Not Just Looking the Part

Dress, performance and rhetorical action in the synoptic gospels

Paper by Erin Vearncombe , November 21, 2022

A joint session of Performance Criticism of the Bible and Other Ancient Media (PC-BOAT) and Rhetoric and Early Christianity

In the first century CE, Quintilian defined rhetoric as bene dicendi scientia, the “science of speaking well” (Inst. 2.15.34). “Speaking well,” or persuading others of what is good or right, involves much more than word choice; it is embodied action. This embodied action involves voice, movement and dress. Quintilian writes about dress as an active, if challenging, participant in speech. The speaker must take great care to use his dress properly, acting in awareness of the possible effects of dishevelled hair or a slipped fold of a cloak at different points of the speech (Inst. 11.3.137-49). Dress is, essentially, performative rhetoric, used as part of the body to make or break arguments, to not just enhance but enact persuasion, to achieve specific results. In the context of the oral/scribal and intensely visual cultures of Judaism and early Christianity, dress often plays a key role in persuasive action. As dress functioned differently on and with bodies in the ancient Mediterranean than it does on contemporary bodies, the integration of dress theory with our interpretation of key writings and artefacts creates new epistemic space where performance criticism and rhetorical criticism profitably meet. This paper specifically examines the prevalence of dress in the rhetorical activities of Jesus in the synoptic gospels. Dress in these contexts functions in concrete, material terms, not as metaphor or symbol pointing to other meaning. Dress is itself active in challenge-riposte exchanges in the synoptics and in strategic teaching moments as well. It is an essential component of Jesus’ construction of the body of the student. Well beyond “looking the part,” dress is performative partner, part of the embodied action of rhetoric in these writings.

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