Theology from many angles

This paper takes up the interplay between the “particularity” and “universality” of the Pauline letters, which was so influentially identified by Nils A. Dahl, and demonstrates that even after the canon had provided a implicitly universalizing hermeneutic for the corpus Paulinum, a late antique preacher such as John Chrysostom still felt the need to explain why the letters contain material of such an apparently situation-specific nature. Through a close reading of an untranslated homily on Romans 16:3 (“Greet Priscilla and Aquila”), we shall demonstrate how this rhetorically astute interpreter fashioned his homily precisely around this dynamic – in order to prove to his skeptical audience that it is in the particular that the universal is to be found.