A Text centred rhetorical analysis of Paul's Letter to Titus

SECTION 3
CONCLUSION
In Section 1, the research hypothesis on which this study was based was
outlined as follows: A thorough text-centred rhetorical approach to the Letter
of Titus (i.e. without relating it to the other two Pastoral Letters or approaching
it in terms of the authenticity/inauthenticity debate) will yield new insights for
its interpretation.
Guided by this research hypothesis, this rhetorical analysis of the Letter to
Titus was, accordingly, an endeavour to firstly, investigate the uniqueness of
this letter based upon the assumption that it stands independently from the
Timothean correspondence. Secondly, it involved an attempt at analysing
Paul’s rhetorical strategy from the letter itself. The methodology employed to
achieve this was a minimal theoretical framework methodology for rhetorical
analysis, which was developed by Tolmie (2005) for a text-centred rhetorical
analysis by which the persuasive strategy in a text can be identified and
described.
The important question to be asked now is: “Did this study indeed yield new
insights, as foreseen in Chapter 1?” To begin, it should be pointed out that this
study is the only comprehensive, as well as the only text-centred, rhetorical
analysis of the Letter to Titus currently existing – in itself a contribution to New
Testament scholarship. As I have indicated in Chapter 1, the rhetorical
interest in the Pastorals is generally rare and in the case of Titus it is virtually
non-existent. With regard to Titus, this it has been suggested that this is
attributable, firstly, to the relative novelty of the rhetorical critical approach
and, secondly, to the brevity of the letter in comparison to the other two
letters. Titus often appears to be treated as a footnote within the greater
discussion of the Timothean corpus. The only recent work that focuses
exclusively upon the rhetoric of the Letter to Titus is that of Joachim Classen.
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