Socio-Rhetorical Examples
Burton Mack enacts the history of religions approach to New Testament texts in a mode of discourse perhaps most accurately described as postmodern "new historical" commentary (see Veeser 1989; Thomas 1991). Mack uses the insights both of historians of religion like Jonathan Z. Smith and of postmodern critics like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault to generate a new historiography of first century Christianity. For him, the Markan account of the death of Jesus is a "moment" in the creation of early Christian historiography. Early Christians create their "history" by interrelating myth and "lives of" Jesus in highly complex and multivalent ways.
Jesus' death [in Mark] is the sign of the end of the temple's time. The rending of the temple curtain anticipates the destruction of the temple in 70 C.E. There is no other sense to be made of the concentration of suggestions than that the reader associate the two events. Apocalyptic mentality would have understood the destruction of the temple as an act of God's judgment in any case. Mark stacked up the reasons for seeing it related to the crucifixion of Jesus. The reason he could not make the point explicit in a direct statement is because to have named a single cause either of the crucifixion or of the temple's destruction would have ruined the multimotivational interpretation of the events he had in mind and the reciprocal dynamics of conflict he needed in order to carry out his fiction (Mack 1988: 297).
Mack's discourse participates ideologically in intellectual circles that produce history of religions commentary informed by critical anthropology. These ideological commitments have a significantly different social and cultural location than the commitments of people who produce either theological or social-scientific commentary. The goal of understanding the nature of Christianity as a religion among all other religions is significantly different from a goal of understanding Christianity as the one religion that, with its own discourse, appropriately informs a person's view of the world. Also, it differs from a use of the social sciences to analyze a text as a social and cultural text rather than a religious text. Smith and Mack quite consciously select discourse that is different both from Christian discourse informed primarily by theological terminology and from social science discourse that is not addressed to religious phenomena as a way to shed light on the nature of Christian discourse. Smith and Mack use both social science discourse that focuses on religious phenomena and literary discourse that focuses on religious texts to analyze the Gospel of Mark. Only a certain group of interpreters invest their discourse in this kind of commentary.
From V. K. Robbins, Exploring the Texture of Texts, (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1996), p. 109.
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