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.

The First Christian Letters

Reading 1 and 2 Thessalonians

by Rafael Rodriguez

(Cascade, 2024>

Paul's letters to the Thessalonians are the earliest surviving Christian documents. They are also among the most easily overlooked parts of the New Testament. What could these short, simple letters possibly have to say to a world caught in the throes of racial discord, political polarization, fears of an uncertain future, and fights over truth and false news? While Paul and his companions could not have imagined anything like the twenty-first century, their letters in the mid-first century to non-Jewish followers of Jesus in northern Greece address problems we still wrestle with today: race and ethnicity, family, ethics, an unknown future, how to respond to strangers, and more. These letters, rather than being an outdated part of Paul's collected letters, provoke us to throw ourselves into the great challenges of the modern world, to resist the temptation to repay "another person evil for evil," and to "pursue the good, both for one another and for everyone" (1 Thess 5:15). Will we read these ancient letters anew?