place to think about temporal sequence interacting with social environment, but such analysis has not been a traditional part of New Testament study. In any case, I became aware that the social environment of a teacher-disciple relation had to have a beginning. The rhetoric associated with that beginning brought me to an analysis of Mark 1:14-20, Jesus' calling of two sets of brothers to follow him.⁵

The analysis of Mark 1:14-20 involved two different steps. First, it investigated the wording of these verses in a mode regularly hailed as "intrinsic criticism." Within a repetitive framework in which Jesus went to a place and spoke out in an authoritative manner, a three-step progression brought implications of Jesus' announcement of "the gospel of God" into the lives of two sets of brothers who began to "follow him." Thus, the article began with rhetoric regularly perceived to be internal to the wording in the text. Second, the article investigated language and action in the Septuagint and Greco-Roman literature that was present in the Markan episode, since some commentators had suggested that some of the action and speech in this opening sequence replicated action and speech in texts antecedent to the Gospel of Mark. This was, I now understand, an attempt to understand the "intertextuality" of these verses, that is, their relation to other texts. Frankly, I was surprised to discover that there were "call stories" in Greco-Roman literature so close both in language and function to these Markan episodes. Also, I had never supposed that analysis of antecedent biblical literature would show that the language attributed to Jesus in this context has a fascinating relation to God's speech when he calls Abraham (Genesis 12:1-2) but has virtually no relation to Elijah's speech when he calls Elisha (1 Kings 19:20). In addition, I felt informed by the subtle intermingling of language and action both from biblical tradition and from Greco-Roman tradition in these episodes. In this way, then, analysis of the beginning of the teacher-disciple relation as presented in Mark brought me, first, to intrinsic analysis and, second, to intertextual analysis.

As I moved beyond the beginning of the teacher-disciple relation to its middle and end, I began to realize that the Markan story concerns the natural, socio-biological life-cycle of a male human being.⁶ Jesus' "calling" of certain men into a teacher-disciple relation shares many dynamics with the passage of a modern male from "the novice phase of early adulthood" into "middle adulthood." At the end of the process the disciples are "on their own" with the challenge of "settling" into what they have learned.⁷ This means that the Gospel of Mark builds into the socio-biological cycle of males a teacher-disciple cycle that is "socio-rhetorical" from beginning to end. The cycle begins only if a rhetorical encounter between a teacher and a potential disciple evokes a willingness by both to accept their