In this course you will:

1) become acquainted with a variety of ancient ethical/moral texts and topics with a focus on early Christianity;

2) become acquainted with some ancient, modern and postmodern theory and method pertaining to ethics and rhetoric;

3) apply the ethical and rhetorical knowledge and skills you acquire to a subject of your choice in a major seminar paper.

Rhetoric has made a strong come-back in the modern university in communications, philosophy, English, religious studies and elsewhere.  For the most part, this return has been focused on rhetoric as persuasion, not merely or mainly as style.  Historically, the writings of the early church are among the foundation documents of Western civilization, and they have been enormously persuasive to many people in various cultures and societies for two millennia.  The last thirty years or so have witnessed a renewed awareness that the discourse of the NT often exhibits classic Greco-Roman rhetorical features.  Nearly all the readings for this course will take this for granted.

When I first thought of a title for this course, it was Ethics and Persuasion in Early Christianity.  Such a title might imply an entirely antiquarian pursuit that is not typical of how I nor many other scholars approach the topic.  To some modest extent in modern biblical scholarship, and much more in postmodern scholarship, metatheoretical issues are given thorough attention.  So while I take it for granted that such matters are part and parcel with the study of ethics and persuasion in early Christianity, the revised title better reflects this reality.  One is hard-pressed to find a prominent specialists in the study of early Christian ethics who is not at the same time concerned with the ethics of scholarship itself.  So when we say, ethics, persuasion and early Christianity, we mean not only ancient ethics and rhetoric, but also our own.