For Paul the truth of the gospel of Christ was not to be understood by dodging the logical riddles with which it confronts us. He does not speak as if the illumination guaranteed by the Holy Spirit dispenses with the need for reflection. Rather he speaks as if, sharpened and directed by the Holy Spirit, the human capacity for exercising critical judgement plays a formative role in our grasp of the gospel. In addressing those who, in different ways according to their differing backgrounds, had to face the difficulties such a perspective entails, Paul, impelled by the urgency of his message, was unaccommodating.

‘The attempt to understand the logic and argumentation of Paul must give a Greek a headache,’ V. Grönbech once observed (in Paulus Jesu Christi Apostel). And certainly to the mind shaped by the Socratic tradition, his manner of reasoning could scarcely fail to occasion perplexity of reader response. It was not his aim to stimulate detached intellectual enquiry in anything like the Socratic spirit. He assumes in his readers a core of conviction in which an answer to every question lies latent. And yet, if his approach is thus out of line with the Greek tradition, it is no less out of line with the OT tradition. In his concern with explanation, verification, substantiation, though it may be questionable how much there is of the Greek philosopher, there is certainly much of the Greek rhetorician with his philosophical background.

A semiotic perspective for the study of Pauline argument. Umberto Eco's ‘typology of modes of sign-production’.

‘It is very difficult to imagine an imprint that mentions a referent without the mediation of a content.’ This is a comment which the semiologist Umberto Eco is prompted to make in relation to the significance which Robinson Crusoe reads into the human footprint which he comes upon on the island where he is shipwrecked. The message may be spelt out thus: ‘There is at least one other human being on this island in addition to me.’ The referent which the imprint, by virtue of its form, ‘mentions’ is ‘human being’, but the ‘mention’ does not come about for Crusoe on this occasion without the mediation of a content which the words ‘human being’ alone do not adequately represent. He does not think ‘human being’ except as ‘a particular human being who must be my fellow inhabitant on this island’.

This example illustrates one mode of the operation which Eco defines as ‘sign-production’. It is the mode which he refers to as ‘Recognition’. It is the first of four modes into which he distinguishes ‘sign-production’. The others are Ostension, Replica and Invention. It is a feature of Eco's general theory of semiotics that the object of semiological study should be understood not as the sign itself but as the production of signs.

The Christian's reprieve and the two ‘laws’. The case for seeing 8:1 as an inference enthymematically drawn from 8:2. Different ways of unpacking ăpa, and their bearing on the issue.

Romans 8 opens with a statement which is at once supported by a reason signposted as such by the usual ydp. The resulting two-member unit is itself signposted as consequent on what has gone before by the less usual ăpa (very unusual in being paired here not with o5v but with vũv). These facts in themselves are insufficient to warrant the expectation that the dependence in either direction is of a kind that involves the principle of deductive logic. If I say ‘the pavements are not dry yet for it has only just stopped raining’ I am probably just naming the cause of the situation. If I say ‘the pavements cannot be dry yet as it has only just stopped raining’, I am applying the principle of deductive logic. Paul here may be doing either of these things. And, given the nature of his theme, it is not easy to be sure which is involved.

In the case of the dependence signalled by yáp, assessment will obviously begin from a consideration of the two members which the particle serves to link as they stand before us in the text. In the case of the dependence signalled by ăpa, the question that at once arises is: what area of text is relevant? I believe the two cases here to be closely inter-related, but let us start from the former where the area of text to be focussed on is not in any doubt.

Coding and clarity in Guiraud and Prieto. Paul's own view of communication, and the problem it highlights.

In my opening discussion I took Eco as my mentor in semiological theory and relegated any references to other theoreticians to the notes. Consideration of the theories of other semiologists and of the relation of semiological theory to other kindred disciplines such as communication theory and linguistics (as well as psychology, anthropology and aesthetics) occupies a great deal of space in his writings. It is possible, in consequence, to trace back to earlier research the vast majority of his basic ideas, though their relation to it is almost always complex, and it is rare for him to adopt an idea without in some way remodelling or redeploying it. In due course this chapter will lead me around to Eco again, but in the earlier part of it I shall bring into play some theories which (though reflected in his) display a particular relevance to Paul in their original form, or at some stage in their development prior to their assimilation by Eco, like the analytical refinements of the coding factor in semiosis for which I turn to the two linguists Pierre Guiraud and Luis Prieto. This is my first step in that ‘subtler appreciation of signification’ which I have said we need to pursue (supra, p. 131).

The character of the enthymeme. Identifying enthymemes.

There is no other Pauline letter in which inferential argument figures more prominently than it does in Romans. Much of this argument takes the form of immediate deductive inference, where each conclusion is drawn from a single premise. Often these two-part units occur in sequence so that the conclusion of one forms the premise of the next. But conclusions involving two premises also often occur, and the resulting process of mediate deductive inference introduces the argumentative structure which is that of the syllogism. The surface structure of Paul's discourse, however, is not normally syllogistic but enthymematic, the syllogistic argument which underlies his statements remaining only partly expressed, and what is expressed being often expressed obliquely.

‘If God be for us, who can be against us?’ is an oblique way of arguing that given God's support we are invincible. It takes as read the premise that God is invincible. Compare the principle behind Goneril's words to Lear: ‘As you are old and reverend, you should be wise.’ They assume the premise that the old are wise. The illustration was among those used by H. W. B. Joseph, who made a number of extremely important points regarding the enthymeme, which nothing in subsequent developments in logical theory has rendered less valid: