Aspectos da retórica de Aristóteles na epístola de Paulo A Filemom

Abstract

The corpus of this thesis is the Epistle of Paul to Philemon, known and classified as a Personal Letter and also as Epistle of recommendation or mediation, and as a deliberative discourse. The purpose is to demonstrate that the apostle Paul strategically structured his epistle to Philemon according to the Aristotelian typology of the deliberative rhetorical genre, with the intention of convincing him to receive back his fugitive slave, Onesimus. This paper is an application of New Testament rhetorical criticism in the analysis of Paul's Epistle to Philemon. To reach the established goal, we have made an approach to the ancient epistolary genre and the New Testament epistles, highlighting its structure and how it weighs on rhetorical discourse. Then, we briefly analyzed the Rhetoric of Aristotle, highlighting his definition of rhetoric and its usefulness, with special emphasis on the parts of rhetoric: the Invention; Disposition (dispositio, τᾰ́ξῐς- táxis); the Elocution (elocutio) or λέξις - léxis; Memory or memorization, and Pronunciation. The structure of the rhetorical discourse was also analyzed: the Exordium; the Narration; the Proposition; the Rhetoric Proofs; the Refutation and the Epilogue or Peroration. To conclude the analysis of Aristotle's Rhetoric, rhetoric genres - the judicial or forensic, the deliberative and the demonstrative or the epistemic. Finally, we present the rhetorical aspects in Philemon from a translational approach and morphosyntactic notes, and the analysis of these aspects used by Paul to structure the epistle according to the typology of deliberative discourse and the effects it provoked in its recipients, Philemon and the church that was in his house.