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This volume employs a text-centered, literary-rhetorical, and audience-oriented method to demonstrate how the implied audience of Philippians are persuaded and exhorted by the dynamic progression of the letter’s chiastic structures to rejoice along with Paul and other believers in being conformed, with all of the broad implications of such conformity, to Christ. This reading assumes that Philippians is a single, unified letter written to be read and heard in a public setting as an oral performance substituting for the personal presence of the imprisoned Paul, and it proposes new chiastic structures for the entire letter as a key to understanding it.

John Paul Heil is Professor of New Testament at The Catholic University of America. His books include Ephesians: Empowerment to Walk in Love for the Unity of All in Christ and Colossians: Encouragement to Walk in All Wisdom as Holy Ones in Christ (Society of Biblical Literature); The Gospel of Mark as Model for Action: A Reader-Response Commentary (Paulist); and The Death and Resurrection of Jesus: A Narrative-Critical Reading of Matthew 26–28 (Fortress).