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7 Chapter 2 The Recollection of Rhetoric A Brief History Margaret D. Zulick Even when narrowed to the field of religion and concentrated in New Testament studies, the study of rhetoric remains staggeringly vast. To get our bearings we begin with a contribution from expert cartographer Margaret Zulick, whose concise orientation compresses twenty-four centuries of rhetorical investigation into about as many paragraphs. En route Zulick directs our attention to many of the key thinkers in our aggregate intellectual heritage, not merely in Kennedy’s alone: from Aristotle to The Columbian Orator; from Augustine to Kenneth Burke; from Judah Messer Leon to Karlyn Kohrs Campbell. Any essay assessing the work of George Kennedy and its bearing on religious rhetoric does well to emulate his ability to traverse disciplines in search of comparable ideas. My own career across disciplines could not have been done successfully, if at all, were it not for his trailblazing. In contemplating Kennedy’s “post-biblical” influence , we turn immediately to the many disciplines in which rhetoric is now influential, having been given an identity and a body of work of its own. I therefore verge on autobiography in order to do justice to the bridges Kennedy’s work has helped to build between rhetorical interests in biblical studies, communication, languages, and classics. When James Muilenburg wrote “Form Criticism and Beyond,” suggesting rhetorical criticism as a remedy for the purely historical approach to the study of Old Testament literary forms, he was working from a European-centered understanding of rhetoric as the study of prose style.1 This conception of rhetoric, elaborated in the works of Muilenburg’s noted student Phyllis Trible,2 was what I knew of rhetoric when I started Ph.D. coursework at the then-interdisciplinary program in Religious Studies at Garrett-Northwestern. While looking for a field cognate to Hebrew Bible at Northwestern, I encountered some Black Watson Rhetoric final.indd 7 8/27/08 9:02:00 AM 8 Margaret D. Zulick New Testament students in the Garrett cafeteria and discovered that they were taking courses in a subject called rhetorical criticism. In this way I blundered into what was then the best rhetoric program in the country. For two full semesters I was unaware that I was in a communication department, not a rhetoric department, and I struggled to make sense of their approach to the classic rhetorical texts. Accustomed to close reading of fixed literary tradition as an end in itself, I encountered a group of people who, with less Greek than my own four semesters’ worth, were mining Aristotle’s rhetoric as a how-to manual for contemporary speech and disputation. At their elbows were Kennedy ’s volumes on classical rhetoric.3 The idea was energizing—and this energeia induced me to make rhetoric my academic home. Two qualities of Kennedy’s thought have made it possible for rhetoricians trained in modern communication departments, without much background in classical languages, nevertheless to come to grips with the Greco-Roman rhetorical tradition: his copiousness and his sense of adventure in following the art of rhetoric wherever it leads, especially across long-standing disciplinary boundaries. Early reviews of The Art of Persuasion in Greece in communication journals testify to the sheer volume of information; in fact, they were agreed that the book had too much information for the nonspecialist.4 In New Testament Interpretation through Rhetorical Criticism, Kennedy crossed not one but two disciplinary lines, for in outlining a rhetorical reading of the New Testament , he cited both Lloyd Bitzer and Kenneth Burke: Bitzer, a communication scholar; Burke, a critic without portfolio.5 What was the rhetoric I encountered in this foray toward the field of communication? For American communication scholars, rhetoric is a very different animal than it was for Muilenburg. For them, logical invention of arguments, not stylistic elegance, is the heart and soul of persuasion. In fact the two traditions of rhetoric—call them European and American—seemed largely unaware of each other. So I was set on the path to assist in bringing them back together, in recollecting the complete tradition. There was a pragmatic imperative to this goal as well. New Testament scholars enjoy a strong genetic liaison between the language of the New Testament and the rhetorical tradition. I needed to justify a rhetoric of the Old Testament, supposedly pre-Hellenic and Hebrew rather than Greek. The idea of rhetoric as a transhistorical theory of persuasion, an aspect of language as such in its function...

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