Andrew M. Langford examines the rhetoric of medical metaphors in three New Testament letters (1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus) and demonstrates how these letters utilize disease metaphors to promulgate a distinctive vision of opponents and how to deal with them in the post-Pauline era.

In this study, Andrew M. Langford demonstrates that the single, post-Pauline author of the Pastoral Epistles ("the Pastor) crafts a stigmatizing depiction of his theological opponents by spatializing, demonizing, and pathologizing their alleged deviance. Through close comparative readings of ancient medical and philosophical literature, the author argues for the necessity of interpreting the Pastor's pathologizing of deviance in light of ancient disease etiologies and models of corporeality. With this book, the author contributes to recent interpretive insights about the function of authorial fiction in antiquity and demonstrates that the Pastor is self-consciously appropriating the Pauline epistolary to craft his approach to his theological opponents.

Autorentext
Born 1983; PhD, University of Chicago Divinity School; currently instructor at the University of Oregon and ordained pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America.

Inhalt
Chapter 1: Diagnosing Deviance: Foundational Considerations
Chapter 2: Spatializing Deviance: Staying, Straying, and Satan
Chapter 3: Demonizing Deviance: Rethinking the Doctrines of Demons
Chapter 4: Pathologizing Deviance: Toward an Alternative Account of Medical Terminology in the Pastoral Epistles
Chapter 5: Corporealizing Deviance: Bodies in the Pastoral Epistles
Chapter 6: Avoiding Deviance: Keeping Timothy Healthy
Chapter 7: Intellectualizing Deviance: The Corrupted and Psychosomatic Disease
Chapter 8: Deviance as a Crisis of Conscience