Words Well Spoken: George Kennedy's Rhetoric of the New Testament

Chapter 1: Introduction

1 Chapter 1 Introduction C. Clifton Black and Duane F. Watson Of interdisciplinary studies one is tempted to grouse as did Mark Twain on a different subject: “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.”1 If that estimate seems hyperbolic , perhaps Hamlet’s rueful comment (I. IV.) was more apt in speaking of . . . a custom More honoured in the breach than the observance. For our intellectual failings the reasons are more transparent than immediately remedied. In every area of human inquiry, whether in the sciences or the humanities, knowledge multiplies rapidly and exponentially. Unless the furrow one tends is either very short or very shallow, or both, it is no longer possible for even acknowledged experts to stay abreast of all developments. To ask them to maintain credibility in their native fields, while crossing boundaries into foreign terrain, seems at best supererogatory and at worst naive. More is the pity, for most of us would concede that some of the most innovative and productive scholarship happens when investigators venture beyond the zones of their academic comfort, learning from others who examine intersecting phenomena from different angles of inquiry. The work of George A. Kennedy, Paddison Professor of Classics Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, exemplifies such teaching and research. Firmly rooted in the teeming literature of western antiquity, Kennedy early on concentrated his prodigious intellect and industry on ancient rhetoric at a time when that subject was a neglected stepchild among his peers in the guild. Black Watson Rhetoric final.indd 1 8/27/08 9:02:00 AM 2 C. Clifton Black and Duane F. Watson After ­ mastering the history of rhetoric,2 compressing that history into manageable size for interested nonspecialists,3 and translating many of its primary sources, both famous and little known,4 Kennedy could easily have spent his remaining years puttering in the garden and polishing his accolades. This he has resolutely refused to do, for reasons that say something about the nature of his discipline and much about the gentleman’s own character. Rhetoric’s earliest theorists claimed that it was dealing with a subject of universal, transcultural human significance—a thesis that one of Kennedy’s most recent monographs has put to the test.5 Kennedy himself, however, is as generous a listener and amiable a collaborator as any scholar could ever hope to meet. His academic passport is covered with the smudged stamps of custodians in a broad array of expertise: specialists in speech communication, homileticians, biblical exegetes, anthropologists, philosophers, and theologians. For colleagues in these disciplines and others, Kennedy’s work has the extraordinary capacity to open up frontiers instead of shutting conversations down. Some of that intellectual stimulation, we hope, crackles in this volume’s chapters. The book as a whole cannot take full measure of Kennedy’s influence in all disciplines cognate with classics, nor does it try. Its distinctive coloration bespeaks its origins in a symposium sponsored by the Rhetoric and the New Testament Section of the Society of Biblical Literature in Philadelphia, November 2005. At that time early versions of four of this book’s chapters addressed “The Impact of George Kennedy’s Work for the Rhetorical Analysis of the New Testament.” Quickly it became evident that those essays alone were inadequate to the task, for large chunks of Christian Scripture went uninvestigated, more recent excursions beyond Kennedy’s enterprise needed engagement, and the larger intellectual currents buoying his own research had receded from view. To these ends, new chapters were commissioned for the present book. The editors stand indebted to all contributors who carved time from their already overburdened schedules to support our aspiration for a full-orbed volume. Though it remains incomplete in some important respects—we think especially of rhetoric’s philosophical underpinnings and political implications— one book cannot do everything, save perhaps to serve as impetus for continued study. As it stands, the present work offers some early-twenty -first-century snapshots of rhetorical analysis of New Testament texts, with considered reflections on how its practitioners have, for Black Watson Rhetoric final.indd 2 8/27/08 9:02:00 AM Introduction 3 now, arrived where they have. These distinctly Christian documents are more than historical artifacts, but stand prominently among the charter documents that still inform a goodly number of the world’s religious adherents. So it is for the editors a...