[.ca] Decoding Mark (ISBN 0826418538)

Lots of Good and Interesting Ideas Well Presented:
As a journalist, John Dart has a nice, easy to understand and charming style. He presents a hypothesis that he's obviously excited about, and it is a hypothesis well worth considering. He suggests that the gospel writer Mark organized his work around a series of chiasms (basically words and ideas arranged in a mirrored form: A, B, C, B', A'). Using this concept, he finds evidence that Morton's Smith's "Secret Gospel of Mark" along with a number of passages from Luke were in the original Gospel of Mark, while a section in the middle of Mark 6:47-8:26 was added later. Another important hypothesis is that the original writer put in 16 miracles for Jesus to match the number of miracles done by the Jewish prophet Elisha. A later editor added 8 more to have him outdo Elisha. I would have liked to have seen a bit more references to the gospels of Matthew and John, for example can you find these chiasms or other chiastic patterns in them? And it would have been nice to have more speculation about the author Mark and why he hated the disciples and Jesus' family so much, although there are a few paragraphs on this. Altogether a fascinating, pleasant and enjoyable book for anyone interested in the gospels or any serious students of ancient literature and history.