tual children. In other words, in the cultural environment of these two writings a concept of spiritual procreation calls for a context of contemplative rest necessary for spiritual life that replaces a context in which a person is preoccupied with physical children who take a person away from concerns of the soul. Valantasis treats us to a fully-developed cultural mode of intertextual analysis that, if followed by other interpreters, can contribute richly to interpretation of NT and early Christian literature in the years to come.

Judith Perkins's analysis of the relation among Greek romances, the apocryphal Acts, and Apuleius' Metamorphoses moves yet one step further into analysis and interpretation of cultural intertextuality. One of the major achievements of Perkins's essay is to draw a carefully-defined distinction between society and culture. Only a few people engaged in textual interpretation draw such a distinction clearly and carefully. For Perkins, "society" refers to structures and institutions that are widespread, well-known, and accepted publicly. "Culture," in contrast, refers to internal meanings of things that regularly set one over against commonly accepted values and goals. In her words, culture is the creation and interpretation of the social world by humans "through the imbricated framework of their cultural beliefs, symbols and representations." There is always, Perkins states, an ongoing dialectic between society and culture, and "[i]t is through this dialectic that new cultural and social formations emerge and take hold."

Perkins's analysis proposes that the second and third centuries were a pivotal point in a transition from the civic person of classical Hellenistic antiquity, where authority was located externally in various social institutions, to the person of the late antique and medieval world who searched within for otherworldly authority. Christianity as a social institution benefitted from this transformation, since it was a social formation that nurtured and supported people who presupposed and engaged in this search for otherworldly authority. In Perkins's approach we see social and cultural intertextual analysis and interpretation in a rich, full form. For her, each writing calls for careful internal analysis and interpretation, but it also calls for a perception that these writings are participants in widespread, dynamic social and cultural processes of interaction.

Perkins's essay, along with her book The Suffering Self, invites this interpreter to reflect on yet another shift that appears to have been occurring from the second century BCE to the second century CE. Apocalyptic views during the two centuries prior to the Common Era brought into prominence the presupposition that divine powers were finding it necessary to bring about, very soon, the destruction (death) and renewal of the present created order. During the first two centuries of the Common Era, this worldview modulated into a "death-appropriating" view of the world in which baptism into death-renewal, dying daily, or martyrdom as a seal of eternal life became a way of internalizing the death, destruction, and renewal required by divine