Introduction to the
Paperback Edition

Little did I know what a fortunate circumstance it was when the phrase "socio-rhetorical interpretation" appeared in the subtitle of this book and the phrase "socio-rhetorical criticism" appeared on the jacket. At the time, I only knew I was trying to work my way toward a method that brought information about Mediterranean society and culture into interpretation of the Gospels and Acts. Subsequently, the phrase "socio-rhetorical" has appeared in the title of an article on the multiple accounts of the Woman who Touched Jesus' Garment (1987), a response to studies of paraenesis in biblical literature (1990), and a look at John Knox's second century dating of Luke and Acts (1991);¹ and the phrase is beginning to appear in writings where authors perceive their own approach to be related to the approach in this book, Jesus the Teacher.² In addition, Bertram L. Melbourne and Mary Ann Beavis have built creatively upon the analysis in Teacher in well-crafted monographs that focus on a particular aspect of the teacher-disciple relation in Mark.³

A socio-rhetorical method of analysis first suggested itself to me after I compared the we-passages in Acts with accounts of sea voyages in Mediterranean antiquity.⁴ This study in 1975 revealed that traveling in a boat on the sea with other people created a social environment that made it natural for some authors in antiquity to use first person plural "we" for literary accounts of sea voyages. The inference I drew from this observation was "socio-rhetorical" --namely, that a well-known social environment in the culture could play a key role in the rhetoric of a literary narrative. In this instance, the social environment under consideration has a vivid narrative quality; being in a boat on the sea is a story we all experience together.

Among other things, the sea voyage study revealed that some social environments have a beginning, middle, and end. This suggested a new approach for analyzing the "socio-rhetoric" of Jesus's relationship with his disciples in the Gospel of Mark. We know that a primary rhetorical aspect of stories is their beginning, middle, and end. But I had not been taught to think programmatically about the beginning, middle, and end of a social environment. Analysis of community rituals could have been a natural