I have introduced the framework already--namely the four arenas of interpretation which socio-rhetorical criticism emphasizes: (a) rhetorical-literary features internal to the text; (b) intertextual aspects of the text; (c) social and cultural dynamics in the text; and (d) ideology. Since August of 1990, students and colleagues have helped me to reflect further on the method and to identify the strategies at work as one explores these four arenas of a text. It may be informative, then, to take another run through the method, going back to revisit the place where I began this introduction.

A revisitation of the beginning place for socio-rhetorical criticism brings an awareness that the method is a call for biblical interpreters to work consciously at two tasks at once: (a) reading the text; and (b) opening the world of the text. Jouette Bassler understood this when she wrote: "[Robbins] has developed a methodology that permits a satisfying integration of the Jewish background of Mark's Gospel with its Greco-Roman background, while retaining a sensitivity to the literary dimensions of the text as well as an interest in its reader."¹⁵ The term "rhetorical" asks the interpreter to hear the text of Mark as a story--to listen to all of the voices in the story, including the narrator's voice, and to look around at all that is happening.¹⁶ The prefix "socio-" asks the interpreter to open the text to the past, present, and future world we see, hear, and imagine as twentieth, and soon twenty-first, century people. It may seem unnecessary to emphasize the importance both of the text and of the world of the text, but most interpreters establish strategies of interpretation that limit both dimensions of Mark. As Daniel Harrington phrased it: "... this work [Teacher] breaks new ground in several areas. Whether a fruitful harvest is to be gathered from it in the future depends on the willingness of Marcan scholars to move beyond the familiar confines of OT backgrounds and literary-theological analysis."¹⁷ In other words, most interpreters do not think the Gospel of Mark was produced and used in Mediterranean society and culture, even though it was written in Greek; and many of the same interpreters read the text as a christological or theological tractate rather than a story. I was pleased, then, when James Swetnam joined in a similar refrain by saying that "the book helps free New Testament criticism from the self-imposed strait jacket it has been in and opens the New Testament to a more nuanced approach."¹⁸

Why might it be difficult for Markan scholars to move beyond the "familiar confines"? All New Testament interpreters, I think, have a goal of "reading the text to open the world of the text." But the issues are: (a) how one should read a New Testament text; and (b) what world of a New Testament text one is trying to open? Robert Tannehill, Norman Petersen, Willem Vorster, David Rhoads, and Donald Michie, as well as others,