Symposium or Anti-Symposium? Reflections on Luke 14:1-24

Abstract

When Aristotle said of style in the making of an argument that 'the way in which a thing is said does affect its intelligibility," he reluctantly conceded (owing to the average hearer's 'defects') that facts and proofs alone may not produce persuasion. How one says what is to be said matters, for it is largely in the attention to the manner of speaking that the stuff to be communicated (logos) is armed with affective power over the disposition (pathos) of the audience. This basic rhetorical principle, which I here enlarge to mean the general accommodation of speech to the prevailing conventions and codes of communication in a particular society, is no less valid as a force in the early Christian articulation of the traditions about Jesus. The thorough-going rhetoricity of these traditions manifests itself in various patterns of argumentative composition in the synoptic gospels2 and, during the pre-synoptic stages of transmission, in the predominance of units encoded in typically Hellenistic, rhetorically useful Gattungen (chreiai, miracle stories, analogies). This early Christian option for standard Hellenistic genres, rhetorical figures and patterns of argumentation was not borne of a frivolous fancy for 'flowery speech,' censured even in the rhetorical world of antiquity, but of the need to forge a discourse of persuasion that would be useful for Christian communal formation (paideia) and promotion (mission), a discourse, therefore, that necessarily 'rested ultimately upon cultural conventions and traditions that were shared and in force' in the Hellenistic world, the 'home' of the Christian community 'from the first,' as Heinz Guenther has shown with compelling persuasiveness.