oa Doctrine et drame dans la prédication grecque

The christological disputes of the IVth-VIIth centuries generated in the Christian East a specific rhetorical technique: the dramatisation of the exexegis of the New Covenant. Exexegis required a strenuous effort in the Hellenized world so impregnated with philosophical and rhetorical culture. The preacher who meant to convince his audience had to level up his explanation of the Holy Scripture to the height of the Hellenistic intellectual heritage and to resort to the most subtle rhetoric procedures. Dramatising scriptural episodes became thus an instrument of doctrinal persuasion, the theses of the preacher taking the shape of fictitions speeches that the New Covenant’s dramatis personae were supposed to pronounce. The study exemines and describes the technic of dramatising biblical comments and the genre it produced: the exegetical drama.