4 Prelude

Prelude

To begin this topic, a brief overview of the history of “rhetorical criticism” may be helpful.

In 1969, in his presidential address to the Society of Biblical Literature, James Muilenburg issued a call for moving beyond form criticism to what he titled “rhetorical criticism.” He said that his primary interest was: in exhibiting the structural patterns that are employed for the fashioning of a literary unit, whether in poetry or in prose, and in discerning the many and various devices by which the predications are formulated and ordered into a unified whole. Such an enterprise I should describe as, rhetoric and the methodology as rhetorical criticism…

Taken from Paul Through Mediterranean Eyes by Kenneth E. Bailey