When words were a power loosed: Audience expectation andfinishednarrative technique in thegospel of mark

Abstract

This essay examines the expectation on the part of audiences in antiquity that Hellenistic narratives would be emplotted according to the compositional technique of architectonic parallelism. After setting the debate concerning the recognition of this technique in the context of the emerging theory of orality and literacy in the work of Lord, Havelock, and Ong, the term finished narratives (as contrasted with an unfinished or half‐finished narrative) is proposed as the theoretical means by which Dionysius of Halicamassus and Diodorus Siculus distinguished narratives with reference to this organizing technique. This is followed by a rhetorical analysis of two narrative complexes from the Gospel of Mark. They are offered as evidence that the first century A.D. author, Mark, could assume a Greco‐Roman audience would expect this phenomenon as a genre restraint, which, in turn, permitted him to allow argument to be a function of arrangement.

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