that the volume explicitly attends to the four arenas of importance to socio-rhetorical criticism.

Burton L. Mack's A Myth of Innocence is a third book of interest alongside Teacher. In this instance, the approach sounds a message of "intertextuality" at the outset. Mack emphasizes that a text contains "layers of accumulated constructions" that exhibit "the patterns of early Christian movements."⁶⁹ This means that "the words" in the present text are a configuration of words from previous sites of composition intertwined with words articulated in the final site of composition. This intertextual focus drives Mack to gather evidence systematically for written collections of material that have been reconfigured and re-contextualized in the Gospel of Mark. For a different reason than in Myers' book, then, the reader loses sight of the narrative qualities that present dramatic interaction between a teacher and his disciple-companions. Rather than exhibiting inner textual features of Mark, Mack's book synthesizes the evidence for pre-Markan collections in a manner unsurpassed by any recent study. Once Mack has located the previous "sites" among parables, pronouncement stories, and miracle stories, he analyzes each collection in a mode related to Elliott's use of sociological imagination to interpret the "socioreligious strategy" of 1 Peter. Rather than using Elliott's more "domesticated" form of analysis, however, Mack uses Jonathan Z. Smith's form of "imagining religion."⁷⁰ Also, Mack explores the inner texture of each collection with insights from rhetorical handbooks in Mediterranean antiquity. But Mack's analysis of inner texture is saturated with intertextual and ideological dimensions in the spirit of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault.⁷¹ His form of intertextuality is ideologically charged to differentiate subtle nuances of difference between social situations, much like a trained German shepherd distinguishes between latakia pipe tobacco and marijuana. It is inaccurate, so far as Mack is concerned, to sort among Christians simply on the basis of Aramaic or Greek language, or basic geographical location. Rather, the "literarily" oriented scholar must develop a highly nuanced and even intuitive form of analysis to "imagine" religion in antiquity. For other aspects of Mack's book, I refer the reader to the review article on "Text and Context in Recent Studies of Mark."⁷²

In truth, the most interesting recent book alongside Teacher is Bernard Brandon Scott's Hear Then the Parable.⁷³ This book not only shares with socio-rhetorical criticism an interest in opening doors to adjacent disciplines of study, but it also shares specific strategies of analysis. Scott's book displays extensive analysis of the inner texture of the parables. Since the heritage of his language is structuralism, he refers to inner texture as surface structure. Nevertheless, his observations are not limited to oppositions, and his insights do not remain "on the surface." As he builds his