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gmark - Re: [GMark] John Dart's _Decoding Mark"

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Subject: Kata Markon

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  • From: "Stephen C. Carlson" <scarlson AT mindspring.com>
  • To: Kata Markon <gmark AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Cc: "S. Chabert d'Hyeres" <abilene AT ifrance.com>, Mark Goodacre <M.S.Goodacre AT bham.ac.uk>
  • Subject: Re: [GMark] John Dart's _Decoding Mark"
  • Date: Sun, 04 Jan 2004 10:23:58 -0500

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




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