Search results for ""author margaret m. mitchell""

Margaret M. Mitchell argues that all Pauline interpretation depends to a large degree upon the ways in which readers formulate their own mental (and sometimes graphic) images of the author, Paul. John Chrysostom, the most prolific interpreter of the Pauline epistles in the early church (c. 349-407 C.E.), richly exemplifies this phenomenon in his writings and speeches, where he composes word portraits of his beloved Paul, so as to bring his own readers face to face with the saintly figure he commends for their imitation.The author brings together the copious portraits of Paul - of his body, his soul, and his life circumstances - found throughout Chrysostom's immense corpus of writings, and for the first time analyzes them as complex rhetorical compositions built upon well-known conventions and techniques of Greco-Roman rhetoric (epithet, encomium, and ekphrasis). Chrysostom's literary portraiture, by idealizing Paul as 'the archetypal image' of Christian virtue, served as a rhetorical vehicle for social construction and replication of the Pauline model in the now-Christian society of late antiquity. Pauline interpretation as Chrysostom practiced it confounds both the traditional map of patristic exegesis as defined by the dichotomy between Antiochene literalism and Alexandrine allegory, and contemporary hermeneutical claims about 'the death of the author' in the interpretive enterprise. While Chrysostom's Pauline portraiture may reach exalted heights of artistry, it is not unique, as comparisons with Chrysostom's Latin contemporary Augustine and recent Pauline scholarship reveal. Two appendices offer a fresh translation of Chrysostom's seven homilies de laudibus sancti Pauli, and a catalogue and color plates of artistic representations of Chrysostom and Paul that graphically represent the author/exegete dynamic this study explores.

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The essays by Margaret M. Mitchell collected in this volume were published over a roughly twenty-five year span of time, and range in scope from the treatment of a two-word phrase (περὶ δέ, "now concerning," in 1 Corinthians and 1 Thessalonians) to the role of "the written record" in the formation, diffusion, and ultimate success of the Gentile Christ-believing mission in the first three centuries. At the heart of these studies are two main claims: an insistence that it was by no means predictable that textuality would be a crucial medium of the Christ-believing apocalyptic missionary movements, and the contention that in a significant way it was the influence of the self-styled "apostolic envoy," Paul, that made it so. These arguments involve not only a retracing of the history and development of Paulinism, in some sense, but also an analysis, both hermeneutical and history-of-religions, of the role of texts in the life of the historical Paul, in the extant remnants of the historical-epistolary Paul (i.e., of the homologoumena), and in that of Paulinist readers, writers, collectors, redactors, narrators, and interpreters from his time forward. This extends from the flexible poetics of his accordion-like "gospel narrative" that could be expanded and contracted to encompass and address with sophistication all kinds of issues in occasion-specific written texts, to the theological grounding of that gospel proclamation κατὰ τὰς γραφάς ("according to the scriptures," 1 Cor 15:3-4), to the religious logic of "envoyage" and "epiphany" that animated his self-understanding of mediated presence of Jesus Christ crucified, to the powerful poetics of epistolary literature that enabled the absent Paul to speak from a distance and so even the dead Paul to continue to speak to generation after generation in a trans-local and trans-temporal religious community formed in relation to these texts, their claims, and their ritual embodiments. The story of the development of an early Christian literary culture is not ancillary to a proper study of the "rise of Christianity" but is a key to it, the isolation of a major strand of its DNA and its processes for replication across time and space.

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