Narrative Criticism, Rhetorical Criticism, and Structuralism

Introduction

By the later twentieth century, biblical studies had amassed a formidable toolkit for reconstructing the prehistory of texts: sources parsed, forms mapped, redactional fingerprints identified. Yet the very success of those diachronic methods created a different deficit. In the excitement of recovering J and P, the Deuteronomist, Q, and the evangelists’ editorial moves, scholars could neglect the final text’s literary artistry—its plot, point of view, repetition, irony, temporal pacing, and persuasive force on actual readers. In response, a family of approaches emerged that turned exegetical attention back to the text as discourse and to the reader’s experience: narrative criticism, rhetorical criticism, and structuralism. They are distinct but overlapping. Narrative criticism treats biblical writings as stories shaped by craft; rhetorical criticism examines how texts persuade; structuralism seeks the underlying systems—binary oppositions, narrative functions, semiotic structures—that generate meaning.

This chapter introduces these approaches at doctoral depth. After clarifying their philosophical and historical backgrounds, we will explore each method’s key concepts, demonstrate them in extended case studies (from Genesis and Samuel to Mark, John, and Paul), and evaluate their strengths and limits. Because the goal of this course is historiographical awareness in service of exegetical craft, we will ask repeatedly not only what these approaches enable us to see but also what they may tempt us to ignore. We conclude with graduate-level assignments designed to train your eyes and ears for literary and rhetorical features that often escape historically oriented readings, and with guidance for integrating literary insights with theological interpretation and canonical attention.

Background and Theoretical Bearings

From Historicism to Poetics

The rise of narrative, rhetorical, and structuralist approaches in biblical studies was part of a broader literary turn across the humanities. The early and mid-century dominance of historicist paradigms (culminating in the historical-critical method) yielded, by the 1960s–1980s, to renewed interest in poetics: how texts work as texts. In the study of the Hebrew Bible, Robert Alter’s The Art of Biblical Narrative and Meir Sternberg’s The Poetics of Biblical Narrative offered bracing demonstrations that biblical narrators deploy sophisticated literary strategies—selectivity, scenic depiction, dialogue, type-scenes, gap-creation—that reward close reading (Alter, 1981; Sternberg, 1985). In New Testament studies, works like Mark as Story by Rhoads, Dewey, and Michie modeled narrative analysis of a Gospel as a coherent story with implied author, narrator, plot, and readerly effects (Rhoads, Dewey, & Michie, 2012). At the same time, Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Greco-Roman rhetorical handbooks (Cicero, Quintilian) were rediscovered as allies for reading Paul’s letters as rhetorical performances, while modern rhetorical theory (Perelman, Toulmin, Burke) invited attention to argumentation and audience.

Structuralism, meanwhile, approached texts as products of systems: codes, oppositions, and functions that transcend any single work. In biblical studies this appeared in structuralist commentaries (e.g., Daniel Patte on Matthew), semiotic analysis drawing on A. J. Greimas’s actantial model, and studies of chiastic/ring composition and macro-patterns (Patte, 1987; Douglas, 2007).

Each approach shifted the exegetical question from “What sources lie behind this passage?” to “How does the final discourse work on a reader or audience?” The former remains valuable; the latter guards against the fragmentation of Scripture into pre-texts that nobody actually reads.

Narrative Criticism: Story, Discourse, and the Implied Reader

Core Concepts

Narrative critics distinguish story (the sequence of events in their chronological order) from discourse (the way the narrative tells those events—order, duration, frequency, voice, and perspective). Drawing on narratology (Genette, Chatman, Bal), they analyze:

• Plot and temporal manipulation: analepsis (flashback), prolepsis (flash-forward), pace (scene, summary, pause), frequency (repetition).

• Characterization through action, speech, and narrator comment; flat and round characters; stereotypes and subversions.

• Point of view and focalization: whose eyes/knowledge frame the scene; dramatic irony produced by reader–character knowledge gaps.

• Type-scenes and intertextual echoes: betrothal at a well, the barren matriarch, the deliverer threatened at birth.

• Gaps and ambiguities that solicit reader inference (Sternberg’s “gappiness”).

• Implied author and implied reader—textual constructs guiding expectations and values.

Rather than treating “tensions” as evidence of prehistory, narrative critics often treat them as artistic devices that stimulate interpretation and ethical/theological reflection.

Hebrew Narrative Case Study: 2 Samuel 11–12 (David, Bathsheba, and Uriah)

A historically oriented reading maps sources and historical plausibility. A narrative reading attends to scene construction: the compressed opening (“In the spring… David remained at Jerusalem”) sets an ironic hiatus—kings go to war; this king stays home (2 Sam 11:1). The focalization tightens: David “saw,” “sent,” “took”—verbs that echo royal abuse in 1 Sam 8. The narrator’s economy leaves gaps (Bathsheba’s voice, consent); Sternberg cautions that biblical narratives often under-narrate interiority to force the reader’s moral labor (Sternberg, 1985). The repetition of “send” (shalach) creates a pattern culminating in David sending for Uriah, then sending a letter that seals Uriah’s death. Into this machinery, Nathan’s parable triggers self-incrimination; only then does narrative time slow for confession and judgment. Plot devices (irony, reversal, delayed revelation) push us to read the tale as a theological drama about power, complicity, and divine justice. We draw theology not by importing a system but by tracking the story’s rhetorical logic.

Gospel Case Study: Mark’s “Intercalations” (5:21–43; 11:12–25; 14:1–11)

Mark famously intercalates one story into another (the “Markan sandwich”), creating interpretive cross-lighting. In 5:21–43, Jairus’s plea for his daughter (outer frame) is interrupted by the hemorrhaging woman (center). The shared vocabulary of touch, fear, faith, daughter invites readers to let the center interpret the frame: the marginalized woman becomes the model of faith Jairus must emulate. The delay heightens tension; the announcement of death (“Your daughter has died”) creates a crisis resolved by Jesus’s command to believe. A diachronic reading might ask whether two traditions were stitched together; the narrative critic asks how interruption functions to teach faith and redefine social boundaries (Rhoads et al., 2012).

Point of View and Irony in John

The Fourth Gospel’s omniscient narrator often grants readers privileged knowledge (“He was speaking about the temple of his body,” John 2:21), creating dramatic irony as characters misunderstand. Nicodemus hears anōthen as “again,” not “from above” (John 3). The Samaritan woman expects water; Jesus offers living water (John 4). The narrative thus trains readers in double hearing: literal and symbolic. Plot and symbolism integrate theology—the identity of Jesus—into the very structure of misunderstanding and revelation.

Gains and Limits

Narrative criticism makes us better readers of what the biblical authors actually wrote. It resists flattening rich stories into proof-texts, reveals artistry that historical atomization misses, and often uncovers theological freight embedded in plot. Yet narrative focus can drift into text-immanent isolation, inattentive to historical referents, early reception, or ecclesial use. The doctoral task is not to abandon history but to coordinate narrative craft with historical inquiry and theological judgment.

Rhetorical Criticism: Texts as Persuasive Acts

Ancient and Modern Rhetoric

Where narrative criticism foregrounds story, rhetorical criticism foregrounds persuasion. In antiquity, rhetoric was the art of finding the available means of persuasion in a given case (Aristotle, Rhetoric). Biblical rhetorical critics draw on classical categories—invention (discovering arguments), arrangement (dispositio: exordium, narratio, probatio, refutatio, peroratio), style (elocutio: figures, tropes), and ethos/logos/pathos—to analyze how biblical writers argue. Modern rhetorical theory adds attention to audiences, situations, and argument schemes (e.g., Toulmin’s model), as well as to ethos as communal credibility and character.

Paul as Rhetor: Galatians and 1 Corinthians

Galatians has been a playground for rhetorical analysis since Hans Dieter Betz argued that it is a forensic/apologetic speech in letter form (Betz, 1979). The exordium (1:6–10) shocks with anathema to seize attention; the narratio (1:11–2:14) establishes ethos via autobiographical defense—Paul’s gospel is from God, not men; he withstood Peter. The probatio (3:1–4:31) argues from Scripture (Abraham, promise vs. law) and experience (the Spirit), deploying diatribe and scriptural chains; the exhortatio and peroratio (5–6) move to communal ethics. Seeing the letter’s arrangement clarifies the logic of appeals and the strategic alternation of pathos (3:1, “O foolish Galatians!”), logos (Scripture proofs), and ethos (suffering and marks of Jesus, 6:17).

In 1 Corinthians, rhetorical sensitivity illuminates Paul’s irony and inversion: he unmasks Corinthian status competition by proclaiming the foolishness of the cross as the power of God (1:18–2:5). He turns commonplaces of wisdom into rhetorical traps: who is truly wise? He uses captatio benevolentiae (1:4–9) to build rapport before rebuke; he practices synkrisis (comparison) of apostles and sophists; he appeals to ethos by self-depiction as weak and trembling, which paradoxically strengthens the argument’s theological point (Kennedy, 1984; Mitchell, 1991).

Rhetoric in the Gospels and Acts

Rhetorical readings attend to how speeches in Acts adapt to audiences (Jewish in Acts 2–3; pagan in Acts 17), how Luke uses proof from Scripture and miracles to build logos and ethos, and how evangelists craft narrative rhetoric—persuasion through story architecture. Even miracle clusters (Mark 1–2) can be read as rhetorical sequences establishing authority before controversial pronouncements.

Gains and Limits

Rhetorical criticism re-centers the communicative intent of biblical discourse. It keeps exegesis honest about argument and audience, corrects an overly descriptive historicism by asking, “What is the author trying to make the audience think/feel/do?” Yet mapping ancient handbooks onto letters is not mechanical; scholars debate which species (forensic, deliberative, epideictic) best fits a given letter, and the New Testament’s epistolary genre complicates strict speech outlines. The gain is heuristic; the risk is over-schematizing and forcing a letter into a Procrustean bed. Good rhetorical criticism remains text-led, not handbook-led (Kennedy, 1984).

Structuralism: Systems, Functions, and Semiotic Patterns

What Structuralism Is (and Isn’t)

Structuralism, rooted in Saussurean linguistics and developed by Lévi-Strauss, Propp, Barthes, Greimas, and others, seeks the underlying structures that generate meaning: binary oppositions (life/death, clean/unclean), narrative functions (Propp’s morphology), and actantial roles (Greimas’s subject/object, sender/receiver, helper/opponent). Applied to biblical texts, structuralism looks for relational patterns across a narrative rather than the psychology of characters or the chronology of sources. It is not a claim that stories are empty shells; it is a method for seeing how meaning emerges from relations.

Binary Oppositions and Cultural Codes

In Genesis, Eden’s garden stages oppositions (life/death; obedience/transgression; wisdom/folly) that radiate through Torah. Leviticus organizes Israel’s world by binaries (holy/common, clean/unclean), producing a symbolic system that encodes Israel’s identity (Mary Douglas famously reads Leviticus as a coherent system of boundary maintenance, not a random rulebook) (Douglas, 2007). Structural attention explains why otherwise disparate regulations “hang together.”

Greimas’s Actantial Model and Narrative Grammar

Consider Mark 1–3 with Greimas: the subject (Jesus) seeks the object (kingdom mission: proclaim, heal, exorcise). The sender (God’s voice at baptism) commissions; helpers (Spirit, angels, disciples, crowds) and opponents (Satan, demons, hostile authorities) shape the struggle; the receiver is Israel/the world. This grammar abstracts the conflictual logic of the plot, making visible the deep structure of mission, contest, and revelation. It does not replace narrative nuance; it sketches the relations that give the narrative its propulsion.

Ring Composition and Chiasm

Structuralists and kindred close readers have highlighted ring composition and chiasm at micro- and macro-levels: e.g., the Noah cycle (Genesis 6–9) with its A–B–C–D–E–F–E′–D′–C′–B′–A′ structure (entrance/exit, waters rise/fall, remembrance in the center), or Mark’s broader arcs where wilderness → sea → Gentile mission arcs return motifs transformed. Mary Douglas argues that ring structures function as memory aids and meaning-makers; recognizing them guards against atomistic readings (Douglas, 2007).

Structuralist Readings of Parable

In Luke 15, the so-called “prodigal” story turns on oppositions (lost/found; death/life; far/near; slave/son). A structuralist chart shows how these oppositions invert across the story: the “near” son becomes “far” in heart; the “dead” is “alive.” The mediator (father) collapses the oppositions with gratuitous embrace. Noticing the structural play strengthens theological reading: grace is not a third term but the overcoming of oppositions by the father’s initiative.

Gains and Limits

Structuralism compels rigor: attend to form, pattern, relation. It resists psychologizing and begs us to see the architecture of meaning. But it can flatten historical thickness and readerly experience into abstractions, or seduce us into finding patterns everywhere. A disciplined structuralism marries pattern detection to exegetical warrant and lets canonical context and reception history check free play.

Integrative Case Studies

Joseph Narrative (Genesis 37–50): Narrative, Rhetoric, Structure Together

A narrative reading tracks character development (Joseph’s youthful arrogance; Judah’s transformation), recognition scenes, and irony (the dreamer’s dreams fulfilled by brothers’ bowing). Rhetorically, Judah’s speech (44:18–34) is a masterpiece of ethos (self-offering), pathos (father’s grief), and logos (cause-and-effect), arranged to persuade the hidden Joseph; it is the pivot of reconciliation. Structurally, the cycle exhibits ring composition: betrayal → descent → ascent → testing → reconciliation → blessing; the “center” features transformation (Judah) and disclosure (Joseph). The theological surplus—God’s providence working through human agency (“You meant it for evil, God meant it for good,” 50:20)—emerges from literary/rhetorical craft, not despite it (Alter, 1981; Bar-Efrat, 1989).

Mark 14:1–11 (Anointing at Bethany) as Intercalation and Rhetoric

Narratively, Mark frames the anointing with plots to kill Jesus and Judas’s betrayal (14:1–2, 10–11). The center woman’s act interprets Jesus’s death in advance (“She has anointed my body beforehand for burial”). The rhetorical clash pits pragmatic objections (“waste!”) against Jesus’s commendation, redefining “good work” (kalon ergon) as prophetic discernment. Structurally, the sandwich inverts expected valuations: insiders (disciples) misappraise; an outsider models true response. The pericope persuades readers to see the cross through the lens of honor and devotion, not defeat.

Galatians 3–4: Argument, Allegory, and Narrative World

Rhetorically, Paul’s probatio mixes Scripture chains (Gen 15; Deut 27) with diatribe questions (“Did you receive the Spirit by works…?”), and culminates in a controversial “allegory” of Hagar and Sarah (4:21–31). A narrative critic observes that Paul crafts a story-world: slavery vs. freedom, flesh vs. promise, Sinai vs. Zion; converts are placed inside a plot of exodus reenacted in Christ. Structurally, binary oppositions organize the argument (slave/free; law/promise), yet Paul complicates them by introducing inheritance as the deeper structure uniting Abrahamic promise and Christ. Recognizing these layers helps read the letter’s theology as rhetoric and as story without collapsing either into mere proof or bare plot (Kennedy, 1984; Mitchell, 1991).

Methodological Synthesis and Theological Use

These approaches do not demand that we choose literary artistry over historical truth or theological confession. They demand that we respect Scripture’s form as part of its content. Several integrative guidelines can steady doctoral work:

1. Let the text’s discourse guide your questions. Before reaching for background or prehistory, ask how the author has told this and to what effect. Attend to plot, scenes, speeches, pacing, and pattern.

2. Coordinate literary and historical lenses. Narrative and rhetorical craft occur in time. Historical insights will often explain why an author chooses a given arrangement or appeal.

3. Let canon and theology gather literary insights. A ring structure or intercalation is not merely clever; it often theologizes. Ask how a pattern embodies themes (covenant, kingdom, temple) and how it sounds within the canon’s symphony.

4. Practice ethical reading. Literary form often carries ethical weight: who is centered, who is silenced, how power operates. Narrative and rhetorical analysis can expose complicity and invite conversion (e.g., David and Bathsheba; Luke’s centering of outsiders).

5. Beware totalizing grids. Rhetorical handbooks and structural schemas are heuristics, not oracles. Use them to see more, not to force what isn’t there.

Assignments (Doctoral Level)

Narrative Dossier (4,000 words). Choose one extended narrative unit (e.g., 1 Samuel 24–26; Mark 4:35–6:6). Produce a sustained analysis of plot, focalization, temporal pacing, type-scenes, and gaps, engaging Alter, Sternberg, and at least one narratologist (Genette, Bal, or Chatman). Conclude with a theologically reflective section showing how narrative form shapes doctrinal/ethical claims.

Rhetorical Brief (3,500–4,000 words). Analyze Galatians or 1 Corinthians through the lens of ancient rhetoric (Aristotle, Quintilian, Kennedy). Identify exordium, narratio, probatio, refutatio, peroratio; chart appeals to ethos/pathos/logos and the letter’s dispositio. Incorporate one modern argumentation scheme (Toulmin) to assess how Paul warrants his claims. Finish with a short homiletical memo (500 words) translating your analysis into ecclesial communication.

Structural Analysis (3,000–3,500 words). Apply Greimas’s actantial model and ring-composition analysis to a synoptic pericope cluster (e.g., Luke 7–8) or to Genesis 37–50. Test your proposed structure against textual markers (repetition, inclusio, chiastic echoes). Evaluate the gains (coherence, thematic emphasis) and risks (over-patterning), and show how the structure illuminates theological stakes.

Integrative Seminar Paper (4,500+ words). On a passage of your choice, perform narrative, rhetorical, and structural readings in sequence. Then synthesize them into a single theological interpretation oriented to the canon and the church’s use. Explicitly discuss how your literary findings inform or correct historical-critical conclusions and how they bear on a live doctrinal question (e.g., atonement, kingdom, ecclesiology).

Conclusion

Narrative criticism, rhetorical criticism, and structuralism have helped biblical studies recover what premodern readers often knew intuitively: form matters. God’s self-communication in Scripture does not come only as doctrinal propositions or as historical reports; it comes as stories told with craft, arguments delivered with strategic artistry, and patterns that shape perception. Learning to see these dimensions does not diminish historical inquiry or theological confession. It deepens both—because we come to see how the inspired authors mean what they mean.

At the doctoral level, the assignment is not merely to master terms—focalization, exordium, actant—but to let these lenses refine your judgment. Read with the patience to notice structure, the empathy to hear rhetoric’s appeal, and the courage to follow narrative’s moral demand. Let literary craft become a school of theological wisdom: a way of inhabiting Scripture that makes you not only a more rigorous scholar but also a more truthful teacher of the church.

References

Alter, R. (1981). The art of biblical narrative. Basic Books.

Aristotle. (2007). On rhetoric: A theory of civic discourse (G. A. Kennedy, Trans., 2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.

Bar-Efrat, S. (1989). Narrative art in the Bible. Sheffield Academic Press.

Betz, H. D. (1979). Galatians: A commentary on Paul’s letter to the churches in Galatia. Fortress Press.

Douglas, M. (2007). Thinking in circles: An essay on ring composition. Yale University Press.

Genette, G. (1980). Narrative discourse: An essay in method (J. E. Lewin, Trans.). Cornell University Press.

Kennedy, G. A. (1984). New Testament interpretation through rhetorical criticism. University of North Carolina Press.

Mitchell, M. M. (1991). Paul and the rhetoric of reconciliation: An exegetical investigation of the language and composition of 1 Corinthians. Westminster John Knox.

Patte, D. (1987). The Gospel according to Matthew: A structural commentary on Matt 1–12. Fortress Press.

Rhoads, D., Dewey, J., & Michie, D. (2012). Mark as story: An introduction to the narrative of a gospel (3rd ed.). Fortress Press.

Sternberg, M. (1985). The poetics of biblical narrative: Ideological literature and the drama of reading. Indiana University Press.