In John as Storyteller, I have sought to integrate various aspects of literary criticism which have tended to exist separately from one another. The first aspect of my integrative hermeneutic has involved the question of literary criticism and literary history. As I have pointed out, New criticism emphasized literary criticism over and against literary history. R. S. Crane, one of the leading New critics, drew a sharp distinction between the two, arguing that literary critics should concern themselves primarily with works of imaginative literature themselves, and not with ‘generic and historical investigations’ (1967, p. 17). It is this kind of thinking which lies behind Culpepper's Anatomy and indeed much contemporary NT narrative criticism. However, literary critics of the Bible need to realize that this is not the only viable paradigm for biblical criticism. René Wellek pointed out in the 1940s that theory, history and criticism ‘implicate each other so thoroughly’ that they must all be involved in the analysis of literary texts (McKnight, 1985, p. 3). In 1963, Wellek argued that the New critical focus upon the literary work of art as a ‘verbal structure of a certain coherence and wholeness’ should not involve ‘a denial of the relevance of historical information for the business of poetic interpretation’ (McKnight, 1985, p.4). As McKnight has argued, this is not only a challenge to New criticism, but also ‘a challenge to more recent structural views of and approaches to literary texts’ (p. 4).