Polemic in the Book of Hebrews. Lloyd Kim
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the New Age in the Epistle to the Hebrews?,” in Apocalyptic and the New Testament: Essays in Honor of J. Louis Martyn, ed. Joel Marcus and Marion L. Soards, JSNTSS 24 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1989) 273; and Isaacs, “Hebrews,” 157.
31 Dieter Sänger, “Neues Testament und Antijudaismus: Versuch einer exegetischen und hermeneutischen Vergewisserung im innerchristlichen Gespräch,” KD 34 (1988) 210–31.
32 Donald Hagner, Encountering the Book of Hebrews (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2002) 35–36.
33 Bloesch, “All Israel Will Be Saved,” 139.
34 Luke Timothy Johnson, “The New Testament’s Anti-Jewish Slander and the Conventions of Ancient Polemic,” JBL 108 (1989) 423–24.
35 Ibid., 429.
36 Ibid., 433.
37 Ibid., 441.
38 David A. deSilva, Perseverance in Gratitude: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary on the Epistle ‘to the Hebrews’ (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000) 263.
39 Ibid., 264.
40 The author describes 1) the law as “weak” and “useless” (7:18); 2) the Mosaic covenant as having “fault” (8:7) and becoming obsolete (8:13); and 3) the ineffectiveness of bull and goat sacrifices in taking away sins (10:4), cf. 13:10.
41 Johnson, “The New Testament’s Anti-Jewish Slander,” 433.
2
The Method of Approach
We shall approach the question of anti-Semitism, anti-Judaism, and supersessionism in Hebrews by applying the socio-rhetorical method to three specific polemical passages: Heb 7:1-19, 8:1-13, and 10:1-10.1 The socio-rhetorical approach will be particularly helpful in this study because it blends together rhetorical criticism, social-scientific criticism, as well as other modern methods.2 In this chapter, we will first review rhetorical and socio-scientific studies on Hebrews. Then, we will describe and evaluate the socio-rhetorical approach.
Review of Rhetorical Approaches to Hebrews
General Trends
The socio-rhetorical approach has its roots in rhetorical criticism, which can be divided into three major trajectories: literary-aesthetic studies, rhetorical criticism, and the “new rhetoric” of Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca.3
Literary-Aesthetic Studies
The modern history of rhetorical criticism began with James Muilenburg’s 1968 Presidential address to the Society of Biblical Literature. At that forum, he asked what would come after form criticism.4 Muilenburg wanted to move beyond form criticism, which did not do enough to examine authorial creativity and composition. He also wanted to head off the new literary critical movement, which seemed to discount any historical considerations when examining a text.5 Amos Niven Wilder also promoted a rhetorical approach that was historically grounded. He did not want to separate form from content.6 However, what has emerged from Muilenburg’s and Wilder’s work is a view that rhetorical criticism is primarily an examination of the aesthetics or literary properties of the text.
Rhetorical Criticism
A second movement promoted by George A. Kennedy is referred to as “rhetorical criticism.” Kennedy shifted the focus from rhetoric as literary artistry to rhetoric as the art of persuasion, using classical Greek rhetoric as his guide.7 Though he was not the first to adopt this more technical definition of rhetoric for New Testament interpretation, he was perhaps the most influential.8 He distinguishes rhetorical criticism from (new) literary criticism in that literary criticism is concerned with how modern readers read these ancient documents, while rhetorical criticism seeks to discern how the ancient readers read the works in their own context.9
Kennedy outlines an approach that begins with identifying the rhetorical unit. He defines a unit as that which has a beginning, middle, and an end.10 He notes that one must look for signs that indicate a proem and epilogue (i.e., inclusios, etc.). Once the unit is determined, one must turn to form criticism and seek to define the rhetorical situation or Sitz im Leben of the text, specifically the situation in which the reader was to make some response.11 This can be facilitated by identifying the text as deliberative, judicial, or epideictic and then determining the rhetorical problem (objections that the audience may have had against the speaker).12 Next would be an examination of the arrangement of the material, paying attention to the argument and its use of deductive or inductive reasoning.13 Once this is complete then one should look over the entire unit and ask whether it was successful in meeting its rhetorical goal.14
The “New Rhetoric”
A third trajectory is described as the “new rhetoric.” Burton Mack argues that the publication of Chaim Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca’s English translation of The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation15 moved the discipline from seeing rhetoric as simply an analysis of style and aesthetics, to seeing it as argumentation.16 Though this movement is similar to Kennedy’s rhetorical criticism, it emphasizes the social situation behind the text much more than Kennedy’s approach and focuses less on how the text follows Greco-Roman rhetorical forms. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca bring out the fact that the social situation in which the argument was made is an important factor in understanding the persuasive force of an argument.
All language is the language of a community, be this a community bound by biological ties, or by the practice of a common discipline or technique. The terms used, their meanings, their definition, can only be understood in the context of the habits, ways of thought, methods, external circumstances, and traditions known to the users of those terms.17
Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca wanted to focus on the audience and the social context as well as the speaker and the speech. This led naturally to examining the rhetoric of a text in hopes of reconstructing