Article

Journal for the Study of

Socio-Rhetorical
the New Testament
33(2) 191­–206
© The Author(s) 2010
Interpretation: Textures Reprints and permission:
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of a Text and its Reception DOI: 10.1177/0142064X10385857
jsnt.sagepub.com

David B. Gowler
Emory University

Abstract
The meaning of a text does not reside alone in the creative genius of its author;
there is a complex correlation between a text and the contexts in which a text has
been read and reread, including various dynamic interrelations between creator and
contemplators, past and present. Vernon Robbins’s socio-rhetorical interpretation
provides a powerful interpretive analytic to explore these dialogic interrelations among
authors, texts and readers/interpreters. Correspondingly, studies of reception history,
through their investigations of significant additional voices that join the heteroglossic
chorus of interpreters, provide critical insights for more comprehensive socio-rhetorical
analyses of texts. This article chronicles the birth and development of socio-rhetorical
interpretation, introduces major components of a socio-rhetorical approach, and
provides examples of how socio-rhetorical interpretation and reception history can
mutually inform each other.

Keywords
Reception history, socio-rhetorical, textures of texts,Vernon K. Robbins

Introduction
Vernon Robbins first introduced the term ‘socio-rhetorical’ into New Testament studies
in 1984 (Robbins 1984), and in the intervening years he has been at the forefront of the
developments within socio-rhetorical analysis, an approach currently used by a variety
of scholars in a number of different texts and contexts.1 As John Kloppenborg noted in
Robbins’s 2003 Festschrift:

1. See the impressive but incomplete list compiled by Robbins: http://www.religion.emory.edu/

faculty/robbins/SRI/defns/bib.cfm.

Corresponding author:
David B. Gowler, Oxford College of Emory University, 100 Hamill Street, Oxford, GA 30054, USA
Email: dgowler@emory.edu

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192 Journal for the Study of the New Testament 33(2)

In a discipline as seemingly conservative as the study of the New Testament, to witness the
rapid emergence of a methodological approach with such wide-ranging and revolutionary
implications as socio-rhetorical criticism is a rare event. Rarer still is the fact that this approach
was effectively brought from its infancy to a degree of maturity by the efforts of a single
scholar. It is not that Vernon Robbins created ex nihilo; of course, he drew on a variety of stud-
ies that arose from the ferment of the 1970s and 1980s—studies that focused on semiotics, on
narrative criticism, on rhetorical features of biblical texts, on intertextuality, on the social world
of biblical texts, and on the role of ideology in the production and use of literary texts. But
Robbins had the clarity of mind to see how to integrate these diverse methods and approaches
to the texts of antiquity into a multi-dimensional method which identifies various registers or
‘textures’ in an effort to understand how a text works on the intellect, emotions, and sensibili-
ties of its readers and hearers and how the worlds of the readers or hearers variously affect the
appropriation of the text (Kloppenborg 2003: 64).

Socio-rhetorical analysis fosters a dialogic relationship with scholars of various

approaches and disciplines, and its connection with reception history in particular is
multifaceted, beginning with its foundational assumptions about the nature of texts and
discourse. In brief, socio-rhetorical analysis offers an interdisciplinary interpretive ana-
lytic by which we can better understand texts and their reception (Robbins 1996a: 11-13).

Vernon K. Robbins and the Birth of Socio-Rhetorical Criticism

Vernon Robbins’s academic training and teaching experiences generated an environment
conducive to the birth and development of socio-rhetorical interpretation. Robbins did
his undergraduate work at Westmar College in LeMars, Iowa, and received a masters of
divinity from United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio. He began his doctorate at
the University of Chicago Divinity School in 1964, the same year Norman Perrin arrived,
and Robbins and Dennis Duling were appointed as Perrin’s graduate assistants. Robbins
and Duling worked with Perrin for the next four years, including assisting with Perrin’s
classic work, Rediscovering the Teaching of Jesus.
From 1968 to 1984 Robbins taught in the Department of Classics at the University of
Illinois at Urbana/Champaign. This experience, because of his interaction with such col-
leagues as Thomas Conley, a rhetorician in the Communications Department, enabled
Robbins to move beyond the conceptual and methodological world of traditional histor-
ical-critical scholarship. Scholars, Robbins argued, are in dialogue with voices both past
and present; they should establish continuity with previous works (e.g. ancient Jewish
and Greco-Roman literature) but also should more successfully integrate the insights
of a wide range of eras and approaches. Robbins’s socio-rhetorical approach utilizes
‘rhetorical analysis and interpretation that is based on both oral and literary dynamics within
social, cultural, ideological, and religious contexts of interaction during the first century
CE to interpret New Testament literature’ (Robbins 2009: 3). A distinguishing factor of
socio-rhetorical analysis, however, is that Robbins includes not just the first-century con-
texts for New Testament texts, but also insights that span from 100 CE through the emer-
gence of Islam and the Qur’an during the seventh century CE and continuing all the way

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Gowler 193

to twenty-first-century literary, historical, social, cultural, theological, ideological and

rhetorical approaches of today.
After a year as a Fulbright Professor in the Department of Religious Studies, University
of Trondheim, Norway (1983–84), Robbins moved to Emory University in Atlanta,
Georgia, where he is currently Professor of New Testament and Comparative Sacred
Texts in the Department and Graduate Division of Religion. Robbins was appointed
Winship Distinguished Research Professor of New Testament and Comparative Sacred
Texts in the Humanities at Emory in 2001, and he also served as Visiting Professor of
New Testament, University of Stellenbosch, South Africa (1999–2002).
Robbins’s major books include Jesus the Teacher: A Socio-Rhetorical Interpretation of
Mark (1984, pbk 1992a), Ancient Quotes and Anecdotes (1989) and Patterns of Persuasion
in the Gospels (with Burton L. Mack, 1989). Two programmatic books appeared in 1996,
The Tapestry of Early Christian Discourse (1996a) and Exploring the Texture of Texts
(1996b), both of which present a further modification of socio-rhetorical interpretation by
exhibiting programmatic strategies for interpreting the inner texture, intertexture, social
and cultural texture, ideological texture and sacred texture of texts (see below). Robbins’s
goal in those books was to organize ‘socio-rhetorical strategies of analysis and interpreta-
tion in a manner that showed their relationship to one another’ and to encourage scholars
to use those modes of analysis in programmatic ways (Robbins 2009: 6).
In addition, two collections of socio-rhetorical essays by Robbins have appeared: New
Boundaries in Old Territory: Forms and Social Rhetoric in Mark (1994a) and Sea
Voyages and Beyond: Emerging Strategies in Socio-Rhetorical Interpretation (2010b),
both of which contain programmatic essays by David B. Gowler that chronicle the birth
and development of socio-rhetorical interpretation from 1973 to 2002.
A Festschrift in Robbins’s honor, Fabrics of Discourse: Essays in Honor of Vernon K.
Robbins (Gowler, Watson and Bloomquist 2003), includes essays from scholars around
the world who apply insights of socio-rhetorical interpretation in distinctive ways. This
collection of essays amply demonstrates the remarkable creativity, depth and interna-
tional influence of Robbins’s scholarship.
The most recent insights of Robbins’s continuing development of socio-rhetorical
interpretation may be found in his magisterial work, The Invention of Christian Discourse,
I (2009), the inaugural volume of the Rhetoric in Religious Antiquity series. This book is
the first volume of a comprehensive statement of socio-rhetorical interpretation as an
‘interpretive analytic’ to illustrate how early Christians reconfigured common patterns of
Mediterranean discourse (e.g. philosophical, mantic, etc.) into specific modes of
Christian discourse (e.g. wisdom, prophetic, apocalyptic, etc.).
Unfortunately, a caveat is in order before proceeding to the development of
Robbins’s approach: Not all works labeled ‘socio-rhetorical’ are created equal. As
David Aune noted, Robbins’s socio-rhetorical interpretation is a ‘holistic combination
of methods and approaches to reading and interpreting texts that Robbins describes as
an “interpretive analytic”’ (Aune 2010: 4). After more than a decade of Robbins’s use
of the term ‘socio-rhetorical’, however, Ben Witherington III hijacked the term for a
series of commentaries that Witherington misleadingly labeled as ‘Socio-Rhetorical
Commentary’ (Aune 2010: 4). This classic ‘bait-and-switch’ replaces Robbins’s sophis-
ticated multi-dimensional socio-rhetorical approach with Witherington’s ‘method’ that

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194 Journal for the Study of the New Testament 33(2)

utilizes some rhetorical and social-science insights to argue for his rather conservative
historical agenda.

The Development of Socio-Rhetorical Criticism

I have chronicled the development of socio-rhetorical criticism (Gowler 1994, 2006, 2010)
and its placement within rhetorical criticism (Gowler 2000b) elsewhere, so a brief summary
will suffice here. In this article, after describing the context out of which socio-rhetorical
criticism emerged, I will give a basic taxonomy of the ‘textures’ of socio-rhetorical criti-
cism and their implications for reception history before moving on to specific examples of
studies that utilize socio-rhetorical interpretation, including some reception history studies.
Some rhetorical critics, such as Brian Vickers, argue that rhetoric is the most compre-
hensive form of literary criticism (1988: 435-79). As Terry Eagleton (1996: 206) states:

Rhetoric…shares with Formalism, structuralism, and semiotics an interest in the formal devices of
language, but like reception theory [e.g. reader response] is also concerned with how these devices
are actually effective at the point of ‘consumption’; its preoccupation with discourse as a form of
power and desire can learn much from deconstruction and psychoanalytical theory, and its belief
that discourse can be a humanly transformative affair shares a good deal with liberal humanism.

Rhetorical approaches include a concern for the social nature of reality, the interrelation-
ship between language and human actions, and how language attempts to create effects
on an audience. Rhetorical criticism thus combines an interest in how to explain and
evaluate speakers’ motivations, audiences’ responses, structures of discourse, and the
developments within an environment of communication (Goodwin 1993: 177).
Within biblical studies, rhetorical criticism was rejuvenated by the pioneering works
of Amos Wilder (1964) and James Muilenburg (1969). The classicist George Kennedy,
however, was primarily responsible for the (re)emergence of classical rhetoric within
New Testament rhetorical criticism, where ‘rhetoric’ is the quality in discourse by which
authors or speakers seek to accomplish their persuasive purposes and not merely a matter
of stylistic elements (1984: 4).
The emergence of the ‘new rhetoric’, heralded by the eponymous book by Chaim
Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969), also encouraged scholars to (re)envision rhet-
oric as primarily a means of argumentation: Rhetoric encompasses all speech and all
aspects of all speech (e.g. as social discourse, a means of societal formation, and a focus
on the social and cultural contexts of the speaker/writer and audience). Language, now
seen as inherently a social activity, was crafted and used to accomplish a particular pur-
pose (cf. Gowler 2000b, 2006).

Socio-Rhetorical Interpretation’s ‘Textures of Texts’

Into this rhetorical environment stepped Robbins’s ‘socio-rhetorical analysis’. Robbins’s
interpretive analytic differed from other modes of rhetorical analyses, in part because he

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Gowler 195

was also influenced by numerous literary, social-scientific and cultural developments in

scholarship. Socio-rhetorical criticism became even more distinctive in the 1990s, when
Robbins began to focus on the discovery, analysis and interpretation of the ‘textures of
texts’ (see Gowler 1994, 2000b, 2010). Robbins utilizes the metaphor of a rich tapestry
to explain the nature of texts. When we look at a thick tapestry from different angles, we
see different ‘textures’: configurations, patterns and images inherent in its warp and
woof. In a similar way, when we explore a text from different angles, we see multiple
textures of meanings, convictions, values, emotions and actions. The process of delineat-
ing these textures of texts began in 1992 (Robbins 1992a, 1992b) but reached a more
definitive form in 1996 with the publication of two books in which Robbins defined and
explained these textures (Robbins 1996a, 1996b):
Inner texture includes linguistic patterns within a text, structural elements of a text,
and the specific manner in which a text attempts to persuade its reader. These elements
are traditionally part of what is called a ‘close reading’ of a text, the interpretation of the
literary-rhetorical features and patterns in the text.
Intertexture designates a text’s representation of, reference to and use of phenomena
in the ‘world’ outside the text, including a text’s citations, allusions and reconfigurations
of specific texts, events, language, objects, institutions and other specific extra-textual
contexts with which the text interacts.
Social and cultural texture is where a text interacts with society and culture by sharing
in the general social and cultural attitudes, norms and modes of interaction that are
known by everyone in a society, and by establishing itself in relationship with the domi-
nant cultural system as either sharing, rejecting or transforming those attitudes, values
and dispositions.
Ideological texture concerns the particular alliances and conflicts nurtured and evoked by
the language of the text and the language of the interpretation as well as the way the text itself
and interpreters of the text position themselves in relation to other individuals and groups.
Readers should recognize and interpret the ideological point(s) of view a text evokes, advo-
cates and nurtures, as well as their own ideological point(s) of view as readers.
Sacred texture refers to the manner in which a text communicates insights into the
relationship between the human and the divine. This texture includes aspects concerning
such things as deity, holy persons, spirit beings, divine history, human redemption, reli-
gious community and ethics. This texture (added in Robbins 1996b), in my view, is actu-
ally a subset of ideological texture (Gowler 2000b: 456).

Intertexture and Reception History

Although he does not focus on reception history, Vernon Robbins did pursue several
avenues of reception history during the development of socio-rhetorical interpretation
(e.g. Robbins 1992b, 2005), and his work intersects in significant ways with key interests
of reception history. Perhaps more importantly, socio-rhetorical interpretation offers an
interpretive analytic through which we can think creatively and constructively about cur-
rent approaches to reception history. And, as noted below, significant studies of reception
history have profitably used socio-rhetorical interpretation (e.g. Bloomquist 1999; Bell

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196 Journal for the Study of the New Testament 33(2)

2007) in ways that provide a more sophisticated understanding of the relation of voices
in the texts and the various voices that respond to them. The difference between a
‘method’ and Robbins’s ‘interpretive analytic’ is crucial in exploring this relation of
voices, because Robbins envisions a ‘method’ as an entity unto itself, whereas an inter-
pretive analytic is ‘grounded in the belief that the true nature of something is exhibited
in the way it relates to other things’ (Robbins 2009: 5). That philosophy is at the heart of
reception history, which includes an understanding of the dynamic relations of voices
past and present. So socio-rhetorical analysis has keen insights for practitioners of recep-
tion history, but reception history, on the other hand, is also essential for a comprehensive
socio-rhetorical analysis of a text.
At its most basic level, the textures of socio-rhetorical analysis can serve as a taxon-
omy of the various approaches an interpreter should utilize to create a more comprehen-
sive interpretation of a text and its reception. The analysis of inner texture, for example,
includes narrative and rhetorical techniques that serve to highlight the words, patterns,
narrative voices, literary structures and devices, and other literary-rhetorical elements
such as progression, repetition, narration and argumentation (Robbins 1996a: 7-39).
Likewise, ideological texture also can be a key element in reception history, as socio-
rhetorical critics examine interpreters’ ideological ‘social, cultural, individual, and group
location[s] and perspective[s]’ (Robbins 1996a: 95), as well as their own ideological
locations and stances.
The analysis of intertexture is fundamental for reception history, even more so because
intertextuality denotes an extremely wide range of textual relationships:

In a broad sense, no text can be anything but derivative. But there are times when texts refer so
concretely to other texts that they seem to demand that the audience recognize a connection…
But the identification of a textual recollection is only the first step to describing the shape of an
intertextual relationship (Willey 1997: 68).

In his description of intertexture, Robbins appropriately highlights a multitude of ways a

text can ‘reconfigured’.2 Oral-scribal intertexture, for example, focuses on how texts
represent, reconfigure and refer to other texts, and Robbins finds five basic categories
within this type of intertexture (Robbins 1996a: 40-52):

1. Recitation ‘is the transmission of speech or narrative, either from oral or written
tradition, in the exact or different words...’ Robbins cites numerous examples of
different modes of recitation, ranging from the replication of exact words to the
utilization of different words in a variety of forms (on a spectrum from most of
the words being the same to reciting the narrative in substantially one’s own
words) all the way to the more general summarization of the previous text(s).

2. Besides oral-scribal intertexture, intertexture also includes (1) cultural knowledge that is
known only inside a particular group or by direct interaction with that group, (2) a more
visible social knowledge that is commonly held by all people of a ‘region’, no matter their
particular cultural location (e.g. a social role or institution), and (3) historical knowledge of
events that have occurred at specific times and locations (Robbins 1996b: 58-68).

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Gowler 197

2. Recontextualization includes wording from previous texts without an explicit

acknowledgment that these words/texts exist in another text and are being (re)used.
3. Reconfiguration utilizes aspects of a previous event/situation to describe a later
event in such a way that the former event appears to foreshadow the later event.
4. Narrative amplification expands a brief narrative into a longer and more complex
form, and this extended composition often integrates recitation, recontextualiza-
tion and/or reconfiguration.
5. Thematic elaboration takes a theme or issue from an earlier text and elaborates
on that theme by utilizing modes of rhetorical argumentation.

This typology of oral-scribal intertexture provides a basic foundation for a detailed

interpretation of the various ways a text has been received, but socio-rhetorical criti-
cism’s attempt to broaden intertextual analyses, however, can also challenge current
practices in reception history. Because of the nature of language, many voices actually
speak, on some level, ‘through any individual person’s use of language’ (cf. Bakhtin
1981). All texts are ‘rewritings’ of previous texts and a reaction to current texts, where
text may be seen as a literary text or as a general ‘text of culture’. Therefore, socio-
rhetorical criticism extends intertextuality to include ‘cultural discourse’. For example,
Robbins expands intertextuality for Luke’s Magnificat beyond the common ‘long tradi-
tion of barren Israelite women’ who finally conceive and bear a son (e.g. 1 Sam. 1).
Intertextuality must also include Septuagintal stories about virgins being ‘humiliated’ by
men (e.g. Deut. 22.23-24), as well as first-century Mediterranean stories about virgins
who are overpowered and impregnated by gods (Robbins 1994b; cf. 1992c).

Intertextuality, Social and Cultural Texture, and

Reception History
Explorations of other textures besides intertexture also yield important insights for anal-
yses of reception history. Elements of social and cultural texture illuminate our under-
standings of the contexts in which people respond to texts, especially when such contexts
are also informed by intertextual analysis and a close reading of inner textual details. In
1990, for example, Robbins integrated social and cultural texture with intertextual analy-
sis to illustrate how Mark uses both Greco-Roman and biblical traditions (Robbins
1990). His conclusions about Markan rhetorical strategies are illustrative of how rhetori-
cal strategies in general can invoke cultural conventions and expectations in dialogic
interaction with intertextual elements.
Stephen Brown’s examination of eight pre-Decian martyr texts illustrates how the
textures of socio-rhetorical analysis can be helpful for reception history analyses. In con-
trast to previous studies, which assumed that these texts were ‘repositories of informa-
tion about the mid-to-late second century world’, Brown focuses not just on the ‘pedigree
of the text’ but on the stories themselves (1999: xvii-xviii), and he methodically works
through all five textures. His section on intertexture finds numerous types of oral-scribal
intertexture. For example, even though there is almost no contact between the New
Testament and The Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs, the latter does ‘contain some

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“reminiscences” of the New Testament’ (e.g. Mt. 5.11-12; 19.18; Brown 1999: 168-70).
A ‘near recitation’ is found in paragraph 9 of the same text (‘honoring for Caesar that
which is Caesar’s, but fearing God’), but Brown decides that the allusion is the ‘clearest’
example of a reminiscence and ‘strange variation’ of Mt. 22.21 (1999: 169) which has
been conflated with 1 Pet. 2.17. This adaption of the two precursor texts makes this allu-
sion a ‘transformation’, ‘echo’ and ‘recontextualization’, although Brown does not pur-
sue the implications of this and other discoveries.
Brown concludes that ‘while the text partakes of the literary traditions of the
early Christian world’, it is ‘essentially an ahistorical text’ (1999: 189). Nothing in its
oral-scribal intertexture ties it to any other texts than the New Testament; nothing in its
cultural intertexture ties it to items other than what arose among early Christian com-
munities; nothing in its social texture is more than just the most general of social roles;
nothing in its historical intertexture ties it to events outside of the ones narrated, which
may or may not have happened in Carthage in the first four centuries CE. Brown thus
argues that The Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs is a ‘piece of Christian fiction about which
there is as yet very little known’ (1999: 190).
Brown’s socio-rhetorical research ultimately is disappointing in that he applies the
socio-rhetorical textures in a workmanlike fashion that does not employ the full power of
its interdisciplinary analysis. Brown’s true interests lie elsewhere, such as demonstrating
that, although these stories have a verisimilitude that makes them ‘plausible’ to audi-
ences in antiquity, they are ‘Christian fiction’ (e.g. 1999: 190, 266, 78). At the very least,
however, Brown’s study illustrates how illuminating the textures of socio-rhetorical
analysis could be for studies of reception history.

Rhetography in Socio-Rhetorical Interpretation

In 1996 Robbins began exploring the emergence of first-century Christian discourse by
taking Paul Ricoeur’s ‘five discourses’ within the Tanak as a starting point: prophetic,
narrative, prescriptive, wisdom and hymnic (Ricoeur 1980; Robbins 1996c). Robbins
argues that six modes of discourse appear within early Christian discourse: rhetorolects
(abbreviated from rhetorical dialect) that he defined as ‘a form of language variety
or discourse identifiable on the basis of a distinctive configuration of themes, topics,
reasonings, and argumentation’. The six rhetorolects of early Christian discourse are
wisdom, prophetic, apocalyptic, precreation, priestly and miracle (Robbins 1996c: 356;
cf. 2009: 7-9):

A rhetorolect is a form of language variety or discourse identifiable on the basis of a distinctive

configuration of themes, topics, reasonings, and argumentations. By their nature, rhetorolects
interpenetrate one another and interact with one another like dialects do when people from dif-
ferent dialectical areas converse with one another. The interaction of rhetorolects in early
Christianity created new configurations of speech as the movement grew. Every early Christian
writing contains a configuration of rhetorolects that is somewhat different from every other
writing. These differences, interacting with one another, create the overall rhetorical environ-
ment properly called early Christian discourse (Robbins 1996c: 356; cf. 2009: xxvii-xxviii).

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Gowler 199

Robbins also distinguishes narrative-descriptive from argumentative-enthymematic

elaboration (Robbins 2002). Narrative description is rhetography (picturesque expression/
narration); argumentative expression is rhetology. The key aspect of rhetography is that
‘narrative begins by creating a verbal picture’, and that picture is elaborated with addi-
tional, sequential pictures to create a ‘graphic story’; readers/hearers, in turn, create vis-
ual images in their minds as they read/hear, and Robbins focuses on the way in which
words in a text create images in the mind, the way in which reading/hearing of a text
enables a person to see (2009: 115-20; 2010a: 203). The way rhetorolects function thus
has implications not only for how readers engage with texts, but also for reception his-
tory (e.g. the reception of the Bible in artistic works).
Robbins is not unique in understanding the way in which readers/hearers create
images in the mind. The conceptual blending theorist and rhetorician Todd Oakley, for
example, argues for the critical importance of ‘scene construction’ in discourse (Oakley
1999: 110; Robbins 2010a: 203). Although Robbins does not utilize her work, similari-
ties can be found in Mary Carruthers’s study on meditation, rhetoric and the making of
images, The Craft of Thought (1998). Carruthers argues that emotion, imagination and
cognition play key roles in the creative process of thinking. The craft of meditation is
seen as a rhetorical invention that involves making mental images (‘pictures’) for think-
ing and composing. Carruthers also makes explicit connections between this craft and
both Jewish spirituality and late Roman rhetoric, a move that parallels Robbins’s explicit
socio-rhetorical use of both Jewish and Greco-Roman literature for the interpretation of
the New Testament (Carruthers 1998). Specifically related to the New Testament is
Averil Cameron’s analysis of the multiple types of rhetorics in early Christian discourse,
where she extensively discusses the pictorial nature of that discourse (Cameron 1991:
15-119; Robbins 2010a: 203). The dialogic perspective of Mikhail Bakhtin also can aid
interpretation of visual images, whether works of art or visual images created in the read-
ing process, as Deborah Haynes demonstrates in her book, Bakhtin and the Visual Arts
(Haynes 1995). Her stress on the ‘Janus-faced’ nature of the creation and interpretation
of works of art, beginnings and endings, past and present, finalized but yet unfinalizable,
speaks cogently to how reception history must proceed. Another first step in reception
history, biblical interpretation and art is Ulrich Luz’s ‘“Effective History” and Art’ essay,
in which he discusses the ‘language of images’ (Luz 2007; cf. Boyd and Esler 2004).
One of the major questions concerning the creation of verbal pictures during the pro-
cess of reading is the ‘location’ of these reading scenarios. That is, how do readers envi-
sion the spatial setting for various events narrated in texts? In the New Testament, for
example, common locations for pictorial narration include households, villages, syna-
gogues, cities, temples and empires. The argumentation inherently arose from ‘lived
experiences’ in specific and common types of locations throughout the first-century
Mediterranean world (Robbins 2009: 15-16; 2010a: 199-203). More importantly,
Robbins argues that certain social places were related to specific cultural, ideological and
religious spaces in the six rhetorolects in early Christian discourse. For example, wisdom
discourse is distinctive because it tends to be ‘located’ in family households or the cre-
ated world (Robbins 2008: 94-96; 2010a: 201).
How can this understanding of readers’ spatial mode of engagement with texts impact
our understanding of reception history? The first obvious connection is that interpreters

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200 Journal for the Study of the New Testament 33(2)

can construct a typology of spaces within early Christian discourse. If Robbins’s descrip-
tion of these rhetorolects is correct, then interpreters can perceive and describe ‘the
social, cultural, and ideological language, story-telling, and argumentation that evoke
specific pictures, emotions, cognitions, and reasonings…’ (Robbins 2010a: 203). Second,
because many of these spaces continue to exist in modified forms since these texts
were written (e.g. household, village, church/synagogue/temple), such early Christian
discourse has been continually reconfigured in places that are similar and function in
similar social, cultural, and religious ways (Robbins 2010a: 203). The power of early
Christian discourse thus continues to be reflected in its reception over the centuries
because this discourse prepared

Christianity not only to function in contexts where it would become the official religion of the
Roman empire but also to function in contexts almost anywhere in the world. This discourse
was able to do this, because it was interactive with topoi that addressed issues, concerns, emo-
tions, insights, knowledge, and mysteries that cover a spectrum reaching from mundane daily
activities to the widest reaches of God’s unknown realm of being. To be sure, there are many
topics and issues first century Christian discourse did not address. Nevertheless, the spectrum
was so wide-reaching that it successfully launched a new culture of discourse in the
Mediterranean world that expanded and became continually more nuanced and complex
throughout twenty centuries in the history of the world (Robbins 2009: 120).

Socio-Rhetorical Reception History

The emergence of rhetorolects within socio-rhetorical analysis is too recent to gauge its
overall impact on New Testament scholarship. The analytical tools provided by socio-
rhetorical analysis in its earlier ‘textures phase’, however, has led to its use on a wide
variety of texts. Initial studies focused on texts that in some way could shed light on the
New Testament, including Dialogues of Plato, Xenophon’s Memorabilia, Josephus,
Philo, rabbinic literature, Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius and the Discourses of Dio
Chrysostom. Socio-rhetorical analysis has also been used with an ever-widening circle
of texts, including the Babylonian Talmud, Mishnah, Tosefta, two medieval sequences
by Peter Abelard, religious traditions in South Africa, the Apocalypse of Peter, the Gospel
of Thomas, the Book of Mormon, the Apocalypse of Paul, Islamic law, African-American
slave songs, and various other Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist sacred
texts (see Robbins 2010a: 195).
Robbins, for example, explored relationships between the Hebrew Bible, the New
Testament and the Qur’an (Robbins and Newby 2003). In the context of reception history,
Robbins also has challenged traditional interpretations of Luke–Acts, Marcion and the
portrait of Jesus in the Qur’an (Robbins 2005). In the process, Robbins attempts to expand
Auslegungsgeschichte and Wirkungsgeschichte beyond explicitly Christian literature, and
he explores how Lukan tradition was dynamically interpreted both within Christian tradi-
tion and within Islamic tradition. Robbins concludes, for example, that Marcion’s ‘sub-
tracting from, adding to, interpreting, and reconfiguring Lukan tradition about Jesus’ is
the first move toward the Jesus traditions found in the Qur’an (2005: 342-43).

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Gowler 201

Robbins’s foray into reception history highlights the need for further socio-rhetorical
investigations on a wider variety of texts, a task some scholars have already attempted in
analyses of reception history. L. Gregory Bloomquist, for example, examines the ‘rheto-
ric of empire’ in Luke–Acts by following the trajectory of empire within Luke’s Gospel
and its pre-Augustine interpreters (1999: 112). Bloomquist discovers a moralizing ten-
dency in the Alexandrian tradition, with later authors connecting sections of Lk. 14
(especially 14.15-24) with the Eucharist. In his socio-rhetorical reception history of Lk.
14.1-24 in ante-Nicene and Nicene writings, Bloomquist concludes:

1. Luke 14 is cited infrequently in ante-Nicene authors, which raises the issue of

whether the absence of certain types of intertexture is salient for interpretation
(e.g. Justin Martyr, who was sympathetic to the rhetoric of empire within
Christianity, cited Lk. 13 and Lk. 16 but not Lk. 14).
2. In the places where Lk. 14 is cited, it is ‘significantly reconfigured’ for moraliz-
ing purposes, a reconfiguration ‘consonant with the Lukan trajectory’. In addi-
tion, ethical issues arise, sometimes in the context of a heavenly banquet or in the
context of—usually outside of Alexandrian texts—the Eucharist (Bloomquist
1999: 125). This reconfiguration connects the healing of the body with the heal-
ing of social wounds (including the Eucharist as a ‘healing meal’).
3. Socio-economic issues in Luke are subsumed into a larger issue of worship, and
there is little evidence of deliberate incorporation of the rhetorical moves in the pas-
sage (e.g. the cynic topos of dropsy symbolizing greed in Lk. 14.1-6 is missing).
4. Socio-economic obligations are discussed in the context of family responsibili-
ties. This trajectory gives more evidence of the role of households both in Luke
and in post-biblical interpretation: ‘it might be in the family sphere that the inter-
face of socio-economic relations and right worship is to be found’ (Bloomquist
1999: 128).

Bloomquist’s study thus provides a starting point, but the most extensive socio-rhetorical
reception history analysis to date is Thomas Bell’s investigation of two of Peter
Abelard’s sequences: Virgines castae and Epithalamica (Bell 2007). Bell concludes that
Abelard’s exegesis of biblical and extra-biblical sources primarily is a moral exhorta-
tion focused on the concrete life situation of Heloise and other Paraclete Abbey nuns.
Abelard’s goal is to create and nurture a symbolic world beyond the Paraclete Abbey in
which they would become even more faithful in their love for Christ as their bride-
groom (2007: 33, 53).
Scripture formed a critical part of Abelard’s rhetorical arguments. Bell notes that
Abelard’s use of Scripture did not stem from the poring over various manuscripts;
instead, ‘the words, images, thoughts, and divisions of Scripture, the Fathers’ writings,
and other texts (sacred and pagan) [were impressed] into the wax of his memory’. The
two fundamental passages for Abelard’s Virgines castae and Epithalamica were the Song
of Songs and Ps. 44, which, for Abelard, ‘are essentially of one cloth’ (2007: 36, 38).
Bell closely follows Robbins’s framework for intertextual analysis, especially recita-
tion and recontextualization. As he concludes about Abelard’s use of the Song of Songs
in his Virgines castae:

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202 Journal for the Study of the New Testament 33(2)

Abelard is no slave to his source of inspiration. He ‘recites’ the Song text, but not word for
word. It is enough for him to use key words that clearly link his work with the Song of Songs.
Yet he changes words for poetic and rhetorical purposes. Abelard used the literal images of the
Song to evoke, engage, and direct the feminine soul to set its affections upon Christ, the bride-
groom. Abelard’s Paraclete audience would have immediately recognized his language and
imagery. In the symbolic world Abelard sought to create at the Paraclete Abbey, the voice of
God spoke through the Song’s bridegroom and the proper voice for Heloise and her nuns was
found in the words and deeds of the Canticle’s virginal bride (2007: 53).3

Likewise, Bell argues that the relationship between the Song of Songs and Abelard’s
Epithalamica is an excellent example of various types of recitation, including omission,
summarization, replication, rearrangement and utilization of different words (2007: 59-60).
Bell’s analysis of rhetorical and cultural intertexture leads him to conclude that
Abelard’s rhetorical adaptations of biblical texts create a rhetorical effect in which the
bridegroom is not imparting knowledge. Instead, the bridegroom presents ‘wisdom’ that
every person ‘should already know’ and to which every person should respond (2007:
60). The nuns’ ‘bridal role’ is to abandon their old lives, submit themselves completely
to their heavenly bridegroom, and to delight in the honor of this role (2007: 72).
In addition, Abelard uses patristic and later works on virginity, especially from
Cyprian of Carthage, Ambrose and Jerome. His understanding of the Song of Songs and
Ps. 44, for example, was greatly influenced by the writings of those three church fathers
(Bell 2007: 76-90). Abelard’s ‘frisky’ or ‘unicorn-like’ lamb, of which there is nothing
comparable in earlier Christian literature, may also include intertextual elements of the
mythological unicorn (2007: 90-96).
Bell concludes that Abelard

is a weaver, carefully intertwining long and short, narrow and wide, small and large threads of
color to form scenes of deep symbolic depth. He is, as it were, preparing a wedding tapestry for
Heloise and her nuns. It is his gift for the brides of Christ… From biblical and non-biblical
sources he has stitched their story. Its words, lines, stanzas, and sections all stress that God
names himself a bridegroom because he desires Heloise and her nuns to respond to his call with
‘the affectus of love’ characteristic of a bride for her Bridegroom (2007: 94).

In a similar way, Bell has woven together a convincing socio-rhetorical argument

about Abelard’s creative use of sources. Bell’s study also demonstrates the func-
tional, interpretive utility of socio-rhetorical analysis for studies of reception history.
In addition, the book takes socio-rhetorical analysis beyond merely a study of texts
and their textures to an analysis of music, including Abelard as a musician and spir-
itual advisor, as well as the liturgical music he composed for Heloise and the other
Paraclete sisters. Abelard’s mastery of rhetoric, poetry and melody for the purpose of

3. Bell finds similar techniques in Abelard’s use of Ps. 44. Abelard is ‘no slave to the biblical
wording’. In fact, stanza 3 of Virgines castae contains only two words from its parallel verse,
Ps. 44.10, although other stanzas (e.g. 4 and 5) utilize more words from Ps. 44. Abelard also
felt free to rearrange Ps. 44 in such stanzas as 4 and 5 (2007: 71)

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Gowler 203

developing sisters’ obedience, penitence and humility requires that interpreters have
a sensitive, multidisciplinary and comprehensive approach, with the tools and flex-
ibility that socio-rhetorical analysis can provide.

Conclusion
From my own Bakhtinian perspective, texts are always in dialogical relationship with their
contexts, a relationship which incorporates, in different ways, the words of others that pre-
cede them, and, also in different ways, the texts and voices that respond to them. From this
perspective, the ‘meaning’ of the text does not reside alone in the creative genius of its
author; there is a complex correlation between a text and the contexts in which a text has
been read and reread, including a specific relation between creator and contemplators. In
that sense every text—and every communication—is intertextual (cf. Gowler 2000a, 2003).
Therefore, we stand on the shoulders of centuries of conversations; our own positions are
never independent of the reception history of these texts—ancient and modern—and our
own work is woefully incomplete without a dialogic presentation of or response to those
other responses. In a similar dialogic fashion, Robbins’s socio-rhetorical interpretation pro-
vides a powerful interpretive analytic to explore these dialogic interrelations among authors,
texts and readers/interpreters. Correspondingly, reception history analyses, by contributing
studies of significant additional voices that join the heteroglossic chorus of interpreters,
provide critical insights for more comprehensive socio-rhetorical analyses of texts.
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