At this juncture, the New Testament seems clear that Paul's friend knew he engaged in persuasion. Paul's enemies knew he accomplished persuasion. Paul himself knew he prevailed in persuasion. Since that is the situation, then the problem of Paul's words, "And my message and my preaching were not in persuasive words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power" (1 Cor. 2:4) must be considered. The interpretation of Paul's statement here must be in agreement with the testimony of the New Testament, with Paul's own words elsewhere, and especially with Luke's own evaluation of Paul's ministry in Corinth as given in Acts 18. When Paul arrived in Corinth from Athens, "he was reasoning in the synagogue every Sabbath and trying to persuade (epeithen) Jews and Greeks" (18:4). His success in persuasion at Corinth is evidenced by the Jews who brought him before Gallio with the accusation, "This man persuades (anapeithei, "to move someone to do something by persuasion," BDAG, pp. 69-70) men to worship God contrary to the law" (18:13), and once again the emphasis on "action" and not "comprehension" is evident.

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A full discussion of the implications of 1 Corinthians 2:1-5 is beyond the scope of this paper, but has been set forth by Litfin (1994), Bullmore (1995), and Winter (1997). Litfin's position, briefly, is that the rhetorical tradition of Corinth in the time of the apostle Paul was in the very center of the Greco-Roman rhetorical tradition that had been practiced for 500 years from the Sophist Corax (fl. 467 B.C.) through the Roman Quintilian (ca. A.D. 35-95). He argues that this rhetorical tradition emphasized the "orator's efforts toward inducing belief in his hearers," while Paul's argument in 1 Corinthians is actively opposed to this approach (Litfin, 1994, p. 247). Litfin considers Paul's argument in 1 Corinthians 2:1-5 to be "the clearest and most detailed statement — both positive and negative — of the Apostle's manner of preaching to be found anywhere in his writings" (Litfin, 1994, p. 204; a similar position is taken by Zemek, 1991).

Problems with Litfin's approach can be observed. To begin, his lack of attention to the New Testament uses of the peitho word group is an omission which definitely skews his work. Furthermore, Winter demonstrates that Litfin "did not make use of all the evidence on Corinth" (Winter, 1997, pp. 8-9), and that the evidence shows that the rhetorical circumstance of Corinth in Paul's day was greatly influenced by the Second Sophistic movement. "The sophists taught rules on style, and the management of the voice and the body," and "Parents expected the sophist to make public speakers of their sons, for they judged that this form of education was most useful in producing leaders accomplished in the great art of persuasion whether it be in the legal courts or the council or political assembly of their city" (Winter, 1997, p. 5).

Bullmore argues at length that an Asiatic style of rhetoric was predominant in Greece in the first century A.D., a style that emphasized artistic delivery (Bullmore, 1995, pp. 90-113) above all else. This was in contrast to the Atticist position on rhetoric which was a more direct proclamation. Fee similarly observes that Paul's "letters, which at times have all the character of speech, are in fact powerful examples of rhetoric and persuasion. Nonetheless Paul can confidently assert before those who have come to care about such things that his preaching was not of this kind. This seems to make certain that it is not rhetoric in general, but rhetoric of a very specific and well-known kind, that he is disavowing" (Fee, 1987, p. 94, ftn. 27).