It is helpful to view the text of Scripture from multiple angles, and different commentators and commentary series work to provide them. The literary angle is important; the theological angle is, too. But a certain strain of biblical commentator in recent decades, exemplified by Ben Witherington, has worked to explain a specific historical angle, a “socio-rhetorical” one, in Witherington’s words.
What insight does our knowledge of the ancient Jewish and Greco-Roman worlds, and specifically their culture and customs and their use of rhetorical tools, provide into the Gospels, into the letters of Paul, into the general epistles? Witherington’s Socio-Rhetorical Commentary Series, his Letters and Homilies for Hellenized Christians, and the Smith & Helwys Reading the New Testament Commentary all work to draw truth from the NT by viewing it from this particular historical angle.