SBL - Early Christianity and Its Literature
2 primary works
Book 3
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.
Book 4
This book investigates Colossians as a "captivity" letter from the primary implied author, the imprisoned Paul, to an implied audience of mainly Gentile converts currently in danger of influence by local Jews or Jewish Christians. Utilizing a text-centered, literary-rhetorical, and audience-oriented method, it demonstrates new chiastic structures for the entire letter that progressively encourage the audience to resist deceit and conduct themselves according to all the wisdom at their disposal as holy ones in Christ.