meanings as people living in social environments attribute meanings to them. In other words, every meaning perceived to be "in a text" is attributed to signs in that text by a reader-interpreter. The meanings in the text are dependent on the kinds of knowledge the reader-interpreter brings to the text. The signs may call for greater meanings than they receive, but if the reader-interpreter does not give these meanings to the signs, these meanings will not be "in the text." The meanings in the text, then, are dependent on the "textures" of meaning reader-interpreters perceive them to have.

To restate an observation made above, the four arenas of interest to the socio-rhetorical interpreter and critic are four kinds of texture in the text: inner texture, intertexture, social and cultural texture, and ideological texture. Socio-rhetorical criticism begins with inner textual analysis designed to detect persuasive dimensions of discourse. In other words, the analysis of internal discursive features occurs within an ideology that is more interested in the "rhetoric of poetics" than in the "poetics of rhetoric." Again, the major bias is a commitment to language as a social product and tool. This means that all attempts to enclose words, phrases, or sentences in "a" meaning are frustrated by the range of social meanings and social conversations in which the language in the text is engaged.

Since, as mentioned above, interdisciplinary approaches use disciplinary practices, the socio-rhetorical analysis in this book uses various disciplinary strategies and usually exhibits the strengths and limitations that attend them. At the outset, the analysis of repetitive form is implicated in the discipline of grammar and syntax. Frans Neirynck's display of duality and "series of three" in the text of Mark provides the basis for analysis of "three-step progressions" in the passion predictions.⁴⁵ Rather than analyzing three-step progressions throughout all of Mark, however, the study focuses on three-step progressions that exhibit the formal structure or outline of Mark. This move is implicated, as the reader will recognize, in the disciplinary practice of outlining a text.⁴⁶ Beyond this, the analysis of three-step progressions in the narrative is implicated in "literary-historical" practice that identifies "units" in the text. This study places special emphasis on "summaries," "introductions," and "conclusions" in the narrative. This means that the analysis in this book presupposes that the text contains "textual units," and this concept of units was influenced by but was trying to move beyond the disciplines of source, form, and redaction criticism.

Since completing this book, as many readers know, I joined with Burton Mack in rhetorical analysis of the Synoptic Gospels using the Greco-Roman rhetorical handbooks called Progymnasmata.⁴⁷ This was a way of deepening the "rhetorical" part of socio-rhetorical criticism. I was, of course, pleased with Mary Patrick's comment that "Rhetorical criticism of the kind