Matthew Pawlak, "Sarcasm in Paul's Letters" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Summary

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Podcast Summary: "Sarcasm in Paul's Letters" – New Books Network Interview with Matthew Pollock

Episode Date: December 28, 2025
Host: David (New Books Network)
Guest: Dr. Matthew Pollock, author of Sarcasm in Paul's Letters (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Overview

This episode delves into Dr. Matthew Pollock's groundbreaking scholarly work on the use of sarcasm in the letters of Paul found in the New Testament. The discussion explores the origins, definitions, and scholarly approaches to sarcasm and irony in the ancient world, key differences between ancient and modern understandings, and their implications for biblical studies—particularly regarding Pauline authorship and rhetorical strategies.

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Guest Background and Motivation

[02:14–03:24]

• Pollock’s interest began during his master’s studies when he noticed repeated instances of sarcasm in 2 Corinthians and realized the topic was academically unexplored.
• His research evolved from a master’s project to a PhD dissertation, and finally this book.
• "It turned into a master's project, which got bigger and turned into a PhD project, which eventually turned into a book. So it's been a long time coming, but it's been a really interesting research project."
  — Matthew Pollock [02:28]

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Theoretical and Historical Foundations of Irony and Sarcasm

Defining Irony: Ancient Greek Perspectives

[04:50–07:36]

• The Greek term eironeia changed meaning over time:
  • Aristophanes: "Concealing by feigning"—essentially lying to avoid responsibility.
  • Plato: Similar deception or insult.
  • Aristotle: Recast as self-deprecation (more positive than earlier, but still a negative quality).
  • Later rhetoricians: Eironeia evolves to mean saying one thing but meaning its opposite, a parent of modern sarcasm.
• Notable scholar: Melissa Lane's research on eironeia (Pollock credits Lane frequently).
• "So by the time we get to Paul, irony is this more rhetorical meaning of saying one thing meaning something different. And sarcasm is one species of that."
  — Matthew Pollock [07:28]

Rhetorical Shift – From Playful Concealment to Verbal Weapon

[07:36–09:22]

• Through generations, the term's focus shifted, evident in authors like Quintilian, where irony could mean both a figure (literary device) and a trope (rhetorical tool).
• The documentary record is piecemeal, making the precise moment and reason for the conceptual break hard to establish.

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Modern Scholarship: The “Quests” for Irony in Paul

[09:22–12:30]

• Pollock humorously dubs the evolution of irony research in biblical studies the “first quest” and “second quest.”
• First quest: Relied on older monographs (Kierkegaard, Wayne Booth, Muecke), with a semantic approach (focus on meaning).
• Second quest: Embraces pragmatic approaches—shift to understanding irony and sarcasm by their evaluative function (compliment, criticism) rather than strictly literal meanings.
• “...the big shift is from semantics…to pragmatics, which has more to do with evaluation than meaning.”
  — Matthew Pollock [11:57]

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Application to Pauline Scholarship

Pragmatic Irony: Example and Implications

[12:30–15:30]

• Pollock’s "parable of the disgruntled undergraduate" illustrates sarcastic criticism even when statements are factually true.
• In Romans 11:19–20, Paul’s use of the Greek "kalos" (“good”/“well”) often misread as sincerity is, Pollock argues, quintessential sarcasm, targeting arrogance rather than doctrine.
• "Paul can criticize the arrogance behind someone...without saying that this theologically important statement is actually wrong."
  — Matthew Pollock [14:35]

Sarcasm as a Mark of Authentic Pauline Letters

[16:30–19:39]

• The “Lucky Seven” (undisputed authentic Pauline letters) feature most of Paul’s sarcasm; the pastorals and other contested letters do not.
• “...almost all of Paul's sarcasm is in these Lucky Seven undisputed letters. Otherwise, I didn't find any in the pastoral letters...”
  — Matthew Pollock [17:40]
• Pollock cautions against using this as strong evidence for authorship—it’s suggestive but not definitive.

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Case Studies: Sarcasm in Action

Galatians 1:6–7 – The Ironic Rebuke

[19:43–23:01]

• Unlike typical ancient letters, Paul in Galatians skips polite openings and moves straight to rebuke.
• The Greek "thaumazō" (“I marvel/am amazed”) can be positive or negative—here, Pollock argues, it’s sarcastic.
• Paul’s tone: "Wow, I'm so amazed at how quickly you turned away," meant as scorn, not genuine amazement.
• "If Paul is saying, oh yeah, I'm so amazed that you've so quickly turned away from your calling to pursue another gospel, like he's sarcastically saying, wow, I'm, you know, I'm impressed how quickly you were able to do this."
  — Matthew Pollock [21:12]

Sarcasm in Ancient Letters and the Everyday

[23:01–24:58]

• Sarcasm is rare in extant ancient letters simply due to brevity and purpose, but Pollock provides a humorous example: a Greek father’s sarcastic letter to his son.
• Everyday conversation likely hosted more sarcasm, but most ancient letters are too formal or utilitarian for much wit.

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Rhetorical Education or Natural Wit?

[24:58–27:46]

• Debate persists about Paul’s rhetorical education; sarcasm likely reflects both spontaneous and learned rhetorical skills.
• "There's nothing in Paul's use of sarcasm that says he must have had a rhetorical education..."
• Sarcasm can be natural, akin to an instinctive tennis swing; intentional study is not required.

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Future Directions and Implications

[27:46–29:43]

• Pollock sees opportunities to:
  • Expand into other forms of irony and mockery.
  • Study self-deprecating irony (asteismos).
  • Launch a large-scale project on ancient humor and its role in early Christianity.
• "If I in five years time have my choice of project, I would really love to do just a really big study on humor in the ancient world and early Christianity."
  — Matthew Pollock [28:42]

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Current and Upcoming Projects

[29:43–31:02]

• At Luxembourg School of Religion and Society, Pollock now leads a multidisciplinary research network on "Trust and Society," exploring trust in religion, science, and broader social challenges.
• Personally, he is researching trust relationships in early Christianity.

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Memorable Quotes

• On his research process:
  "It was a very, very new kind of field." — Matthew Pollock [03:15]

• On ancient irony:
  "Irony, the Greek term eironeia, starts out...as meaning something like...concealing by feigning...and this changes over time." — Matthew Pollock [05:20]

• On pragmatic irony:
  “You can be sarcastic without actually saying something factually untrue…” — Matthew Pollock [13:02]

• On sarcasm in authentic Pauline letters:
  “It just kind of so happens that almost all of Paul's sarcasm is in these Lucky seven undisputed letters.” — Matthew Pollock [17:37]

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Key Timestamps

• 02:14 — Guest's research origins
• 05:16 — Greek definitions of irony
• 09:22 — Biblical irony scholarship (the "quests")
• 12:44 — Modern pragmatic approaches
• 16:30 — Sarcasm’s role in "Lucky Seven" letters
• 20:08 — Galatians 1:6–7 case study
• 23:12 — Sarcasm in ancient letter writing
• 24:58 — Was Paul classically trained?
• 27:46 — Future research directions
• 29:56 — Current projects

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Conclusion

Dr. Matthew Pollock’s work pioneers a focused, nuanced approach to identifying and understanding sarcasm in Paul’s letters, bridging classical philology and contemporary linguistic theory. His findings illuminate Paul’s distinctive rhetorical flair and open new explorations of irony, humor, and authenticity in biblical texts and the ancient cultural landscape.

Transcript

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[David (Host)]

Welcome to the New Books Network. This is your host, David, and today we'll be talking with Matthew Pollock in his new book, Sarcasm and Paul's Letters. Sarcasm and Paul's Letters is the 182nd entry into the Society for New Testament Studies of Monograph series published by Cambridge University Press in 2023. Matthew Pollock is currently at the Luxembourg School of Religion and Society and he got his post and he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Tubingen. He completed his Ph.D. in Theology and Religious Studies in 2020 at the University of Cambridge. And I hope you enjoy the interview for today.

[Interviewer]

So what we usually like to do to start out our interviews, we usually like to ask our guests just about their background and how they came to write their book. So, Matthew, how did you come to write Sarcasm and Paul's letters?

[Matthew Pollock]

Yeah, good question. Basically, it started back in my master's degree. I was kind of in that phase that every master's student finds them in where they have to decide, what am I going to write my thesis on. And at the time I was doing some unrelated research on Second Corinthians, and as I was working through the latter chapters of Second Corinthians, I started coming across all of these examples of Paul being sarcastic. And it got me wondering, well, has anyone written anything on sarcasm and Paul and I kind of did a search through the literature, found that this hasn't really been done before. And then I decide, okay, that's going to be my thing. And so that turned into a master's project, which got bigger and turned into a PhD project, which eventually turned into a book. So it's been a long time coming, but it's been a really interesting research project.

[Interviewer]

Through your researches, did you find that study and sarcasm throughout the New Testament was lacking in general or just in the subject of Paul?

[Matthew Pollock]

A bit of both. So a lot of what we had, there was a bit of stuff that was done previously on Irony and Paul. I think a bit on the Gospel of John Gospels, but not a ton. This was a pretty. Pretty tiny subfield. And within that there's. There's some issues because. And this, this is something that you see in all kinds of kind of literary studies disciplines that when we talk about irony, it's really easy to confuse different things, because if you're just talking about irony, you're throwing in kind of situational irony, verbal irony, sarcasm. And so it wasn't quite clear all the time what we meant when we were talking Irony and Paul. So I wanted to do something that could kind of clarify things a bit and just kind of narrow in on sarcasm, just kind of one piece and do kind of a really clear, thorough job of doing that. So at the point, we really didn't have any clear treatments of, like, sarcasm, specifically in New Testament. And also there was a little bit done before in classics, but not a lot, just a couple of papers. So it was a very, very new kind of field.

[Interviewer]

So I guess before we get to Paul, at the beginning of the book, you trace out the. You trace out, I guess, how irony was maybe not originally used, but first used by the ancient Greeks. And you juxtapose Aristophanes with Aristotle. Could you just briefly explain for our viewers, I guess, what their views of irony were?

[Matthew Pollock]

Yeah, great. I was. I'm just finishing up an article actually touching on one of these aspects. So this will be a good review for myself. So how the term irony is used in ancient Greek changes in some of these earlier texts. So if I could condense history of the term really briefly, I would say so. Irony, the Greek term eirena, starts out in the earliest texts in Aristophanes, the ancient Greek comedian, as meaning something like what Melissa Lane calls concealing by feigning. Melissa Lane did the work on kind of Aristotle through Aristophanes. Sorry, Aristophanes through Aristotle and her work on this is really good and I draw on that in my book. And essentially so in Aristophanes, irony is. It's not what we mean by irony. It's a way of basically lying to avoid responsibility. Then this changes over time. There's a debate about what irony means when Plato uses it. I agree with Melissa Lane that it's more like this kind of insult, this deception in Aristophanes. But with Aristotle he kind of changes the meaning of the term irony. And it's because of the association of irony of Irenaea with Socrates that it gets a slightly more positive spin. It's still a negative quality, but it comes to mean self deprecation. And of course we're still very far from sarcasm here. It's much later in later rhetorical discussions where Erona goes from being self deprecation to saying one thing and meaning something else or meaning something oppositional to what you said. And from there it branches off into different subspecies species like sarcasm and self deprecating irony. And this is all kind of over a period of several generations. So by the time we get to Paul A. Rhonea, irony is this more rhetorical meaning of saying one thing meaning something different. And sarcasm is one species of that. So that's a lot of history in just a little bit of time.

[Interviewer]

So when the rhetoricians and grammarians, I guess, started to investigate irony, what made them break from the definition erinia used by Aristophanes and Aristotle? What. What caused that break?

[Matthew Pollock]

That's a good question. I have to think back to some of the sources following Aristotle. I think the earliest time I see Irenaeus starting to mean something like what the later grammarians and rhetoricians take it to mean is in one of these early rhetorics attributed to Aristotle but isn't by Aristotle. And I'd have to double check the title of that one. But following that, even like take Quintilian for example. For Quintilian, he still kind of has both meanings going on. He talks about irony in one sense as a figure and irony in one sense as a trope. And I believe it's the trope which is kind of this rhetorical definition of which kind of sarcasm is one of the subtypes. But as a figure, irony can still have this more Aristotelian, more literary sort of meaning. So these two meanings are still existing at the same time, but we have this more kind of rhetorical sense as well. And as to exactly when and why that change occurred, all we have are kind of these isolated little grammars we don't really have much of a history, so it's, it's pretty hard to say.

[Interviewer]

So getting to updating Pauline's scholarship with modern research with irony, you go over, I guess, where you use the term quests, what were the, what were the characteristics of just say the first and second quest of irony and Pauline research.

[Matthew Pollock]

Yeah, and this was one of the biggest issues with previous work in biblical studies that has tried to deal with irony and sarcasm is that it's not really taking into account the most up to date work on irony being done. Irony studies is now a pretty intricate subdiscipline with a number of different theories going on. But essentially the problem really comes down to just kind of disciplinary conventions. So in biblical studies we largely, our kind of hierarchy of academic texts treats books as like the top level academic texts. And then kind of journal articles are good, but sort of ranked below those. But that's obviously not true of an all disciplines. And for example, in the sciences it's all about journal articles and no one writes books. And so in irony studies, most of the kind of best and most used cited research going on right now is happening in articles. And Bible scholars have largely focused on the last big monographs in irony studies, which were written about 50 years ago. And so it's all very much out of date. So what I called kind of in a tongue in cheek matter, the first quest for the, for the nature of irony. This was kind of in the, in the 70s and before. And these are the big monographs that most Bible scholars are citing. Wayne Booth's the Rhetoric of Irony. I'm going to butcher the pronunciation of his name, Miucca, the compass of irony. And of course Kierkegaard's master's thesis on irony. And of course they had their merits at the time, but irony studies have come a long way and the big shift is from semantics. So these older approaches are semantic insofar as they treat irony as something that has to do with meaning. So saying one thing and meaning the opposite. Whereas newer approaches are more pragmatic and pragmatics has more to do with evaluation than meaning. So kind of whether you're complimenting or criticizing rather than what kind of the text means. And there's some picky distinctions in there, but they actually are quite important for how we make determinations about what's ironic and what's sarcastic and what's not.

[Interviewer]

So I guess my next question is how does this, how does this new view of irony, from the semantic to.

[David (Host)]

The.

[Interviewer]

How does this play out in Pauline research.

[Matthew Pollock]

Yeah, that's. That's a good question. I think one of the most obvious ways is something that I illustrate with what in the book I call the parable of the disgruntled undergraduate, which is just a silly situation that I use to show the difference between thinking of irony in terms of meaning and thinking of it in terms of evaluation. So, for example, you can be sarcastic without actually saying something factually untrue. So, for example, I use this example. So you could be. For example, there's an undergraduate sitting in a lecture, and we have one know it all student in the class who's constantly answering all the questions and showing off their intellect. And so the student gets kind of annoyed and they say, wow, you're. You're just so smart. Which of course, they're being sarcastic. They mean this as criticism, but they're not saying anything factually untrue. The student is clearly very smart, but they're also annoyed with them, and they're expressing that annoyance sarcastically. And this shows up a few times in Paul where exegetes have in the past said, is this statement by Paul ironic? No, it can't be ironic. It can't be sarcastic, because what Paul is saying is true. So there's several examples of this. One good one is, let's see, Romans 11, verses 19 and 20, where Paul talks is talking about kind of the Jews being sorry, the Christians being grafted in to the people of God. And he says, so others were removed so that you could be grafted in. Great. They were removed because of unbelief. You were. You have your place by faith. And so the sarcastic bit in there is this, which I just translated as great in Greek, kalos, which means good or well. And so some exegetes would say, when Paul is saying that, he has to be actually sincerely agreeing with the position stated earlier in the verse, because otherwise it would be. If he was being sarcastic, then he'd be kind of negating this theologically important statement, whereas I would argue that's not the case. Paul can criticize the arrogance behind someone who might say that without saying that this theologically important statement is actually wrong, if that makes sense.

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[Matthew Pollock]

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[Interviewer]

Usually, scholars of New Testament categorize I guess the true Pauline letters as the Lucky seven. And it seems like the the case studies that you've given in your book are from the so called Lucky 7. So I guess my question is with the pin with pinning down the use of irony in these case studies. Is there a way to could that be another evidence for if this style of irony is only located in the Lucky seven? Like a way to demarcate between Pseudepigrapha and I guess the authentic Pauline letters?

[Matthew Pollock]

Yeah, thanks. That's a really good question. And I haven't heard them called the Lucky seven before. I like that designation. I'll have to use that in the future. It's a good question because this is something I wanted to maybe talk more about in the book, but really was something I didn't have space for. When you kind of have a dissertation and you have a word limit, I was very thankful that Cambridge did have a word limit, otherwise I could have written a very, very, very long book. And I wanted to. I did some work on the more kind of disputed letters, but it didn't really kind of fit the scope. So I think and I guess the interesting part coming out of that was it just kind of so happens that almost all of Paul's sarcasm is in these Lucky seven undisputed letters. Otherwise I didn't find any in the pastoral letters. I found a couple kind of minor instances of sarcasm and Colossians. And as to whether that can play a piece in this discussion of authenticity, I would say yes, maybe, but with a huge grain of salt. So for example, the situation can really play into it if Paul is Paul is usually using sarcasm when he's kind of got his back up against the wall when he's frustrated that sor of thing Philippians doesn't have any sarcasm in it. First, thessalonians doesn't have any sarcasm in it, and they're all part of the kind of undisputed lucky seven letters. So it certainly doesn't write off anything if Paul's not being sarcastic or the author of these disputed letters is not being as sarcastic as the Paul is at his most sarcastic. But I think it is certainly interesting that it is that there is so much less in the. In the disputed letters. But I wouldn't, I wouldn't make any kind of really fast claims on this. At best, it's kind of a tiny piece in a much, much bigger argument.

[Interviewer]

So I guess getting back to the. One of the case studies in the.

[David (Host)]

Book.

[Interviewer]

Just for an example, could you play out the. The fools. No, sorry. Could you play out the Galatians 1:6 through 7, the ironic rebuke and I guess how irony is used in that situation.

[Matthew Pollock]

Yeah. Great. So the issue here, so Galatians is kind of an outlier in terms of how opens the. Let how Paul opens his letter. He doesn't start with his kind of normal Thanksgiving section. He goes right into rebuking his audience pretty quickly. And so a number of scholars has suggested that this is some kind of letter formula for expressing ironic rebuke and kind of how it starts in Greek and is with the term thaumaso, which means it's actually a really interesting and tricky term to work with in Greek because it's one of those things that has so many different shades of meaning that don't really always translate really easy onto one English term. So it can mean like you're impressed or amazed by something in a positive sense. It can mean you're like shocked and appalled in a negative sense. And so there's a lot of shades in. In terms of how you can use it. And so it's something like Paul is saying, I'm amazed that you have so quickly abandoned he who called you and gone after another gospel, which is no other. I'm sure I didn't quote that 100% accurately, but it's something to this effect. And so in my analysis, I go through this suggestion in previous scholarship that this is kind of an ironic letter opening formula. And in the end, it turns out not really. A number of ancient letters open with the same verb. It's used in a number of different ways, but usually it's actually used in other letters to make your request a bit more indirect and you're trying to avoid conflict. Paul is actually a lot more pursuing conflict in his opening than normal. So it's not a Letter formula. But it could very well be used kind of sarcastically here with Paul in the sense, playing on that sense that this verb can mean kind of like, I'm amazed and impressed. And so if Paul is saying, oh yeah, I'm so amazed that you've so quickly turned away from your calling to pursue another gospel, like he's sarcastically saying, wow, I'm, you know, I'm impressed how quickly you were able to do this. And then of course, he's very quick to clarify as well that this isn't another gospel.

[Interviewer]

Was the use of sarcasm common practice in epistolary writing or letter writing in the. In the ancient world in antiquity?

[Matthew Pollock]

It's a good question. A lot of the examples I use in the book don't come from epistolography, and part of that is just utility. So I was trying to find as many different examples of sarcasm in the ancient world as quickly as possible. Because since this hadn't really been done before, I needed to figure out as efficiently as I could how did ancient Greek speakers express sarcasm? So I had to go for the most sarcastic writers. And you have to go through, if you're looking through just kind of the documentary papyri, you have to look pretty long and hard to find any sarcasm. That's not to say it doesn't exist there. When I was doing the research for the chapter on Galatians, I found kind of what I. I mean, there's always, you know, multiple ways of interpreting these things, but what I suspect was a, a pretty sarcastic letter from a father to a son where the father was kind of really laying into the overly polite sarcasm with his son, trying to kind of get him to write back, which was actually quite funny. And so I imagine it wasn't uncommon in correspondence. But of course, most ancient letters aren't like Paul's letters. Paul's letters are extremely long for most ancient letters, which are usually very brief, to the point correspondences for various reasons. But certainly sarcasm didn't exist in this context. And I'm sure it occurred a lot in everyday conversation at the time as well.

[Interviewer]

Next question I have is, was Paul's use of irony just an expression maybe of his character, just natural, or do you think that Paul was educated and used our. Learned the rhetorical techniques of sarcasm and used it in his letters?

[Matthew Pollock]

Yeah, that's. That's another really good question that I don't have a cut and dry answer for. This question of what was the level of Paul's rhetorical education is something that's been debated a lot and when I read, and this was a while ago, when I read Ryan Shellenberg's work on Paul's rhetorical education, I was pretty convinced by it. He essentially argues that none of the evidence that has been presented in scholarship for that Paul must have had a rhetorical education is really very convincing. And as far as I think the evidence of sarcasm goes, which is again just one piece in a broader argument, I think there's nothing in Paul's use of sargy, in Paul's use of sarcasm that says he must have had a rhetorical education. There was a really, really good article on irony. Oh, I'm forgetting the author. Was it Colston? Was it Gibbs? The paper is called Are Ironic Acts Intentional? And I didn't get a chance to talk about it as much as I would have liked in the book. But essentially he argues that sarcasm and verbal irony are kind of more like a tennis swing. So you can analyze a tennis swing in terms of all of the angles and movements and kind of where you're aiming for I don't play tennis. But you know, it can be broken down in a really complex way. And it's the same thing when you're analyzing something like sarcasm. You can really break it down into kind of, oh, here's how the targets, here's all the things it's implying. But when it comes down to it, these are the sorts of things that we do in everyday conversation all the time, often without really thinking about it. So Paul could have been crafting this in a really thought out, kind of rhetorically minded way, or he could have been doing this in a much more spontaneous way. I don't think we really have the evidence to say definitively which, which is which.

[Interviewer]

What do you hope to me reverse my question with all this analysis that you've done on sarcasm and the Pauline corpus, what do you hope for the researchers, or maybe you in the future could use could do with this analysis? Like what doors do you think have been opened up with your analysis?

[Matthew Pollock]

Yeah, there's a lot of directions where this kind of thing could go. Obviously there's more stuff to be done. I mean, I guess I went through 400 examples of sarcasm in Ancient Greek. There's room to expand, look at different contexts, dialects, time periods, but not just sarcasm. For example, I talk a lot in the book about the Greek term asteismos, which is essentially self deprecating irony, sort of the mirror image or kind of the opposite of sarcasm. And I'm able to touch on that. But I don't get to go into tons of detail. So there's some of these other forms of irony mockery that could benefit from the kind of analysis I do in the book. I'd also really love to see, and this is something that I've always said like my next. It's not what I'm working on right now, but if I in five years time have my choice of project, I would really love to do just a really big study on humor in the ancient world and early Christianity. I think there's. This has been touched on in some different ways, but is something that could be done to a bigger level and on a broader scale and I would really love to do that. We'll just see if I ever get a chance.

[Interviewer]

So before we go, we usually like to ask our guest about any upcoming projects or books in the works. So Matthew, do you have any current works that you're working on?

[Matthew Pollock]

Yeah, so right now I'm in a new position in Luxembourg at the Luxembourg School of Religion and Society and I'm kind of doing a project that's a bit between project management and research. So I'm running a research network called Trust and Society and the idea is to kind of bring together trust research searchers from all across different disciplines and to be able to connect research going on the subject of trust with people in society who can benefit from that. Lots of the challenges and crises that we're facing today have kind of trust is an element in these. We're dealing with issues of misinformation, trust in science. We saw a bunch of this with the vaccines and we could multiply examples. And so it's really interesting being able to go in a completely different direction and work on that. And within that research network, I'm also doing a project of my own which is going to look at kind of networks of trust relationships in early Christianity.

[Interviewer]

So thank you so much, Matthew, for the interview.

[Matthew Pollock]

Yeah, thanks so much for having me.