Mark's Gospel is much maligned for its redundancy and stylistic sloppiness. But is this indignity justified? The answer to this question hangs not only on the genre of this work but also on the life setting of its target audience. Rather than unwitting slip-ups of an inept writer, Mark's narrative repetitions and temporal dislocations are better understood as rhetorical strategies for a didactive oral performance. There is «method» to Mark's «madness,» and the method maps his...
