Kata Markon

["Stephen C. Carlson" <scarlson AT mindspring.com>]

At 09:51 AM 1/4/04 -0500, Carl W. Conrad wrote:
>Has anyone on the list read or seen any reviews of John Dart's _Decoding 
>Mark_?
>I'm reading it right now and it seems to me to say much that is dead right
>but quite a bit that is dead wrong. I can't find anything in the GMark
>archives on it and not much on the web generally beyond publication data.
>It evidently was published sometime during the second half of this last
>year.
>
>John Dart, _Decoding Mark_ (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press Intl.) 2003.

I've been going over this book recently.  I think Dart's book was published
right before SBL in Nov. 2003 and I spotted him at some of the SBL sessions.

Basically, Dart finds a macrostructure in Mark based on chiasm, a pattern
of concentric parallelisms.  Like other attempts at finding chiastic patterns,
it too suffers from subjectivity -- not to mention that his chiasm involving
bits of Secret Mark also requires portions from Luke's gospel.

I think a better treatment of Mark's macrostructure vis-à-vis Secret Mark
is Scott G. Brown, "On the Composition History of the Longer ('Secret')
Gospel of Mark," JBL 122 (2003): 89-110, who builds, among other things,
upon Norman Perrin's observation of a triple discipleship structure in
Mark built around the passion predictions, finding that the Secret Mark
is a noticeable intrusion.  Thus, Secret Mark, whenever it was composed,
is posterior to the Mark that has descended to us.

Stephen Carlson
-- 
Stephen C. Carlson                        mailto:scarlson AT mindspring.com
Weblog:    http://www.mindspring.com/~scarlson/hypotyposeis/blogger.html
"Poetry speaks of aspirations, and songs chant the words."  Shujing 2.35