My presentation discusses deliberate metaphor in the mixed genre of epistles, which are persuasive and expository at the same time. The Pauline epistles are an exceptionally rich source of deliberate metaphors and will be used as corpus. In the talk, I will compare different perspectives on deliberate metaphor, as introduced by hermeneutics, Cognitive Metaphor Theory, and Deliberate Metaphor Theory, and show that the notion of alienation is the key to bring together these threads of research.