The Multidisciplinarian

See Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Silence and Prohibition as Rhetorical Trapdoor

For Mark, silence is a form of structure. His most famous silence comes at the end of the gospel, in 16:8, where the women flee the empty tomb and “said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” Here we have silence at the characters’ level and at the narrative level.

Mark uses silence like a line break. It isolates, heightens, and forces attention. His scenes close with hesitation. The fig tree withers, Jesus gives no explanation. Jesus heals by touch, the narrator doesn’t comment. At his trial, Jesus is silent when questioned (14:61).

In Mark 1:40–45, Jesus heals a leper and sternly warns him to tell no one. The man spreads the news widely. Jesus then retreats into desolate places. The rest is silence. There is no commentary on the man’s disobedience, no indication that Jesus is angry, no explanation of what Jesus’s withdrawal means.

These silences create enough interpretive space to lure a thoughtful reader. A key moment comes in the boat immediately after the second feeding miracle. The disciples are worried they’ve forgotten to bring bread. Jesus asks:

Do you not yet perceive or understand? Are your hearts hardened? Having eyes do you not see, and having ears do you not hear? (8:17–18 ESV)

He’s just fed thousands–twice, and they’re panicking about lunch. The moment seems to glance past the disciples and land somewhere else. The burden of understanding has been handed to the reader

The Messianic Secret: Command as Rhetoric

Repeatedly, Mark’s Jesus performs a miracle, then demands the characters to be silent. He heals a leper, then says: “See that you say nothing to anyone” (1:44). He raises Jairus’s daughter, then “strictly charged them that no one should know” (5:43). He opens a deaf man’s ears and “charged them to tell no one” (7:36). After Peter confesses him as the Christ, Jesus “strictly charged them to tell no one about him” (8:30). The Messianic Secret refers to these repeated instructions to demons and healed individuals, prominent only in Mark’s Gospel, to keep his identity as the Messiah hidden.

Scholars offer various explanations, reflecting different approaches to the text. Some give a historical explanation. Jesus commanded secrecy to avoid arrest by Roman authorities, protecting his ministry. A theological alternative postulates that Jesus kept his identity secret to challenge Jewish expectations of a political Messiah, not the role the suffering Jesus plays in the gospels. Some see it as purely practical – a way to manage crowds to avoid interference with his teaching. This theory fits well with the healing the leper (1:45) and the blind man at Bethsaida (8:22) but poorly with the recognition by Jesus of demons (1:23, 1:34, 3:11) and after Peter’s confession (8:30).

I see it, especially in its repetition, like William Wrede did in the 1800s, as a literary device. Unlike Wrede, I am not concerned with the theological question of whether Jesus was the Messiah from the start, preordained since the beginning of time, as in John 1:1, or whether he became the Messiah at the point of crucifixion, as Phillipians 2:6 can be read. Wrede’s argument for the messianic secret being a literary device hinged on this distinction, along with the question of Markan priority. Mine does not. Wrede and many other explanations of the messianic secret miss the point that is obvious in a reader-response analysis of Mark.

Mark is delaying public understanding to increase private responsibility. If the characters can’t see what happened, then the reader has to see it for them. The messianic identity remains hidden inside the story. It becomes visible to those who can read the signs.

Those reading Mark only for its theology or to judge its historicity miss the continuity between the silence and Jesus’s explanation of the parables: “…but for those outside everything is in parables…” This is blatant. Jesus isn’t hiding from everyone;he’s only hiding within the story. But Jesus, through the narrator, reveals himself directly, to the reader. And Mark rewards the reader for not needing to be told.

It’s the Reader Who Sees the Pattern

Mark’s combination of rhetorical choices – the silence, the repetition, the warnings not to tell anyone – shape an experience that forces the reader to see what the disciples do not, and to do so without the narrator confirming it. It’s why no one inside the story “gets it.” The entire gospel is a structure of discovery, designed not for the narratee, but for you, the reader.

You understand the feeding miracles. You understand the anointing. You suspect, if your rhetorical skills are sharp, that the fig tree is about the temple. You hear the Roman centurion’s words – “Truly this man was the Son of God” – and realize no one else has said anything like that through the entire gospel.

Mark’s narrator doesn’t hand insight to you. You earn it. But on another level, Mark the author, one level up, did hand it to you. Isolating the reader is Mark’s deepest rhetorical move. It’s not that he just delays meaning; he narrows its access. This narrative isolation creates a private moment of insight for the reader alone.

Mark’s positioning of the reader as sole witness is seen in the transfiguration’s muffled epiphany (9:2). Jesus takes Peter, James, and John up a mountain. They see him transfigured, his clothes radiant white, flanked by Moses and Elijah (echoing Malachi 4:5-6). Considered “the greatest miracle” by Aquinas, we might expect it to be the clearest scene in the gospel.

But what happens in Mark’s telling? Peter blurts out something foolish. A voice from heaven addresses an unspecified listener: “This is my beloved Son: hear ye him.”  Then, “suddenly looking round about, they saw no one any more.” Jesus tells the disciples “tell no man what things they had seen” (ASV).

The moment has closed on itself, the vision collapsed to silence. The disciples are clueless and are told to be silent. Who’s left to interpret Jesus’s miracle? Only, you, the reader. Hear ye him.

In the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus undergoes his moment of greatest anguish. He tells his disciples to watch and pray, but they fall asleep. Three times. You, the reader, are fully awake. You are present for every word of his prayer. You see his sorrow. You watch the drops of isolation gather around him. This scene, as Mark paints it, isn’t about the disciples’ inattention; it’s about your attention.

Mark’s structure puts you in a lonely place. You are the only one who sees the pattern. You are the only one who notices the parallels, the ironies, the betrayals. You’re the only one who sees what kind of Messiah this is. Mark doesn’t want you to pity the disciples. He wants you to step over the blocks on which they’ve stumbledand keep on going.

Silence Plus Inversion

Throughout Mark, people are constantly told to be silent – and they rarely obey. The leper in chapter 1 is told to “say nothing to anyone.” He spreads the news. After Jairus’s daughter is raised, Jesus instructs them to keep quiet. They are “immediately overcome with amazement” and, presumably, do not obey. The deaf man in chapter 7 is healed. Jesus charges them to tell no one. “But the more he charged them, the more zealously they proclaimed it.”

It’s a pattern: commanded silence, followed by disobedient speech. But at the tomb, the pattern is reversed. The women are not told to be silent. In fact, they are given a clear message to deliver:

Go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee (Mark 16:7 ESV)

But this time, they say nothing.

And they went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. (Mark 16:8 ESV)

It’s the only moment in the gospel when someone actually complies with silence – despite being told not to.

This reversal is Mark’s final irony. He has trained us to expect speech after commands for silence. But now, when the resurrection itself is announced, when the story should break open, the characters fall silent.

The women are continuing the pattern of misunderstanding and fear that runs through the entire narrative. Even here, at the resurrection, Mark offers no closure. The characters don’t overcome their limitations; they give in to them. And the reader is drawn in.

Mark’s Redefinition of Power

From the midpoint of Mark onward, the tone darkens. Jesus has healed the sick, fed the hungry, walked on water, and rebuked storms. He has astonished crowds, exorcised demons, and taught in riddles that burn their way into the mind. But once Peter names him the Messiah in Mark 8, things shift.

And he began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things… (Mark 8:31 ESV)

This is the pivot. From here on, Jesus repeats the same strange message: he won’t rule as a king but will be rejected. He won’t be crowned; he’ll suffer and dieand rise again. Each time he says it, the disciples, on cue, fail to understand. Mark builds his second half on this theme.

In Mark 8:29, Peter finally names Jesus as the Christ. In a rhetorically less shrewd telling, this would be framed as the breakthrough. In cinema it would be the classic zoom-out, where we are invited to consider the character Jesus and his state of mind before understanding the context around him. But here, Mark’s Jesus story tracks in rather than zooming out. Jesus, in a full-screen close-up, tells the disciples to tell no one and then says “the Son of Man must suffer.”

Peter pulls him aside and says that can’t be right. Jesus responds with the harshest tone, unparalleled in the other gospels:

Get behind Me, Satan; for you are not setting your mind on God’s purposes, but on man’s. (8:33)

This is a clash between two visions of power. Peter gets the title right but fills it with the wrong content. He imagines a crowned victor; Jesus offers a condemned servant. It’s both rebuke and reversal.

In 8:33, Mark shows us something else: Peter is not the intended reader. This isn’t a Vaudeville wink or Groucho’s fourth-wall smirk. It isn’t postmodern self-reference either. It’s something subtler – a direct address the narrator doesn’t acknowledge, but the reader feels. The Greeks called it metalepsis.

In this metalepsis Mark sets up the Christ-confession not as insight but as a foil for the insight that hasn’t happened yet. The reader is meant to notice the disjunction. The narrator doesn’t explain it. But, like a theatrically and rhetorically literate ancient Greek, you’re supposed to feel it.

Mark has three predictions of the Passion (8:31, 9:31, 10:33). In the first we learn that the Son of Man must suffer many things, in the second that he will be delivered. The third has specificity:

The Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests… They will mock him and spit on him, and flog him and kill him. (10:33–34 NASB)

Mark uses a clear escalation in both content and tone. Each is followed by the disciples’ embarrassing descent into misapprehension. By the third, the reader is actively frustrated when James and John ask for seats of glory. They’re imagining Jesus enthroned in messianic splendor, and they want the top cabinet posts – prime minister and chief of staff. Their political expectation shows the disciples’ continued misunderstanding of what Jesus’s “kingdom” is. Mark uses their request to stage one of the gospel’s key reversals. Jesus responds (10:42–45) by redefining power entirely.

This is one of the more elegant places where inherited harmonization dulls Mark’s edge. Readers come to the scene already believing that Jesus is a spiritual king. But Mark wants us to see the disciples as tragically, almost comically mistaken. If you read Mark with fresh eyes – no John 18:36, no Pauline theology, no Sunday school overlays – it hits different. Jesus has predicted torture and death. James and John are jostling for promotions.

As a reader, you wince, like Mark intended. How can they be this obtuse? How can they hear “mocked, spat upon, killed” and respond with “Can we sit at your right and left hand?” The scene mirrors the ironic humor of Jason’s naive optimism in Euripides’ Medea, which similarly served to deepen the audience’s engagement.

Then there’s the final irony. The two men who are actually at Jesus’s right and left when he “comes into his glory” are mocking, low-life thieves, nailed up beside him. Mark explicitly states that one is on his right and one on the left. The seats coveted by James and John are occupied by the damned. Mark makes that detail land like a death knell to any political or triumphalist reading of Jesus’s kingship. Luke seems to want one last flicker of hope; one of his thieves repents and is saved. Mark leaves it dark, no repentance. Readers’ background knowledge of Luke contaminates Mark’s narrative. Harmonized memory, doctrinal catechesis, and liturgical exposure overwrite Mark’s internal logic and makes readers miss Mark’s brutal wit.

Mark’s storytelling shares much with Greek tragic form, but he uses its elements with new intent. Critics have written detailed comparisons between ancient Greek literature and the books of the New Testament. Like the protagonists of Sophocles’ Oedipus or Euripides’ Hippolytus, Jesus is a noble figure with a divine mission, yet he faces suffering and betrayal. The centurion’s declaration at Jesus’ death is a standard Greek anagnorisis, a moment of recognition where a character realizes the true identity of the protagonist. Many more examples appear in Mark.

I’m not pursuing an analysis of parallels here, particularly because I’m not portraying Mark as a standard Greek author but as an innovative one. His tools clearly emerge from that tradition, but he combines them in uncommon ways to push the artform into the future, as befits the explosion of a new form of religion.

Like Euripides in Medea and in Alcestis, Mark has introduced mildly comic elements into what is nominally a tragedy.  These comic elements aren’t there to lighten the mood but to embarrass you on behalf of dimwitted characters in the story. Mark, in service of Jesus’s redefinition of power, has put this device to novel use.

Mark is teaching the reader not just to reject the disciples’ response, but to reject the assumption behind it: that power is triumph, authority is dominance, and victory means avoidance of pain.

For Mark, power is something else entirely. To the disciples’ disbelief, power points downward. When James and John make their request, Jesus answers:

You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink…? (10:38 NASB)

They say yes, because they still don’t get it. And then Jesus delivers what may be the clearest statement of power redefinition in the New Testament:

…whoever wants to be first among you shall be slave of all… For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many. (10:43–45 NASB)

Jesus is not telling them to act humble while being powerful. He’s telling them that the act of humiliation – the path downward,through rejection, suffering, and death– is the power.

As expected, Mark does not explain this principle, he dramatizes it. The ostensibly powerful figures in Mark – Herod, Pilate, the Sanhedrin (high priests, elders, and scribes) – are all shown to be weak. They fear crowds and make cowardly decisions. The disciples, given the chance to stand with Jesus, scatter.

Jesus remains steady and silent. When accused, he does not defend himself. When struck, he doesn’t retaliate. When mocked, he gives no response. The reader is left with the realization: this is what power looks like. It doesn’t come with thunder or reach for titles. It’s patient and does not boast. It walks through pain, fearing no evil, knowing what lies beyond.

Jesus’s redefinition of power is for the reader. The disciples aren’t punished for their dullness. The story moves forward without them. They do not greet the resurrection.

But you do. You’re taken through all of it, with increasing quiet. Mark’s tone descends lower still, until finally, in the silence of the tomb, you are the only one left. Mark doesn’t conclude with a lesson, but an echo. And in the subsequent hush, the story belongs to you, the reader.

Next: Mark’s Interpreter Speaks