Assembly,Rhetoric, and Widespread Community: Mass Communication in Paul of Tarsus

This article claims that Paul of Tarsus is a significant figure in the history and theory of mass communication. Drawing on his letters to the Corinthians and other early groups of Christ-followers, I argue that Paul used eloquent mediated rhetoric to conceptualize local ritual practice in such a way that it could form the basis for widespread solidarity and mass community in a geographically expanding religious sect. This was a form of mass communication centered in dispersed bodily assemblies and radiating outward to encompass ever wider regions of a distended mass society. It hinged on the Body of Christ, which in Paul's letters became a space- and time-binding medium of mass communication that held together a dispersed society of the Christ-proclaiming faithful. Paul was essentially an early medium theorist, and I argue that his bifocal attention to local assembly and distant solidarity is instructive for both the study and social practices of mass communication today.