The format of the paper follows that of a relatively new commentary series published by Baker Academic entitled Paideia: Commentaries on the New Testament. Designed for students in religious and theological programs and yet accessible to laymen, the series reflects the kind of papers that will be done for this course. Quoting from the editors of Paideia one blogger notes:
Each commentary deals with the text in terms of larger rhetorical units; these are not verse-by-verse commentaries. This series thus stands within the stream of recent commentaries that attend to the final form of the text. Such reader centered literary approaches are inherently more accessible to liberal arts students without extensive linguistic and historical-critical preparation than older exegetical approaches, but within the reader-centered world the sanest practitioners have paid careful attention to the extratext of the original readers, including not only these readers’ knowledge of the geography, history, and other context elements reflected in the text but also to their ability to respond correctly to the literary and rhetorical conventions used in the text. Paideia commentaries pay deliberate attention to this extratextual repertoire in order to highlight the ways in which the text is designed to persuade and move its readers."
