John Paul Heil Livres

The Meal Scenes in An Audience-Oriented Approach

The Rhetorical Role of Scripture in 1 Corinthians, an exegetical analysis of all the explicit quotations and references to the Old Testament in Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, examines the various authoritative roles that not only scriptural quotations but also other explicit references and allusions to scripture play in Paul’s rhetorical strategy in the letter. Through this careful examination Heil shows how each scriptural quote or reference speaks with the divine authority of the scriptures in general and affects the audience with its authority and rhetorical power. The end result is an enlightening portrait of the powerful impact that the Jewish scriptures exerted on Paul’s implied audience at Corinth.

This book analyzes Paul s Letter to the Ephesians and demonstrates that the Letter s implied audience heard its individual units as a rich and complex pattern of chiastic structures. It shows that, not only is the entire Letter arranged in fifteen units that function as a comprehensive chiastic structure, but that each of these fifteen units in turn exhibits its own chiastic structure. By attending carefully to the structure and rhetoric of Ephesians, this work demonstrates how the implied audience is persuaded and empowered by the progression of the Letter to walk in love and so contribute to the cosmic unity of all things in Christ.

This volume employs a text-centered, literary-rhetorical, and audience-oriented method to demonstrate how the implied audience of Philippians are persuaded and exhorted by the dynamic progression of the letter s chiastic structures to rejoice along with Paul and other believers in being conformed, with all of the broad implications of such conformity, to Christ. This reading assumes that Philippians is a single, unified letter written to be read and heard in a public setting as an oral performance substituting for the personal presence of the imprisoned Paul, and it proposes new chiastic structures for the entire letter as a key to understanding it.