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Chapter Three u Structure To this point I have outlined the controversy concerning the integrity and authorship of Aduersus Iudaeos by summarizing scholarly opinion. Thus I have demonstrated that the controversy is the reason this text plays such an insignificant part in the debate about the relationship between Christians and Jews in the centuries after the destruction of the second temple in Jerusalem, and why this work was not considered in Robert Sider’s examination of Tertullian ’s use of classical rhetoric. My contention is that classical rhetoric provides particular insight into the nature of Aduersus Iudaeos, an insight that can contribute to the resolution of the controversy. In the previous chapter I pointed to the fact that Aduersus Iudaeos does not claim to be an account of an actual debate between a Christian and a Jew but is a literary production designed to demonstrate what the Christian participant should have said (or wanted to say but could not) and what any Christian participant in such encounters in the future ought to say. In this regard the pamphlet can be classified as a controuersia, a rhetorical forensic exercise. I argued that unlike his contemporaries Tertullian turned to controuersia not merely to delight or impress his readers with his skill but, because of Christianity’s precarious status, to persuade them about the validity of his argument. A rhetorical approach asks questions about readership, and I put forward the view that while Tertullian imagined his work being heard by both sides in a future debate between Christians and Jews, he intended the work primarily for Christians in order to arm them for future encounters. This led me to conclude that we ought to take this work as evidence that such encounters still took place at the end of the second century, at least in North Africa. 58 This is the first time that this work has been analyzed rhetorically, along the lines pursued by Sider with regard to the rest of Tertullian’s output. The conclusion that will be reached from an examination of its rhetorical structure , argumentation, and style in this chapter and the next two is that the pamphlet has an overall structural integrity that would indicate that whoever wrote the first half intended to write something that resembles closely what we find today in the second half. It is not a perfect rhetorical structure. Yet, rather than conclude that the elements of textbook rhetoric do not illuminate the pamphlet we have, I contend that its use helps us identify it not as the work of an inferior author who copied from Tertullian’s Aduersus Marcionem but as an unrevised draft by someone who was trying very much to write according to rhetorical conventions, but whose effort was flawed. The work gives us a glimpse into the raw thought processes of an energetic writer trying to address too many ideas concurrently before the discipline of editorial revision forced a straightening out of his sometimes jumbled thoughts. Further, I would conclude that if Tertullian wrote the first half of Aduersus Iudaeos then, from a structural and stylistic analysis, he wrote the second half as well. A rhetorical perspective confirms the idea that Tertullian himself could have used much of the same material in both Aduersus Iudaeos and book 3 of Aduersus Marcionem. The coherence of the material structurally in Aduersus Iudaeos would suggest its temporal priority over book 3 of Aduersus Marcionem. In this chapter I intend to consider what classical rhetoric may reveal about the structure of Aduersus Iudaeos in order to support the position I am advancing. My method is simple. After a few words about the standard patterns of rhetorical structure I shall present a summary of what Sider has observed about each part of a speech in Tertullian’s other works, followed by comments on the rhetorical structure I have discerned in Aduersus Iudaeos. From this I shall suggest that we can believe that the structure of Aduersus Iudaeos is consistent with what Tertullian is known to have done elsewhere. Finally, I believe that rhetoric gives us a structure for Aduersus Iudaeos unlike that proposed by any other scholar, and one that helps us appreciate better the point at issue in the pamphlet and one that explains better the inelegancies of its second half. Classical rhetoric typically divided a speech, especially a forensic one, into four, five, or six parts: exordium (or prooemium), narratio, diuisio (or partitio), confirmatio (or probatio), refutatio (or confutatio or reprehensio), and peroratio...

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