Jacob Neusner’s documentary method for the study of religious systems offers a way of reading a religious document to expose the religious system it reflects and to identify the urgent question to which the system supplies an answers. A religious system is composed of three elements: a world-view that refers to the intersection of the natural and supernatural to account for the way things are and how they go together, a way of life which expresses the world-view in concrete everyday affairs, and a social entity to which the world-view is addressed and which embodies the way of life. Taken together, these three elements form the basic message or fundamental statement of a system, which, for its adherents, provides a self-evident answer to a pressing and urgent question.
As its name indicates, the documentary method begins with a specific document, which it treats as an autonomous statement, whole and complete. The system reflected in the document is brought to light through an examination of the document’s rhetorical traits, the logic it employs to arrive at its propositions, and the topical program it selects for discussion. Once the system has been described, it then becomes possible to reconstruct the urgent question to which the system provides a response.
In applying the documentary method to Paul’s letter to the Romans, our aim is to discern the religious system reflected in the letter and to identify the urgent question to which the system provides an answer. To the extent that Romans sets forth a religious world-view, way of life, and social entity, which, taken together, represent a response to a compelling and unavoidable question, it expresses a religious system. To the extent that its system refers to Jesus Christ as a source of meaning and authority, it expresses a Christian religious system – or, in simpler terms, a “Christianity”.
Our first order of business is to describe the rhetoric of Romans. By rhetoric we mean simply the modes of composition displayed in a document, the forms, structures, or other means of expression a document uses in presenting its message. The study of Romans’ rhetoric is still in its early stages. Since Romans is a letter, written in the typical Hellenistic letter form, scholars have generally tended to read it in terms of literary theories regarding this ancient letter form. Recently, however, some scholars have proposed that a better understanding of Romans may be had if the letter is read in terms of the categories of ancient formal rhetoric. Thus it has been suggested that Romans conforms to the epideictic genre of rhetoric, in which a speaker (or, as in our case, a writer) employs a wide variety of rhetorical techniques in an argument intended to increase the listener’s adherence to a set of values that may be contested. Indications that Paul is employing the epideictic genre of rhetoric in Romans have been found, for example, in the statements he makes about his intentions in writing the letter. In 1:11-12, he speaks of “strengthening” and “encouraging” his readers, and in 15:15 he says that he has written on certain points “very boldly by way of reminder”. Such intentions, it is claimed, are precisely those that the epideictic genre is designed to serve.
