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MAPPING THE TEXTURES OF NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM:

A RESPONSE TO SOCIO-RHETORICAL CRITICISM

R. Alan Culpepper
Mercer University, School of Theology, Atlanta, GA 30341

For at least the past two decades the weavers of New Testament criti-
cism have worked feverishly, sometimes individually, more often in
small groups, finding and creating new patterns in our part of the
guild’s tapestry. Occasionally we would look over to see what others
were doing in their part of the tapestry but because their part of the

tapestry was different and their designs and textures different, we

would go back to our own work, sometimes chiding the colleagues
across the table because their work did not recognize the importance of
the textures we were discovering.
Vernon Robbins has now walked around the table, talked with each
group of weavers, studied the texture of its work, and the work of its
texture, and seen the ways in which each is related to the other designs
and textures of the tapestry that is our common enterprise. He has
offered us a new language and metaphor for our conversation about the
enterprise of interpretation. He has demonstrated the value of a compre-
hensive approach to interpretation that examines the text in light of
each of the four or five dominant textures he has identified. We will be
using his language of textures, and as we all know, language defines
perspectives, evokes insights, and implies judgments, so the influence
of this work will be enormous.
In a time when the disordering and deconstructive perspectives of
postmodernism are in vogue, I confess that I find the recalcitrant mod-
ernism of Robbins’s work refreshing. Repeatedly, as I plowed through
Robbins’s construction of socio-rhetorical criticism, I kept conjuring
images of Richard Wagner, whose passion was the creation of a

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Gesamtkunstwerk. He sought not ’a mere mixture of the arts’, but ’a

merging of all arts into a new form’ . ~ Strikingly similar is Robbins’s
challenge to ’bring practices of interpretation together that are often
separated from one another’ and ’to build an environment for interpre-
tation that provides interpreters with a basic, overall view of life as we
know it and language as we use it’.2 Wagner sought to unite the arts of
word and music and dance with the ancillary aids of drama (archi-
tecture, sculpture and painting). He wrote the words for his own music
which was performed in an opera house that he designed. Robbins
offers a step toward ’a grand theory’, and an ’interpretive analytics
rather than a method or theory in the usual sense’.~ Within the world of
New Testament criticism, Robbins’s concerns are almost as global,
spanning literary, narrative, rhetorical, intertextual, socio-scientific,
cultural and ideological criticism. No one else to date has interrelated
these divergent approaches to interpretation as powerfully. No doubt its
reach is too broad to support its arch. We will debate its categories,
definitions, limitations, exaggerations and its implicit assumptions, but
Robbins has led us to take a tremendously important step as we do so
because we will be uncovering and working out an understanding of
texts and interpretation that is richer in its conception, more compre-
hensive in its grasp of data, and more powerful in its potential for the
discovery and analysis of meanings in texts.
But now to the task of a critical response. I toyed with the idea of
applying Robbins’s method of socio-rhetorical criticism to his own
work, but I confess that I found the prospect of the work too daunting.
Nevertheless, I will organize my response around the sequence of chap-
ters in The Tapestry of Early Christian Discourse, beginning with inner
texture and moving through ideological texture.

1. Inner Texture
Inner texture, as Robbins defines it, ’concerns relationships among
word-phrase and narrational patterns that produce argumentative and

1. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Creators (New York: Random House, 1992),

p. 481.
2. Vernon K. Robbins, Exploring the Texture of Texts: A Guide to Socio-Rhe-
torical Interpretation (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1996), p. 2.
3. Vernon K. Robbins, The Tapestry of Early Christian Discourse: Rhetoric,
Society, and Ideology (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 11, 12.

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aesthetic patterns in texts’.4 I would want to enlarge the territory of the

inner texture of a text to include the entire range of features of the
world within the text (the narrator, plot, characters, settings, and other
aspects of the narrative or discourse). The interpreter will examine the
role of the development of themes and motifs, the ways in which irony
is created, symbolism, implicit commentary, and asides. In the case of a
text like 1 Corinthians 9, the interpreter would be aware that both Paul
and the Corinthians as well as the other characters are characterized by
various means that affect the reader’s perception of them and the
intimacy or distance created between each character and other charac-
ters, and between each character and the reader. The rhetorical func-
tions of such literary strategies can then be evaluated and the possible
correspondence or differences between text and historical context can
be perceived more clearly. Here we are already moving into the inter-
texture of a text because inner texture and intertexture of texts that deal
with historical persons and events blend or interweave the two textures.
I am in full agreement with Robbins that no one area of concern,
such as inner texture, should be conceived of any longer in a way
that excludes the importance of the other textures. At the same time, as
Robbins himself concedes, any interpreter may legitimately focus on
one or two textures, leaving other tasks to others. I chafed a bit at
Robbins’s criticism that narrative critics have allowed themselves to
be seduced by the implied author and by the narrator. Recognizing
the role and devices of the narrative voice of the texts has been an
essential step, however, in freeing the Gospels from exclusively
historical interests.

2. Intertexture

Here again, wemay want to talk about the definition and constituent
aspects of a text’s intertexture. Robbins introduces the discussion of
intertexture by commenting that ’in this arena the interpreter still inter-
prets the text as a &dquo;work&dquo;, the production of an author. This means the
interpreter works in the area between the author and the text, not
between the text and the reader.&dquo; Why should this be so? Is it not
entirely possible that the reader will be aware of relationships between
the text and other texts that are not known to the author, or between the

4. Tapestry, p. 46.
5. Tapestry, p. 96.

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text and historical or cultural factors not known to the author, or

between the text and later texts or a tradition of reading that could not
have been known to the author. These areas too merit a place in the
intertextual relationships of a text.
Most surprising to me in this area is the complete absence of any
recognition of the role of genre in text production and reception. The
generic conventions and relationships of a text are fundamental to
its intertexture. Authors and readers both approach texts of different
genres in different ways. Nevertheless, there is no discussion of the
importance, variability, adaptation or parodying of genres. We will read
Jonah very differently, however, if we regard it as a parody of the genre
of prophetic literature rather than as history. Nevertheless, there is no
section on genre in the chapter on intertextuality, and the term ’genre’
does not appear in the subject index of either book.
Robbins’s work has raised new questions for me about the relation-
ship between inner texture and intertexture. Robbins analyzes the quo-
tations and references to scripture and words of Jesus in 1 Corinthians 9
as a part of the text’s intertexture, but that is only one side of the issue.
The references have an inner textual role and function. As a part of the
inner texture of 1 Corinthians 9, the quotations and allusions become
part of the repertoire of the rhetor or the ’Paul’ characterized by the
text. It is part of the argument. Intertextually, the quotations and allu-
sions evoke a mode of argument and conventional evaluations of
evidence. Why should one not ’muzzle the ox’? Why should a laborer
get some of the harvest? To ask these questions is to recognize that we
are dealing with values, traditions, conventions and indeed a societal

system that is evoked by the quotations and allusions within the text.
Both the inner textual and the intertextual aspects of the quotations and
allusions need to be considered. Here again, there will be value in a
broader definition of the inner texture of a text.
Robbins’s call for more attention to Greco-Roman texts and the
Greco-Roman conventions of the New Testament texts is well taken
even if one has to start with the observation that whereas
scriptural
texts are frequently quoted, non-biblical texts, whether Jewish or
Greco-Roman, are quoted or explicitly evoked only rarely. This basic
fact means that the nature of the intertextuality of New Testament texts
is going to be different as it concerns Greco-Roman texts.

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3. Social and Cultural Texture

The social and cultural texture differs from the social and cultural inter-
texture, in Robbins’s scheme, in that the former use the language of
anthropological and sociological theory.~ Social-scientific research has
greatly enriched our understanding of ancient Mediterranean cultures.
Much of the discussion of the social and cultural texture in The Tap-
estry of Early Christian Discourse depends on Bryan Wilson’s analysis
of seven types of religious sects and Robbins’s typology of cultures.’
My misgivings about this section are twofold: first, the appropriateness
of the categories, and second the kind of analysis that is required to
identify first-century texts with a social or cultural context that fits one
of the categories in the model. Whereas in other areas Robbins outlines
analytical processes, in this area the objective is to label or classify the
text using the categories of a particular model, but the analytical pro-
cesses that would enable such systems and identifications to shed new

light on texts are lacking. How do we move from text to model to cat-
egory, and what have we learned about the text when we have made
these determinations? Elizabeth A. Castelli’s work on power relations
in a text, by contrast, although it concerns ideological texture rather
than social and cultural texture, is impressive because it offers an ana-
lytical process that effectively leads the interpreter to fresh insights into
8
aspects of the text.

4. Ideological Texture
Ideological texture recognizes the presence of an ideological point of
view in texts, in authoritative traditions of interpretation, in intellectual
discourse, and in individuals and groups.’ Sacred texture is treated in
Exploring the Texture of Texts but not in The Tapestry of Early Chris-
tian Discourse. Moreover, where it is discussed, Robbins explains that
he does not cite any commentaries or articles in this section because the
reader can readily find references to the divine texture in any good

6. Tapestry, p. 144.
7. Tapestry, pp. 168-70.
8. Imitating Paul: A Discourse of Power (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox
Press, 1991); see Robbins, Tapestry, pp. 194-99.
9. Tapestry, p. 193.

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library. Fair enough, but the result is that Robbins offers little guidance
regarding the categories, construction or functions of the theology of
New Testament texts. In what ways do narrative, epistolary and apoca-
lyptic texts construct a theology (again genre as well as rhetoric are
important), how does theology function as intertexture in early Chris-
tian discourse, and how does theology as an exercise of power relate to
the various aspects of ideological texture that Robbins identifies? The
absence of concern with these issues is for me a serious lacuna in The
Tapestry of Early Chr-istian Discourse.

5. The Promise of Socio-Rhetorical Criticism

The conclusion of Tapestry leaves me a bit unsettled. Robbins explains
that the promise of socio-rhetorical criticism lies in three areas: (1) it
’offers programmatic correlation of multiple textures of texts’, (2) it
offers systematic attention to individual textures, and (3) it ’offers re-
sources for writing a new account of first-century Christianity’ .’ The
books do the second well, that is, the systematic attention to individual
textures, and in the process they suggest that the correlation of the
multiple textures would be very fruitful. On the other hand, the books
do not offer a programmatic correlation of the multiple textures. The
last chapter could have been one that demonstrated how this correlation
would take place, but lacking such a chapter, we are left only with the
systematic attention to individual textures. The sequence of the chap-
ters and the concern of the conclusion may also be telling. The
sequence of the chapters may suggest that the objective is to discern the
various ideologies at work in texts, traditions of interpretation, intel-
lectual discourse, and individuals and groups rather than the fulfillment
of the ’grand theory’ that interweaves the various textures of texts, con-
texts and interpretations. Alternatively, the conclusion may reveal that
the underlying interest all along has been a historical one-not the
interpretation of texts but the construction of ’a new account of [the
history of] first-century Christianity’. To fulfill the potential of socio-
rhetorical criticism, I would encourage Robbins to take the next step
and show how the method works, not just in the serial treatment of the
various textures but in their correlation and in their critical dialogue
with one another.

10. Tapestry, p. 237.

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We can debate areas in which each of us might alter or refine

Robbins’s definition of socio-rhetorical criticism, but I applaud it as a
significant methodological advance if only because it defines the poten-
tial for complementary relationships between approaches to interpre-
tation that have developed largely in isolation and sometimes in antag-
onism to one another. To use Robbins’s words, it can only lead to a
richer, thicker interpretation of the early Christian texts and the context
in which they were composed, and I imagine we are going to be using
Robbins’s words a lot.

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