Wilhelm Wuellner is the father of rhetorical criticism of the New Testament. Wuellner has contributed to the field in four key ways. First, he has emphasized that at no time in the history of rhetoric was rhetoric a unified or monolithic field. Second, he attributes the demise of rhetoric in the nineteenth century to the rise of Romanticism and its connection with irrationalism, as well as the profound technological shift in the media of communication with the advent of the print culture and the loss of the living word. Third, he emphasizes the counter-cultural nature of Jewish and Christian...