In 1989 it broke ties with the Jesus Seminar and reorganized in Portland, Oregon, as The Context Group, A Project on the Bible in its Social and Cultural Environment.
Two seminal publications by founding members were Bruce J. Malina's The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology (1981) and John H. Elliott's Home for the Homeless: A Sociological Exegesis of 1 Peter (1981).
Other key figures who published on the subject during this era (all of whom eventually became part of the Context Group) include Dennis Duling, Philip Esler, Douglas E. Oakman, Jerome Neyrey SJ, John J. Pilch, Richard L. Rohrbaugh, and Wolfgang Stegemann.
According to the Context scholars, the interpreter must learn the cultural assumptions and values behind the text in order to understand it correctly.
Other common themes in Context analysis of the Bible include patron-client relationships, the "evil eye", kinship, purity codes, and dyadic/group-oriented personalities.