In The Invention of Christian Discourse, Volume 1, Vernon K. Robbins dives into the rushing stream of religious thoughts, beliefs, and practices of the Greco-Roman Mediterranean world from which the New Testament emerged. Robbins explores wisdom, prophetic, and apocalyptic rhetorolects as well as examples of themes, topics, argumentation, and picturing drawn from the Hebrew Scriptures, Second Temple and later Jewish literature, and Greco-Roman literature. He demonstrates how first-century Christ believers blended these rhetorolects to create the New Testament and other early Christian literature. Robbins includes a glossary of essential terms used in sociorhetorical studies. This second edition of Robbins’s foundational volume provides rich insights into the development of sociorhetorical interpretation and its ongoing application as an interpretive analytic in sociorhetorical commentary.

Vernon K. Robbins is Professor Emeritus of Religion–Winship Distinguished Research Professor in the Humanities at Emory University. Robbins launched sociorhetorical interpretation in New Testament studies with Jesus the Teacher: A Socio-rhetorical Interpretation of Mark (1984). His books include Foundations for Sociorhetorical Exploration: A Rhetoric of Religious Antiquity Reader (2016). Robbins is featured in Genealogies of New Testament Rhetorical Criticism (2014), edited by Troy W. Martin, as one of “five pioneers” of New Testament rhetorical criticism during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.