The aim of the book is to discover a method which may integrate both linguistics and literary studies as independent ways of distinguishing editorial and source material in the Gospel so as to lead on to a detection of the theology of the evangelist as redactor. While certain verses of the Gospel have been marked as editorial by literary, form-critical and linguistic judgements, the present chapter attempts to discover whether linguistic criteria for redaction may alone be deduced from an examination of the author's syntax and vocabulary.

Turner and Kilpatrick, among others, refer from time to time to ‘Marcan usage’. Taylor, in his commentary on the Gospel, lists a fair number of unusual traits in the author's syntax and vocabulary, a well-known example being the frequent use of the historic present. Best refers not infrequently in his chapter on the ‘Markan seams’ to literary and linguistic features of Mark, and from these argues the redactional nature of the writing, e.g. ἄρχoμαι + διδάσκειν and ‘intercalation’. ‘Marcan usage’ may not have exactly the same sense in Taylor's and Turner's work as in that of Best, for form-critical studies naturally lead on to an investigation of the evangelist's role as a redactor. So far, however, those characteristics classified as redactional have not been thoroughly tested as to whether they are to be traced to the sources rather than to the hand of the evangelist.

One presupposition for the search for either linguistic or literary criteria must be the possibility of the division of the Gospel into form-critical pericopae. There is, however, no agreement among scholars whether Mark was handling continuous written sources, though we should not deny the possibility.