolinguistic theory, and cultural anthropology. From my perspective, Mack's work still lacks a programmatic approach to dialogical interaction among the different modes of discourse in earliest Christianity. Also, Mack's work is still guided in certain ways by historical-critical impulses of the T¸bingen school. These impulses, in some instances, hinder a methodologically consistent rhetorical analysis of first and second century Christian discourse. My goal, in contrast, is to remain more fully within the multiple kinds of early Christian discourse to analyze the different kinds of rhetoricity in each discourse and the relation of the discursive traditions to one another within the written traditions available to us. 3. Early Discourses as Rhetorical Dialects (Rhetorolects) of Jesus Messianism To move beyond the previous analyses, it is helpful to supplement strategies we glean from Greek and Roman rhetorical treatises with insights into language developed by Mikhail M. Bakhtin and P. N. Medvedev in the writings now titled The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (1978). This book sets forth an introduction to sociological poetics by critically analyzing and dialoguing with both European and Russian formalism. One of the key insights to be gained from Bakhtin's work is the dialogical nature of multiple voices in all literature, every society, and every culture. Language is not monological but multivocal. Bakhtin and Medvedev show that formalism makes a key mistake by presupposing that poetic language is a special language set apart from practical language. If I read James Robinson and Helmut Koester's analysis correctly, their distinction between orthodox and heretical trajectories is finally like a distinction between different languages rather than different dialects of the same language. If they were different dialects, they would continue to dialogue in a manner that enriched and enlivened each other. Instead, the trajectories go off their own way into different streams of language. The use of Bakhtin's work in socio-rhetorical analysis and interpretation creates an environment for adapting vocabulary that sociolinguists use to describe languages and dialects. For sociolinguists, every language is a mixture of words and expressions from various cultures and regions, and it is always in a state of change. Given these dynamics, individuals and groups not only speak dialects, but they speak sociolects. A sociolect is "a language variety based on a social (rather than geographical) grouping, such as a social community, or a social class" (Benjamin H. Hary: correspondence; cf. O'Grady and Dobrovolsky 1993: appendix; Bolinger and Sears 1981: chapter 9). The term sociolect still is not quite accurate for the socio-rhetorical phenomenon I am analyzing in New Testament discourse. Though usually it is best not to create new vocabulary for New Testament scholarship, I have decided to accept the advice of the sociolinguist Benjamin H. Hary--a colleague at Emory University--to create a new term to |