Performance Criticism of the Pauline Letters

By Bernhard Oestreich

Translated by Lindsay Elias, Brent Blum (Cascade, 2016)

Reviewed by Rafael Rodríguez, Johnson University, in RBL (11/13/2020)

From the Review:

Oestreich, motivated by his interest in homiletics (xi), turns his attention to the mechanisms by which Paul’s letters were experienced and received by their original audiences and how his letters worked their effect on those audiences. Oestreich leans into one of performance criticism’s most important insights: our written texts are the material remains of events in the ancient world. The experience of those events transcended and encompassed the contents of our written texts, so that those contents were affected by extratextual considerations such as gestures, tone, pace, ritual and rhetorical space, and myriad other aspects of their performance before an audience. As event, the performance is not reducible to the written text, but the text is all that remains of the performance. This is both the warrant for and the limitation of performance criticism.

Read the full review at SBL Central.