Rhetoric of Religious Antiquity

Call For Papers: The RRA Group holds three sessions at the annual meetings according to three research tracks. For Track 1 (New Horizons in Sociorhetorical Interpretation) the Rhetoric of Religious Antiquity seminar and the Senses and Culture in the Biblical World section are sponsoring a joint session exploring the non-visual senses. While sight is often the most prominent of the senses deployed by biblical and cognate texts, sensory language involving hearing, touching, tasting, smelling, proprioception, pain, or any other sense demands our attention as well. The papers in this session will examine the use of this language by examining how and why the rhetoric of the texts employs such sensory language. As sensory experience is culturally mediated, interpretation of sensory language in ancient texts will also require us to attend to the cultural meanings the different senses evoked in their indigenous contexts. Moreover, since the senses are more often than not simply assumed by the texts, attending to how they function when they are explicitly engaged will help us to understand these texts better. This session will consist of three invited papers and one respondent. Track 2 (An Analytical Seminar showcasing the use of sociorhetorical interpretation) will be on 2 Corinthians and will be presented by Prof. B. J. Oropeza. Track 3 (Refining Sociorhetorical Interpretation) will be a conjoint session with the Disputed Paulines Section and will present an invited panel to review Harry Maier, Picturing Paul in Empire: Imperial Image, Text and Persuasion in Colossians, Ephesians and the Pastoral Epistles (Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2013). Maier will respond.

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