$32.00

“Dewey’s carefully crafted study represents a welcome and needed application [of rhetorical criticism] to the New Testament, serves as a clear exposition of the method, and sheds light on a very important section of Mark [2:1–3:6]. … Though of primary importance to New Testament scholars, for anyone with a working knowledge of Greek, Dewey’s book provides a model of careful engagement with a text and is richly rewarding in insights about Mark.”
—John R. Donahue, Interpretation

“This study is an important contribution to the present enterprise of taking Mark seriously as a carefully creative transmitter of tradition. D’s work vindicates rhetorical analysis as a method which can both complement and control the methods of form and redaction criticism.”
—Dennis Hamm, Catholic Biblical Quarterly

“For Marcan scholars, Dewey’s work is a significant addition to the SBL Dissertation Series; with John Donahue’s Are You the Christ? (SBLDS 10) and Donald Juel’s Messiah and Temple (SBLDS 31), it furthers our appreciation of Mark as more than the stringer of pearls suggested by earlier redaction criticism. … Furthermore, Dewey’s Markan Public Debate, although strongest in its Marcan literary analysis, has much to recommend it to biblical scholars more generally, namely, its attention to the need for carefully established literary criteria as part of the process of exegesis of theological texts, its preference for methodological complementarity over methodological competition, and its realization that biblical criticism is both a science and an art.”
—Elizabeth Struthers Malbon, Journal of Biblical Literature