This inquiry concerns itself with the intersection of two interpretative methodologies. On the one hand we may speak of ‘rhetorical criticism’ as used in biblical studies to describe a text-centred approach, the purpose being to determine how the shape of that text, its innate strategic impulse, affects the reader. This in turn, depending on the stance of the practitioner, breaks down into two more channels. Either those impulses may inform the analyst's recreation of the text's tradition, travelling back to questions of the intent and strategy of the writer, or such questions may be bracketed off to allow the analyst to locate a text-immanent intent, strategy and world of discourse. Either way this stream of scholarship attempts to deal with the text at hand and take its shape and content as primary.

On the other hand – and we will see that this approach is commonly identified with studies of Galatians – ‘rhetorical analysis’ may be a new and improved approach to form criticism, attempting to describe textual shape and content by measuring its conformity to classical handbooks on rhetoric. This approach is concerned with neither the shape nor prehistory of the text merely for their own sake; thus it side-steps some of the weaknesses of form criticism.