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(J. Boyarin 1993; cf. Noakes 1993; Robbins 1991: 318-26; Robbins 1993b; Robbins 1994). This means that the subject of interpretation is not simply the content of the text but the interaction between its content and its mode of production. Interpreters who enact socio-rhetorical hermeneutics will investigate the historical, linguistic, social, cultural, ideological, and theological phenomena that, working together, function as the material, means, and mode of production of the discourse. One of the distinctive features of a socio-rhetorical hermeneuticsăas it operates in a dynamic relation with historical, social-scientific, literary, and theological hermeneuticsăis its investigation of "operational models" as well as "representative models" exhibited by the discourse in the text. Representational models are "indigenous models of their world that people can more or less articulate." Operational models are "indigenous models that guide behavior in given situations and that tend to be out of awareness" (Holland and Quinn 1987: 5 in D. Boyarin 1993: 228). Many, though fortunately not all, current historical, social-scientific, literary, and theological interpretations work solely with the representational models New Testament texts articulate. These interpretations do not work their way into the operational models that guided the discursive behavior that the discourse exhibits but does not articulate. To put this another way, the socio-rhetorical features of New Testament texts themselves regularly show us quite a different process of transmission and interaction (operational model) than the text articulates (representational model). Undoubtedly the most dramatic articulation of a representational model in the New Testament is the two-volume work Luke-Acts, which claims to present to the reader the process that produced Christianity from the day Zechariah received the promise of his son John the Baptist (Luke 1:5-23) to the "two whole years" Paul spent in Rome "preaching the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ quite openly and unhindered" (Acts 28:30-31). Books in the New Testament like the Epistle of James, the Gospel of John, the Epistle to the Hebrews, and the Revelation of John show us that a very different process produced early Christian discourse than the focus on the death and resurrection of Jesus, supported with scriptural recitation, articulated in Acts. Many current historical, literary, social-scientific, and theological approaches simply work out of the representational model articulated by Luke and Acts, supplementing it here and there without serious investigation of the operational models that exhibit dramatically different processes than Luke and Acts articulate. Socio-rhetorical hermeneutics--as ethnography of orality, writing, and reading--guides interpreters into both the operational and the representational models in the discourse and establishes a dialogue among them in interpretation. |