Paul's Offer of Leniency (2 Cor 10:1)
Populist Ideology & Rhetoric in a Pauline Letter Fragment

By Donald Dale Walker
December 2002
Mohr Siebeck
ISBN: 3-16-147891-6
459 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/8"
$137.50 paper original

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The author examines one of Paul's most rhetorically dramatic texts in order to reveal how it relies on the commonplace ideas and argumentative strategies of the Hellenistic world. As a result the reader can see how the apostle invented his ideas and appreciate how inextricably Paul's mission was wrapped up in the world in which he lived.

Contents include: Semantic investigation. 2 Corinthians 10:1a and 10:1-13:10. Christ the Good King: The leniency & clemency of Christ in Paul's Christology-sources, dissemination & survey of Good King Topoi; evidence of the Good King in Paul's epistles. Paul's practice of leniency: clemency in his ministry to the Corinthians and in Greco-Roman society. Paul's self presentation in 2 Cor 10-13: modest, populist & anti-encomiastic rhetoric-ethical argumentation, Paul's ethical argument, Socrates' combination of modesty & irony, the Socratic subversion of encomiastic rhetoric, the Fool's rejection of modesty, Paul's paradoxical Socratic irony, the basis of Paul's counterculture: Christology. Appendices, Bibliography. Indices.



Theology; Ancient history
WissUNT zum Neuen Testament. Vol 2. No. 152

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