sychological make-up. Instead, he contended, they had an entirely different personality type, which he termed the dyadic personality. The emphasis was not on oridinality, or uniqueness, or even "personality" as we think of it. Instead, the dyadic person is one who is intrinsically socially embedded and derives his or her self-awareness from this group identity, not from a pursuit of individual self-development. For the people of the gospel era, some of the major relevant concepts were shame and honor, kinship and family, clean and unclean. Most important for them, Malina contended was "to live out the expectations of others" (1981, p. 55).
For Malina, then, in order to understand the documents that comprise the Christian Bible it is necessary to understand them in the context of their own time. As he put it:
The words we use to say and speak do in fact embody meaning, but the meaning does not come from the words. Meaning derives from the general social system of the speakers of a language. (pp. 1-2)
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