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6 The Rhetorical Deployment of Scripture in Gregory Gregory never wrote a separate work on biblical interpretation, as Origen and Augustine did. Instead he left us his finely wrought oratory suffused with Scripture, surely intending his use of Scripture there to serve as instruction for future generations. For Gregory, the mediation of scriptural pedagogy was primarily an oratorical affair, a matter of persuasion and formation of the hearer through discourse. His orations illustrate the rhetorical character of his deployment of Scripture: the way the use of the text is shaped by and to the end of moving hearers to partake in the historical possibilities opened by Christ through the Spirit. They conform to his hermeneutics but show them put to work in bringing scriptural pedagogy to bear in the service of the transformation of human beings in their particular historical circumstances. In these ways, examining Gregory’s understanding of the rhetorical character of Christian teaching, and his use of Scripture in his rhetoric, helps complete the picture of his approach to the Bible as a premodern model to assist us in addressing the challenges posed by historical consciousness to the theology and theological interpretation of Scripture. Textuality and Christian Rhetoric in Late Antiquity To appreciate why Gregory’s oratory is the primary vehicle for his biblical exposition, we need to understand a little more about literacy and orality in his context. While some of Gregory’s hermeneutical comments do envisage individual readers wrestling with scriptural texts, he usually has teachers in mind, whose scholarship will edify others.1 And while he envisages private reading on the part of some of the laity—presumably those with sufficient education and wealth to have both ready access to written scriptural texts and 159 the ability to read them fluently—the evidence of his orations suggests he did not think them to be without need of regular teaching in the church.2 Literacy rates in the ancient world, however, suggest that the large majority of Gregory’s congregations would have had no or low levels of literacy, even if we allow for the ability of artisans and other tradespeople to handle correspondence and accounts relating to their business.3 Gregory’s congregations were, for the most part, likely to have been acquainted with Scripture primarily through the process of catechesis, through the lengthy public reading of Scripture in the liturgy, and through its homiletical exposition.4 This way of receiving texts, however, is consistent with the oral dissemination of texts in Greco-Roman society to the less literate and illiterate. As Gamble notes, Recitations of poetry and prose works, dramatic performances in theatres and at festivals, declamations in high rhetorical style, streetcorner philosophical diatribes, commemorative inscriptions, the 1. Hence the commendation of Athanasius in Or. 21.6–7, SC 270, pp. 120–24, and the mention in Oration 31 of those who have “read the Divine Writings neither lazily nor as a mere pastime, but have examined the letter and have stooped [and looked] inside,” Or. 31.21, SC 250, p. 316. This mention also suggests there were those in Gregory’s time who read but without due care and attention. His remarks examined above on the need for formation before undertaking pastoral responsibilities point in a similar direction. 2. Nor could the preacher necessarily count on such people taking the trouble to read the apparently uncultivated writings that comprised Christian sacred literature. It is perhaps for this reason that Gregory wrote paraphrases of key episodes and texts from Scripture in elegant poetry, which may well have been intended for elite correspondents in Constantinople. Gregory also commends Scripture to the readers of his poems in Carmen 2.1.39: the inspired words of God offer “a calm harbour for those who flee the storm” (PG 37 1330). 3. Given what we know of the social composition of early Christian communities and on the basis of work on literacy rates in the ancient world, Harry Gamble estimates that no more than c. 10 percent of any given early Christian community were able to read, criticize, or interpret their Scriptures. See Books and Readers in the Early Church (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 5. It is possible, as Jaclyn Maxwell argues of John Chrysostom’s congregation in Antioch, that some ability to read texts can be attributed to a variety of nonelite readers on the basis of the availability of lower-prestige schooling, and of the survival of texts in the form of...

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