INTRODUCTION: EXPLAINING DIALOGUE FORM

The project of this volume is to explain why the dialogue genre was put to minimal or no use by early Christian authors, despite the previous prominence of the genre in antiquity. One might approach our task in the following manner: first determine what attracts authors to dialogue form, and then use that determination to explain the genre's absence or rarity in early Christianity. For when we have unearthed the rationale for writing in dialogue form – a rationale common to all writers of dialogues – explaining the preference for other media will become a straightforward business; once we have found the desiderata secured by dialogue form, we can infer that early Christians thought that other genres would achieve the same ends more effectively, or alternatively that such desiderata simply ceased to be desiderata in the Christian era.

At the risk of caricature, let me give an intuitive example of the sort of account which this approach would yield. An author writes dialogues because of what she values in dialogue. Now dialogue allows for disagreement and candid exchange, and is thus an inherently non-authoritarian medium. All writers who choose dialogue form do so because they value this feature of dialogue, and so the natural home of dialogue form is democracy, where open debate is valued; little wonder, then, that the dialogue form first flowered in classical Athens.