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gotten out of hand. This rhetoric is highly judicial. If people are guilty, they will be condemned; if people are not guilty of unrighteous action, they are acquitted and preserved in the new environment that God creates. 3.4 Opposition Discourse Central to opposition discourse is the reasoning that people to whom God has given a tradition of salvation in the past currently enact a misunderstanding of God's saving action that must be attacked and replaced by an alternative system of belief and behavior. In other words, this discourse is embedded in sharp disagreement with other kinds of Jews over the conditions and behaviors that enact walking in God's ways in the world. In Bryan Wilson's terminology, this discourse is reformist (Robbins 1996a: 149; 1996b: 73). It presupposes that people on earth can change the system of behavior by confronting it, attacking it, and enacting different behavior that offers God's blessing to people. The gospel of Mark presents the reasoning underlying opposition discourse in the following argument by analogy: No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old cloak; otherwise, the patch pulls away from it, the new from the old, and a worse tear is made. And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise, the wine will burst the skins and the wine is lost, and so are the skins; but one puts new wine into fresh wineskins. (Mark 2.21-22) This discourse contains attacks on specific behaviors and beliefs. It presupposes an alignment of the speaker with God, against people who claim to understand God who really do not know the will and the ways of God. Central to this way of reasoning, then, is the belief that:
Opposition speech contains a combination of judicial and epideictic speech with a deliberative goal. The view is that Jesus Messianism is a distinct alternative to other kinds of Judaism, and activities should be reformed according to new insights into the manner and conditions in which God offers eternal benefits to people on earth. 3.5 Death-Resurrection Discourse Central to death-resurrection discourse, according to 1 Corinthians 15:3-5, is the following reasoning:
This discourse differs from the other discourses by its central dependence on proof from scripture. The other rhetorolects reconfigure many aspects of scripture in their discourse, often gleaning arguments from example or analogy in support of the argumentation. Death-resurrection discourse, in contrast, relies on direct citation of testimony from scripture to support its reasoning. During the first two decades, it is likely that this kind of discourse was introversionist in nature (Robbins 1996a:148; 1996b: 73). During the decade of the 50s, however, Paul developed it into a conversionist and reformist mode of discourse. Programmatic socio-rhetorical analysis of the dramatic effect of this use of death and resurrection discourse during the third and fourth decades of early Christianity (50-70 CE) still awaits modern interpreters. 3.6 Cosmic Discourse Cosmic discourse became a significant rhetorolect within Christianity between twenty-five and fifty years after its beginnings (55-70 CE). This discourse is fully epideictic in nature, |