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When
You Make the Inside Like the Outside:
Prof.
John W. Marshall
In the idealizations of practice that are the ancient tradition of rhetorical handbooks and treatises, ethos and authorship are in harmony. Aristotle's explicit insistence that ethos be constructed wholly within the speech, however, makes room for those instance where ethical appeals (rhetorical sense) do not coincide with an ethical author (moral sense). Aristotle recognized the power of rhetoric and his allowance for a bifurcation between the ethos of the speaker within the speech and the speaker without is a moral compromise that acknowledges rhetoric's power. It creates space, however, for several morally problematic and critically stimulating possibilities. Pseudepigraphy, where the ethos of the speaker within the speech, and the ethics of the writer without may be in stark conflict forms a site where these moral and critical problems intersect vividly. A reading of the pseudepigraphic epistle of Peter to Philip (NHL VII,2), provides the means to explore the conjunction of pseudepigraphy and ethical appeals, and to set these problems in relation to the early Christian topos of the inspiring spirit on the one hand and the Greco-Roman practice of commissioning defixiones in preparation for forensic oratory on the other.
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