To put this another way, I was proceeding in a "social semiotic" manner, not in a "literary-historical" manner. The difference between the two approaches is at some points significant enough that it begins to be clear that they belong to two different paradigms of research.³⁴ The similarity in structure between the Dio account and the Markan account of the humiliation and crucifixion of Jesus still suggests to me the possibility that Mark's performance is a reconfiguration of the cultural text about the humiliated prisoner-king in the Greek East. A literary-historical interpreter functioning within "genetic" boundaries of analysis may resist this observation, but a social-semiotic approach is likely to see the similaries as very suggestive for interpretation of the Markan account.

Since socio-rhetorical criticism is grounded in social semiotics rather than genetic literary history, it often uses disciplinary methods in different ways and at different moments in the act of interpretation. It is not an unexpected circumstance, therefore, when Maier introduces "his" customary disciplinary practice at a point where I am using a different analytical practice. But we must clarify for one another the kind of conclusion we are drawing and how we are drawing it. I am intentionally trying to introduce new practices into New Testament study, because I think the current practices close the world of the text far too much. Since socio-rhetorical criticism presupposes that "practice interpenetrates theory from the beginning" and that "theory is always determined by disciplinary practices,"³⁵ it uses many practices that are different from the practices of literary-historical criticism.

Another aspect of socio-rhetorical criticism is to presuppose that a text has texture. This metaphor for a written document arises from places in Clifford Geertz's writing that refer to the "webs" of signification humans spin.³⁶ From the perspective of socio-rhetorical criticism, the webs of signification in a text produce a surface that looks different according to the different angles from which one approaches it. The term "texture" has a congenial relation to thick description, material culture, and interwoven and interweaving networks of signification and communication. The signs in the text signify the cognitive, emotive, social and material meaning potential in texts.³⁷ For this reason, different approaches can yield significantly different experiences of sight, touch, sound, and emotion. Stephen Tyler recently has called our attention to the textured nature of texts throughout all their aspects:

Writing and the texts produced by writing are, from the first, expressions of a metaphor of figuration as "weaving." The word "text" itself derives from Latin textere ("to weave") and we still speak of weaving or "stitching together" (cf. rhapsode, "stitch together") a discourse in which the "seams"