See Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

Mark’s narrator very rarely offers commentary. His most overt interpretations are tucked into parentheses or framed as almost self-effacing asides. In Mark 7:2–4, he breaks the flow of Jesus’s confrontation with the Pharisees to explain handwashing customs:

(For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they wash their hands properly, holding to the tradition of the elders; and when they come from the marketplace, they do not eat unless they wash. And there are many other traditions they observe, such as the washing of cups and pots and copper vessels.) (ESV)

This form of direct exposition appears nowhere else in the gospel, and its tone is uncharacteristically anxious. The syntax is crowded and accumulative, almost list-like. There’s no attempt to link this aside tightly to the main dialogue, and it reads like a clarification added for a reader who simply wouldn’t understand the stakes of the debate without it. In that sense, it’s a breach where Mark momentarily acknowledges the gap between the world of the story and the world of the reader.

But it’s not clear who is being addressed. A Jewish narratee wouldn’t need the explanation. A Roman reader might, but Mark doesn’t frame it as such. There’s no “as you know” or direct narrative address. Instead, the narrator drops the aside in mid-stream, then promptly disappears again. The result is strangely destabilizing. It invites the reader to notice that this gospel knows it’s being read across cultural lines but doesn’t want to say so too loudly.

Scholars have long noted this passage as evidence that Mark’s intended audience may have included Gentile readers unfamiliar with Jewish purity laws. But its narrative awkwardness may be more important than its audience implications. The digression doesn’t belong to Jesus’s speech, and it isn’t integrated into the narrator’s voice. It hangs slightly askew, as if the narrator is not quite practiced in speaking outside the bounds of his scenes. And that narrative unease may be the point.

In rhetoric, dubitatio is the technique of feigning hesitation or uncertainty, often to enhance credibility. Mark’s aside in 7:2–4 isn’t classic dubitatio. It’s not self-aware enough to feel like artful hesitation, but it does feel like narrative restraint forced into speech. It overexplains in a crowded string of clauses and lacks a clear addressee. Mark’s narrator shows a kind of structural dubitation.

Mark is quiet, especially where we would most expect it to explain itself. The narrator rarely steps in to clarify, summarize, or instruct. When he does, it’s with restraint and can seem indecisive. Odd, parenthetical elements are syntactically jarring. Is Mark’s narrator hesitant to break the rhetorical spell, or is he intentionally breaking rhythm?

This piece looks at the breaches in Mark’s otherwise minimalist storytelling and argues that they are meant to highlight his indirection. Mark’s rare authorial voice is self-referential: not so much pointing to the meaning of events, but to the process of reading and interpreting them. Even when he speaks, Mark still makes you work.

Parentheses in the Wilderness: Ritual Washing

In Mark 7:2–4, the Pharisees confront Jesus about his disciples eating with unwashed hands. Notice how the narration breaks:

(For the Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they wash their hands properly… and there are many other traditions that they observe.) (ESV)

On the surface, this parenthetical is meant to help the reader. But which reader? Again, a Jewish reader wouldn’t need this to be explained, assuming the statement is correct. A Gentile might. So this comment could be the voice of the narrator to the real-world reader, not the narratee within the gospel world.

But it’s not introduced formally. It adds a tangent. Its syntax is overloaded. It’s explanatory, but clunky. It breaks the flow, and it reads like an interlinear gloss that drifted into the body of the text – as some scholars argue it is.

But comparison with Mark’s other parentheses shows it to be consistent. It emphasizes his deliberate method of resisting interpretation at the narrator level.

Dramatically, in 7:19, Jesus says that nothing entering a person from the outside can defile him. It’s a provocative statement – but it’s not a formal abrogation of dietary law. Yet Mark’s narrator follows it with a striking editorial aside: “Thus he declared all foods clean.” Mark tells us that this is his narrator’s gloss, not what Jesus said. It’s what the narrator concludes – or wants the reader to conclude. This is a major theological claim, especially in a first-century Jewish context. Yet it’s not put in Jesus’s mouth but tacked onto the end. The comment is not timeless; it’s contextual. But most readers fail to notice this; they remember the story as if this were Jesus’s claim.

In Greek, this phrase is syntactically ambiguous. It’s an editorial comment, awkwardly inserted and easily overlooked. Yet it’s doing a lot of work.

If it’s Mark’s voice, then it’s one of the rare times he interprets Jesus’s meaning for the reader. But even here, he does it indirectly, after the fact, as a kind of explanatory shrug. He doesn’t say, “Here’s what Jesus meant.” His “thus” leaves us wondering.

In the healing of Jairus’s daughter, Jesus takes the child by the hand and says:

“Talitha koum”–which means, “Little girl, I say to you, arise.” (5:41 NASV)

Koine Greek has no quotation marks. It’s unclear whether this translation, internal to the text, is Jesus speaking to the girl, Jesus speaking to others in the room, or the narrator speaking to the reader. The effect is subtle: Jesus has just used Aramaic; so someone has translated it. But the grammar doesn’t make it obvious who that is.

This is one of several places where Mark’s narration blurs into character speech. It mirrors the overall strategy of the gospel, where author and narrator are not fully aligned, and where the reader is constantly asked to track perspective.

Let the Reader Misunderstand: Parentheses and Self-Reference

A curious moment where Mark breaks from letting actions and dialogue tell the story is the anointing story. Here’s the core moment:

Truly I tell you, wherever the gospel is preached in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her. (14:9)

The narrator up to this point has played things relatively straight – omniscient without interpretation. But here, something unusual happens. A character (Jesus) speaks with a global-historical voice, predicting the preservation of this woman’s story. But this prediction is, ironically, already fulfilled by the gospel in which it appears.

The moment is self-aware. It feels like the author breaking through the narrator using Jesus’s words. Jesus says her story will be told wherever the gospel goes, and the truth of his prophecy is in the reader’s hands. Look, you’re reading it.

Mark 14:9 collapses narrative time and reader time. It’s a moment of reflexivity, not just a character’s prediction, but a cue from the authorial level that this story you’re reading is already enacting the prediction. Mark doesn’t break the fourth wall directly, but this is the next closest thing: Jesus’s voice carries authorial weight.

Mark asserts a form of meta-claim: this anonymous woman, unnamed by everyone in the room, is now known to you, the reader of this gospel because this is that telling, “told in memory of her.”

The clearest and strangest example of Mark’s self-referential voice appears in Mark 13:14. Jesus is giving a long apocalyptic speech about future tribulation. He says:

When you see the abomination of desolation standing where it ought not to be… (let the reader understand) …then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains. (ESV)

In 13:14, translators struggle not with tense but with punctuation. Who’s talking? The phrase “let the reader understand” interrupts the discourse. It’s not addressed to the disciples. It’s not part of the speech’s internal logic. It’s not “let the listener understand,” or “let him who sees understand.” It’s: ὁ ἀναγινώσκων νοείτω: “Let the one who is reading understand.”

Jesus doesn’t speak this way elsewhere. This line isn’t addressed to anyone in the story. It’s aimed past them – to the reader. Though a few evangelists (William L. Lane, Craig Evans, and Robert Gundry) suggest that it could be Jesus’s voice, I think that highly unlikely. The phrase’s address to a “reader” is anachronistic for Jesus’ oral context if he spoke to disciples, not a reading audience. Its parenthetical form and alignment with Mark’s asides (e.g., Mark 7:19) suggest an editorial hand. Matthew’s clarification (“spoken of through the prophet Daniel”) and Luke’s omission (Luke 21:20) imply the phrase was seen by them as a saying of Jesus.

Instead, this is the voice of both the author and the narrator – conflated here – breaking through the frame to speak directly to the reader, not the narratee. Joel Marcus sees it as Mark’s instruction to interpret the “abomination” as destruction of the temple by Romans under Vespasian in 70 AD. Others suggest a reference to the more severe Roman response to the Simon bar Kokhba revolution under Hadrian in 136 AD.

Its literary significance holds regardless of the reference. It is the moment the gospel becomes unarguably self-referential. It admits it’s a text and knows it’s being read. It tells the reader to pay attention – to spot something. Remarkably, that something will not be explained.

This comes at one of the gospel’s most cryptic moments. Rather than clarify the “abomination of desolation” (reference to Daniel 9:27), Mark points directly to its ambiguity and places the burden of interpretation on you.

Ironically, this passage shows boldly that even when Mark speaks, he withholds. His parenthetical interjection is paradoxically employed to direct the reader’s gaze at the absence of explanation.

In a rhetorical move that could have been pulled straight from Samuel Beckett, Mark breaks the fourth wall to report that the fourth wall exists (let the reader understand).

Next: Strategies of Mark, Paul and James: The Silence, the Self and the Law