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When Matthew rewrites Mark, he gives names to faceless characters, supplies motives, removes redundancies, and adds explanation. These edits have historically been interpreted as clarifications, refinements, or improvements, a claim rooted in late classical ideas of rhetorical polish.

I take issue with that interpretation. To call these additions clarifications is, at best, apologetic. A post-resurrection appearance doesn’t clarify Mark – it changes the story. Whether Matthew refined Mark is a theological judgment. Whether he improved him is an aesthetic one. Rhetorical skill, in the end, lies in the eye of the reader.

If we shift the criteria used to judge a gospel from didactic elegance to the ability to implicate the reader, then Mark is doing something monumental. By examining Mark’s tools, we can see his strategy at work. At the heart of that strategy is a tool most of us associate with sarcasm, but in Greek literature runs deeper: irony.

When modern readers use the word, they usually mean something like “when the opposite of what you expect happens,” or they simply mean a dry or mocking tone. For the ancient Greeks, irony was more refined. At its core, irony occurs when there’s a gap between what a character and the reader understand.

In Mark, the gap is huge. The disciples repeatedly fail to understand who Jesus is or what he’s doing. Jesus will explain something directly, and they still miss the point. But you, the reader, can see it. That’s dramatic irony, and Mark uses it repeatedly. Here we’ll explore Mark’s irony and the rhetorical devices he couples with it.

In Mark’s crucifixion scene, bystanders taunt Jesus as he dies on the cross, sneering:

 He saved others; He cannot save Himself! Let this Christ, the King of Israel, come down now from the cross, so that we may see and believe! (15:31-32, NAS)

The irony works on two levels. First, the mockers’ words drip with sarcasm, derisively labeling Jesus as the Christ and King of Israel (irony as the term is popularly used). Second, unbeknownst to them, their taunts actually ring true (ancient irony). You the reader, unlike the characters, accept the narrator’s firm belief that Jesus is indeed the Christ, the King of Israel, making the mockery unintentionally truthful. Then at the cross, only the Roman centurion – and you the reader – realize what just happened (15:39).

That’s Ernest Hemingway’s iceberg principle 2000 years before A Farewell to Arms. It’s Mark letting the reader rise above both the narrator and the narratee. It’s how he creates an experience of epiphany rather than exposition.

Antithesis and Parataxis

Antithesis sets opposites side by side – darkness and light, silence and speech. (That sentence uses literal antithesis.) Parataxis is this: short clauses, side by side, no hierarchy, no conjunctions. (That sentence is paratactic.)

Mark uses literal antithesis (e.g., “not to be served but to serve”, 10:45, 7:15, 10:34) like the other gospels do, but he does so much less often. He uses conceptual antithesis (e.g. 9:35, first and last, greatness and servanthood) at roughly the same frequency as the other gospels, but his style is less systematic. Mark’s antithesis builds narrative tension rather than highlighting explicit teaching moments.

As an example, consider the demoniac of Mark 5:1–20. He recognizes Jesus immediately, begs to stay with him, and is sent out as a witness. The disciples, who are with Jesus constantly, resist his identity and mission (Mark 4:13, 6:52). The narrative antithesis is that those who should be inside the circle of understanding are blind while the demon-possessed outsider sees clearly.

The Widow’s Offering vs. Temple Grandeur contrasts the poor widow who gives all she had with lavish display and institutional grandeur. The juxtaposition does the work without a sermon. James and John ask Jesus for status (Mark 10:35–45) while Bartimaeus, a blind beggar, “sees” Jesus as Son of David and follows him immediately. The supposedly enlightened are self-seeking while the blind man has true sight.

Mark 1:32–34 shows his parataxis at work, particularly in Young’s Literal Translation. Each clause lands like a drumbeat, event after event, rough and ready, without transitions, no reflection or interiority, just stacked actions at a ballistic pace:

And evening having come, when the sun did set, they brought unto him all who were ill, and who were demoniacs, and the whole city was gathered together near the door,and he healed many who were ill of manifold diseases, and many demons he cast forth, and was not suffering the demons to speak, because they knew him.

In Mark 37-39, the storm escalates clause by clause, each introduced with and. No breath taken, no interpretive because. It throws the reader into the middle of the chaos and preserves the disciples’ panic. Mark phrases this in the historic present, bouncing between present and past tense, a device we’ll examine later:

“And there cometh a great storm of wind, and the waves were beating on the boat, so that it is now being filled, and he himself was upon the stern, upon the pillow sleeping, and they wake him up, and say to him, ‘Teacher, art thou not caring that we perish?’” (YLT)

If rhetorical skill is measured only by traditional standards – the kind favored by W. D. Davies, B. H. Streeter, R. T. France, and Dale Allison – such as formal balance, polished diction, or sermonic structure – then Mark fares poorly. But judged by how rhetoric drives tension, irony, and narrative momentum, Mark excels. His narrative and linguistic oddities are strategies – winning strategies I think – effective ones, as a comparison with Matthew makes clear:

Passage	Mark’s Devices	Matthew’s Devices
Messiah’s mission	parataxis, sharp antithesis, irony	polished antithesis, didactic tone
Demoniac healing	parataxis, symbolism, psychological depth, inversion	pacing, emphasis on danger, Jesus’s authority
Fig tree judgment	symbolism, narrative antithesis	explicit moralizing, longer narrative
Peter’s confession	irony, abruptness, parataxis	theological exposition, smoother narrative
Blind man healing	symbolism, narrative pacing	miracle story, immediate healing
Jesus’s baptism	cosmic rupture, lean narration	fulfillment formula, dialog with John
Temptation in the wilderness	brevity, starkness, no dialogue	extended dialogue, scriptural quotation
Parables of the kingdom	cryptic delivery, framing with irony	explanatory framing, allegorical expansion
Walking on water	parataxis, abrupt shift from fear to awe, irony	clearer theological emphasis, worship motif
Cleansing the temple	sudden action, compressed sequence	moral explanation, Old Testament citation
Passion narrative	escalating irony, silence, fractured pacing	narrative order, fulfillment citations, dramatic clarity

Rudolf Bultmann and other early form critics dismissed Mark’s Gospel as a loose patchwork of oral traditions, lightly stitched together by a primitive eschatological scheme. In their view, Matthew provided the literary and theological coherence that Mark lacked. But further analysis of Mark’s rhetorical devices – beyond the narrow frame of late-classical Greek norms – undermines that judgment. If we assess Mark using modern literary standards, the contrast with Matthew becomes a matter of aesthetics, not competence.

Two of Mark’s favorite narrative devices are incomplete vignettes and doublets. Matthew rarely uses incomplete vignettes, and when he does they are smoothed. Mark’s are abrupt. Matthew and Mark both use doublets extensively, but in Matthew they are didactic and thematic – reinforcing ethical teachings (emphatic parallelism). Mark’s doublets increase the tension between what Jesus teaches and what the disciples want, putting the reader in cognitive competition with the disciples. Incomplete vignettes and doublets are used by the writers for very different purposes.

Incomplete Vignettes

One of Mark’s strangest and most troubling moments is an incomplete vignette that has perplexed or embarrassed some evangelists. In Mark 11:12–14, Jesus sees a fig tree in the distance. He approaches it, finds it has no fruit, and curses it. The next day, the disciples notice the tree has withered. Mark states explicitly that it wasn’t the season for figs.

This, on a simplistic reading, either makes Jesus foolish and ill-tempered or Mark a sloppy writer. Matthew “fixes” it by making the tree wither immediately and not mentioning that figs are out of season. Luke omits the story entirely.

Mark knows it’s weird, and he likes it that way. We can tell that from what Mark does next: he sandwiches the fig tree scene around another one, the cleansing of the temple. First, Jesus curses the fig tree. Then he drives out the money changers in the temple. Then they pass by the now-dead tree. Fig tree → temple → fig tree.

Mark’s execution is ruthlessly efficient. The fig tree has leaves but no fruit, just like the temple – and possibly Jerusalem itself – which looks holy but is spiritually barren. Jesus’s rage and actions in the temple are the fulfillment of the fig tree’s parable. The tree is the temple. It’s been weighed, found wanting, and marked for death.

In Mark 14:3–9, Jesus is at the house of Simon the leper in Bethany. An unnamed woman enters, breaks an alabaster jar of expensive nard, and pours it on Jesus’ head. Some present criticize her for wasting the ointment, suggesting it could have been sold with the proceeds given to the poor. Jesus defends her, saying she has done a “beautiful thing,” anointing his body for burial, and her act will be remembered wherever the gospel is preached. The woman’s identity, motives, and fate are unstated; the critics are anonymous; and the transition to the next scene (Judas’ betrayal, Mark 14:10–11) is abrupt.

Scholars have addressed the perceived incompleteness of Mark 14:3–9 through several lenses. I think Adela Yarbro Collins best accounts for the abrupt transition to Judas. It underscores Mark’s theme of misunderstanding versus true discipleship, with the woman as a model disciple. Its brevity heightens dramatic impact, focusing on the anointing as a prophetic act. The promise that the woman’s act will be remembered (14:9) serves as a meta-narrative climax, linking her deed to the gospel’s spread. A story-level climax would be both unnecessary and distracting.

In Mark 5:25–34, a woman who has suffered from a hemorrhage for twelve years, having spent all her money on ineffective physicians, hears about Jesus, touches his garment in a crowd, and is immediately healed. Mark 5:30 states:

And Jesus, perceiving in himself that power had gone out from him, immediately turned about in the crowd and said, “Who touched my garments?” And His disciples said to Him, “You see the crowd pressing in on You, and You say, ‘Who touched Me?’” (ESV).

The disciples question his inquiry given the crowd’s size. The woman confesses, and Jesus affirms her faith, sending her in peace. The verse begs for detail about Jesus’ perception process, his emotional state, and the crowd’s reaction to his question. The question creates cinematic-style suspense, prompting readers to anticipate the woman’s revelation. Past scholars saw the scene as inviting questions about Jesus’s human limitations, but surely, gospel harmonization is behind that consideration. Mark’s gospel shows no sign of concern with Jesus’s human limitations.

While Mark 5:25–34 is narratively complete, it contains the kind of internal tension that characterizes Mark’s larger rhetorical style. Jesus does not seem to control the miracle. And while the woman’s healing is affirmed, the scene exposes threads that Mark forces the reader to notice though they are left theologically dangling.

Mark’s narrator withholds the interpretation, even when the narrator sees everything. In this sense, the assertion by past reader-response critics that Mark’s narrator is omniscient is simply too broad a brush to accurately paint this scene. Omniscient yes, but to what end, if the narrator withholds what he knows? The distance between author and narrator here is clear. Mark the author, isn’t asking you to see and believe, but to notice and wonder.

Parables, Concealment, and the Reader’s Role

At first glance, Mark’s explanation of parables sounds disturbingly exclusionary. In 4:11–12, Jesus says to his disciples:

To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything is in parables, so that they may indeed see but not perceive… (ESV)

This seems, on its face, to make parables a kind of punishment – an obscuring of the truth. If Jesus came to proclaim good news, why deliver it in riddles that no one can understand?

The problem fades if we stop imagining Mark’s portrayal as being of real-time recipients of salvation, and start understanding them as dramatic figures in a rhetorical composition. The parables are not traps laid for first-century peasants. They are tests set before the readers of this gospel. In Mark’s world, the disciples are slow, as are the crowds. But the reader sees what they don’t. The parables are there not to communicate with the characters but to reveal the reader’s insight by comparison.

If we assume the story as told exists to be interpreted, then the parables make perfect sense: they are devices that reward attention. They are rhetorical mirrors. They divide not the faithful from the wicked, but the passive from the alert. In that division, Mark shifts the focus of the gospel – from belief taken on command to perception earned by reading.

The Function of Doublets

The disciples’ failure becomes even more pointed in Mark’s use of doublets – two similar episodes placed in sequence, almost as echoes. Clearly not accidental repetitions, they’re literary devices used to reveal (or withhold) understanding.

Take the feeding miracles, the feeding of the 5,000 (6:35–44) and the feeding of the 4,000 (8:1–10). In both cases, Jesus is surrounded by a hungry crowd. In both, the disciples doubt how the people can be fed. And in both, Jesus provides. The second episode reads almost like parody–how could the disciples not recall the first?

Matthew combines the feeding miracles into one but retains both incidents, and Luke includes only one. suggesting they found Mark’s repetitive, ambiguous style inadequate for their needs.

Matthew retains both of Mark’s feeding miracles but smooths their edges, while Luke includes only one, suggesting that Mark’s repetition and ambiguity didn’t suit Luke’s narrative aims.

Some have suggested that the two feeding stories were preserved because of the numbers they contain – that each version carried symbolic or even mystical significance. Robert M. Price, for instance, has speculated that early redactors may have retained both accounts because the numbers in each were thought to hold cabalistic or talismanic weight.

I find this unlikely. In my view, the differing numbers serve a simpler, more narrative purpose: to make clear that the doublet is no accident. Mark means the repetition to be noticed. The numerical variation helps distinguish the events just enough to resist conflation, while the repetition itself builds rhetorical force – a strategy reinforced by Jesus’s own reference back to both feedings in 8:14–21.

In the first story, the disciples are clueless about how Jesus can feed 5,000 in the wilderness, yet he does so with their help. In the second, they’re just as oblivious, despite witnessing the first miracle.

Some critics reject the idea that the author intended such stupidity, though clues like Mark 6:52 and 8:14-21 suggest otherwise. The stories showcase the author’s use of irony to highlight the disciples’ repeated failure to grasp Jesus’s power. This is stark when, in the second story, they question how to feed a crowd with few loaves and fish, ignoring Jesus’ prior miracle (8:4). The author doesn’t call out their ignorance. It is obvious, but the irony prompts readers to notice and question it.

The clearest and simplest answer is that Mark wants the reader to notice the repetition. Not to scoff at the disciples, but to let the reader experience: I got what they didn’t. Why do they keep failing to understand who Jesus is, even after miracle upon miracle? Mark the writer knows, Mark the narrator doesn’t mention it, the narratee is challenged to figure it out, and you the reader solve the puzzle: Jesus is Lord. You are an active participant.

In the first of two boat scenes (Mark 4:35–41), Jesus calms a storm on the Sea of Galilee, rebuking the disciples’ lack of faith. The disciples respond by asking who is this that even the wind and sea obey. In the second (Mark 6:45–52), Jesus sends his disciples ahead to Bethsaida in a boat while he goes to pray on a mountain. Later, Jesus walks on the Sea of Galilee to meet the disciples, who are struggling in the boat against strong wind. When they see Jesus walking on the water, they mistake him for a ghost and are terrified. Jesus reassures them, and the wind stops. Here, the narrator explicitly states that they had not gained insight from the feeding incident. Mark has increased the contrast between Jesus’s revealed power and the disciples’ stagnant comprehension.

Mark reports two healings of blind men. At Bethsaida (8:22–26), Jesus takes the man out of the village. The man sees partially: “I see people, but they look like trees walking.” Jesus lays hands again – then the man sees clearly. Jesus tells him to go home but not into the village. In the second, Bartimaeus calls Jesus “Son of David.”  Others rebuke him, but he persists. Jesus heals him immediately, no second touch. Bartimaeus follows Jesus “on the way.”

The first is ambiguous, gradual, private. The second is direct, public, declarative. Together they form a bracket around a major transition (the Passion predictions start in 8:31). The blind man at Bethsaida is like the disciples: partially seeing, but still confused. Bartimaeus, in contrast, recognizes Jesus as Messiah, persists in faith, and becomes a model disciple. The two-stage healing mirrors a gradual revelation of Jesus’ identity, while Bartimaeus’ immediate response highlights the ideal response to Jesus’ call that Mark expects the reader to repeat. This doublet brackets the “way” section, where Jesus teaches about suffering and discipleship, reinforcing the theme of seeing and following correctly.

Mark repeats predictions of the Passion twice (8:31, 9:31, 10:33). I’ll discuss these in more detail in a following piece, specifically looking at Mark’s redefinition of Jesus’s power.

These scenes are literary refrains. Mark is using repetition to test the reader. Each doublet invites us to notice what the disciples do not, to hear what the narrator does not explain, to experience a personal victory by understanding what the narratee didn’t grasp.

Mark never says that outright or even winks to the reader. His narrator describes the events but does not interpret. He lets the structure speak for itself.

In the later gospels, especially Luke and John, the disciples eventually grow into spiritual insight. They struggle, but they arrive. They ultimately understand. Not in Mark. The disciples in Mark start confused and stay that way. They ask Jesus what his parables mean (4:10). They panic during a storm even after seeing him calm the sea (4:35–41). They marvel when he feeds a crowd, and then marvel again when he does it a second time. How could they forget this? (6:35–44; 8:1–10). They forget to bring bread, panic about it in a boat, and earn a withering rebuke from Jesus: “Do you not yet understand?” (8:21).

It’s easy to assume that this is just crude storytelling, primitive theology, or both. But Mark is, despite his relatively modest Greek (possibly also by design) a sophistic and sophisticated writer.

Grammar of Urgency and the Historical Present

Mark is called the most breathless gospel. One reason is his use of the word εὐθύς (euthys)– usually translated as “immediately.” It occurs over 40 times in Mark, far more than in the other gospels combined. In Mark 1 alone, it appears 10 times, driving the narrative from event to event with little reflection or transition. English readers feel the effect, but a bit is lost in translation: a rhetorical grammar of urgency, rooted in Greek aspect and tense.

Modern English has tense but not aspect in the way Koine (New Testament Greek) does. Greek verbs distinguish both the time when something happens (past/present/future) and how it unfolds: whether as a whole (aorist), as a process (imperfect), or as an ongoing or repeated action (imperfect). Mark often switches tense and aspect in the middle of a narrative, something you were probably taught not to do. Mark jumps from past to present tense while describing past events, a technique known as the historical present, to create immediacy and vividness, as though the events are unfolding in front of the reader. For example:

And they went into Capernaum, and immediately on the Sabbath he enters the synagogue and teaches…

That is Mark 1:21 as I translate it from the Koine. I’m attempting to capture the nuances of Mark’s tense transitions. Even Young’s Literal Translation struggles to map it onto English:

And they go on to Capernaum, and immediately, on the sabbaths, having gone into the synagogue, he was teaching.

In Greek, διδάσκει (“he teaches”) is present tense, even though here it describes past actions. This jolts the narrative into real-time.

When Jesus calms the sea, Mark switches tenses within a single sentence (three verses, as numbered by Robert Estienne in 1551), several times.

And there cometh a great storm of wind, and the waves were beating on the boat… and he is sleeping on the cushion, and they awake him… and he, having waked up, rebuked the wind… (YLT)

Cometh – is sleeping – awake – rebuked. He bounces between present and past. Young’s Literal Translation does its best to preserve how this works in Greek, though it’s more impressive in the Greek.

Here’s the Koine Greek, abbreviated for clarity:

• καὶ γίνεται λαῖλαψ μεγάλη – And there comes (present tense) a great storm
• τὰ κύματα ἐπέβαλλεν – the waves were beating (imperfect)
• αὐτὸς ἦν ἐπὶ τῇ πρύμνῃ καθεύδων – he was in the stern, sleeping (imperfect + present participle)
• ἐγείρουσιν αὐτόν – they wake him up (present)
• καὶ λέγουσιν αὐτῷ – and they say to him (present)
• καὶ διεγερθεὶς ἐπετίμησεν – and having been awakened, he rebuked (aorist)

Extracting the verbs:

• γίνεται (“there comes”) and ἐγείρουσιν (“they wake”) are historic present.
• ἐπέβαλλεν (“were beating”) and ἦν (“was”) are standard past/imperfect.
• ἐπετίμησεν (“rebuked”) is aorist, simple past.

The sentence yields something disorienting but engaging:

Past (setting) – present (storm hits) – past (ongoing waves) – past (Jesus sleeping) – present (they wake him) – present (they speak) – aorist (he rebuked)

Mark’s bold construction injects urgency and immediacy. He wants you in the boat, living this scene in real time. The YLT tries to preserve that effect – hence the strange-seeming tense shifts that modern translations often iron out, favoring doctrine, coherence, and interpretation over narrative technique, dissonance, and voice.

Mark 4:37–39 raises a point at the intersection of rhetorical technique and reader-response criticism. A casual but persistent assumption in popular criticism is that translation doesn’t matter, at least among decent ones like ASV, NASB, and ESV. But if you care about hearing what the author actually said, translation matters. The smoothing over of the Greek – what YLT tries valiantly to resist – changes how the reader experiences the text. Even if your aim is evangelistic or devotional, polishing away Mark’s strange rhetorical choices may dull their force. Clerics likely assumed a smoother text would attract more converts. But some readers, especially new ones, might find Mark’s rawness more persuasive.

Rhetorical tools exist for a reason. So do the rough edges Mark shapes with them.

Coming next: Silence and Power