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


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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