respective roles; the cycle has a middle phase only if rhetorical give-and-take continues between teacher and disciple; and the rhetorical dynamics at the end of the cycle, where the teacher challenges them to "go on their own," have a direct relation to the dynamics in the beginning and middle phases.⁸

The rhetorical observation about the cycle soon raised a "social" issue. What kind of social environment does the Gospel of Mark evoke for Jesus and his disciples? Investigation of rabbinic sources reveals a "schoolhouse" tradition. A teacher teaches in a "house" and people come to him requesting to be his disciple. It was obvious that the Gospel of Mark envisioned an alternative social environment--one in which the teacher encounters people at their place of work and convinces them to follow him as he travels from village to village. Investigation of the rhetorical situations in which Jesus had gotten disciples to follow him, then, led naturally to investigation of social environments for teacher-disciple relations in Mediterranean society.

As I sought a way to analyze the social and cultural aspects of the teacher-disciple cycle in Mark, articles on role theory in the standard handbooks in cultural anthropology and social psychology were helpful.⁹ I have often wished I had supplemented the approaches gleaned from these articles with more explicit anthropological practices of interpretation like those found in Van Gennep's The Rites of Passage¹⁰ and Victor Turner's The Ritual Process.¹¹ If James Peacock's The Anthropological Lens had appeared earlier, it would have been possible to show how the analysis in Teacher presents an "ethnography" of teachers and their disciple-companions in Mediterranean antiquity.¹² In other words, the commentary could have alerted the reader that to my "traveling" to an environment of foreign literature to perform "fieldwork" that yielded data with which I would accept the tasks of "interpretation," "generalization," "deduction," and "introspection."¹³ In other words, I was intentionally trying to approach the Gospel of Mark like an anthropologist would approach a "foreign" group of people in a "foreign" land. It seems to me that our investigations badly need to confront the reality that New Testament texts are "foreign" to our literature, society, economics, politics, and culture. Adopting the approach of a cultural anthropologist, then, is an important part of any investigation of a New Testament text.¹⁴ In any case, detailed exploration of Mediterranean literature--which includes not only biblical and post-biblical Jewish literature but also Greek and Roman literature--led me beyond intrinsic criticism and intertextual analysis into social and cultural analysis.

But another dynamic also was at work. This book results from training in biblical studies that emphasizes: (a) the Jewishness of the New Testament,