Reading this volume of essays is like surveying analysis and interpretation of the NT from the middle of the nineteenth century to the present. The nineteenth century is known for the rise to prominence of historical-critical interpretation. With it emerged historical-theological intertextuality, which dominated in one form or another for more than a century. During the 1970s, a whole new range of intertextualities began to emerge: literary-cultural, rhetorical-cultural, linguistic-cultural, socio-cultural, and what might simply be called cultural intertextuality. All of these types of intertextualities are present in this volume, plus artistic intertextuality.

The volume opens with essays and responses by Dennis MacDonald, Richard Pervo, and Robert Stoops that take historical-critical analysis and interpretation as their point of departure and build twentieth century insights into it. The issues here are like those that dominated the middle of the nineteenth century, when the discovery of early fourth century Greek codices gave vibrant life to close comparison of NT texts to determine which ones had been used as sources for the composition of others (Kummel: 144-205; Baird 295-329). One of the keys to this kind of scholarship is the development of a coherent set of criteria for establishing chronological order. Dennis MacDonald introduces three criteria for determining relationships of dependence among the apocryphal Acts: (1) generative external traditions; (2) internal consistency; and (3) secondary improvement. These criteria are related to criteria text critics use to establish a chronology of variant readings among manuscripts. Here the interpreters are engaged in detailed intertextual analysis and interpretation but of a type that approaches the words, phrases, clauses, and sentences as historical artifacts. With this type of analysis, the interpreter focuses on texts as objects that represent historical activity. On the level of the form of the words, phrases, clauses, and sentences, texts are scribal artifacts representing past scribal activity. On the level of the content of the words, texts are historical artifacts representing past action and speech. Especially characteristic of this approach during the nineteenth century was vigorous exploration of the synoptic problem, which inverted conventional wisdom about the order of dependence between the gospels of Matthew and