Diagnosing Deviance

Pathology and Polemic in the Pastoral Epistles

by Andrew M. Langford

Book cover: Diagnosing Deviance

Extent: 572 pages

Publisher: Mohr Siebeck

Subjects: Biblical Studies

Series: Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 2.Reihe

Series volume number: 592

Language: English

Paperback (Published)

(July 2023)

ISBN: 9783161616945

9.09 x 6.06 inches

Price: $157.00

In stock

Andrew M. Langford examines the rhetoric of medical metaphors in three New Testament letters (1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus) and demonstrates how these letters utilize disease metaphors to promulgate a distinctive vision of opponents and how to deal with them in the post-Pauline era.


In this study, Andrew M. Langford demonstrates that the single, post-Pauline author of the Pastoral Epistles (“the Pastor”) crafts a stigmatizing depiction of his theological opponents by spatializing, demonizing, and pathologizing their alleged deviance. Through close comparative readings of ancient medical and philosophical literature, the author argues for the necessity of interpreting the Pastor’s pathologizing of deviance in light of ancient disease etiologies and models of corporeality. With this book, the author contributes to recent interpretive insights about the function of authorial fiction in antiquity and demonstrates that the Pastor is self-consciously appropriating the Pauline epistolary to craft his approach to his theological opponents.

  • By (author) Andrew M Langford