Abstract

Through a rhetorical, critical approach this dissertation first argues that the images of the body in the letters of Paul to the New Testament churches comprise a narrative. The three phases of the narrative are figured in the images of the body of death, the body of the believer, and the resurrection body. These images reflect the process of mimesis in detail, as Paul Ricoeur describes it in the three volumes of Time and Narrative, and in the larger sense in which he argues that narrative refiguration makes "explicit the movement by which a text unfolds ... a world in front of itself" . ;The images of the body considered as a whole in their form, process, and intent actually define, and are the paradigmatic activity for the narrativity Ricoeur's theory explicates. Paul, in authoring the letters to the New Testament churches, displays the productive imagination at work and defines a specific three-fold narrative activity that becomes a method of representation defining a dynamic of tradition and innovation making up metaphor, narrative , and culture. In other words, the three-foldness of the images of the body define for the West an original understanding of the world as process and change which, for Paul, is succinctly expressed in I Corinthians 7:31b: "For the form of this world is passing away." In this passing away is inscribed the possibility for narrativity. I do not claim narrative does not exist before Paul, but that no writer prior to Paul explicitly uses imagery to unfold a process of innovation and transformation that are so blatantly the demonstration of the process of narrative-making. ;Finally, the Pauline imagery of body not only defines a narrative process, but in the expected parousia and attendant end of the age of temporality, proclaims the demise of the same process through an innovation in which death is destroyed through literal refiguration of the body of death into the resurrection body