As I early on confessed, I’m clearly not well versed on Markan style. I am aware, on the authority of others, that his Greek is urgent, awkward and variously elliptical and punchy, and that all this gets smoothed out in English translation. That’s the extent of my understanding.

Robert, I for one would be very interested in learning more about which component(s) of typical Markan style makes 13:10’s feeling of non sequitur make more sense. As I mentioned to brenmcg above, it feels less oddly placed than Matthew’s “and the Gentiles”, but still odd to me, a 21st century American monoglot. A simple explanation, or perhaps a good piece to read, would be greatly appreciated.

And brenmcg, would you kindly please unpack more your view as to why the concept (and plurals) of governors and kings implies Gentiles? As I read it, it might admit of Gentiles, but their logical entailment by the terms isn’t clear to me at this point. And if it did, then why would Matthew have Jesus say “and Gentiles” at the end of the sentence? That interpretation feels a little like saying “I want Cherry Garcia, and ice cream!”

Robert, thank you. Excellent.

If I were to say that (what looks to me as) the odd placement of Mark 13:10 in the flow is just one of many examples of where Mark places parentheticals into his narrative at what might appear at odd places, it wouldn’t be too far off? As myself someone who overly liberally uses parentheticals, I can feel his pain.

Is this feature quintessentially Markan, or is it a feature common of ancient Greek or Aramaic style more broadly?

In terms of this particular parenthetical being deemed an “insertion”: if he does these often, it would seem the onus would be on the analyst trying to break this one off from the others as special.

Robert said
It may appear odd at first if you only compare one or two isolated verses in Mark and Matthew, but if you look at the larger Markan context, the paragraph divisions, the whole chapter, it makes good sense in Mark’s larger, contemporizing discourse with his readers in Chapter 13 and as part of the whole narrative plot of his gospel.

Parentheses are certainly not peculiar to Mark, but he is a little bit inattentive sometimes about where he places explanatory comments, and there are other aspects of this parenthetical comment that also show it to be Markan.

Understood and agree.  For me, it’s not the passage’s meaning per se in the context (that does/did make sense), but its placement textually – literally, between which other sentences – that seemed odd. But given that there’s a pattern that Mark is sometimes inattentive in just this way elsewhere, the oddness in my eye is a feature not a bug.

Robert said
In the larger context of Mk 13, it is much more than a parenthesis but I’m struggling to find the right word to indicate its importance to the whole chapter. What do you call a parenthetical comment that is actually more important than its most immediate context? A structural parenthesis that ties the immediate context to the larger context? A structural or interpretative highlight? It’s sort of like a guidepost pointing to the larger meaning of this saying in Ch 13 and indeed for the whole gospel. Maybe you have a better way to describe such a parenthesis?

Perhaps kinda like a major aside or narrator cut-in in a stage play.

Robert said
There are some reasons to think that something like the Matthean version of the saying was part of Mark’s tradition and perhaps might have had an independent existence in Q. I’m not convinced of this. It would indeed explain the doublets in Luke, and both Matthew and Luke putting this statement in differing contexts, but the lexical evidence is rather slight, so I’m not sure it was part of Q. At any rate, if we presume that something like Matthew’s version of this statement was part of Mark’s tradition, he would have inserted the comment into that older saying when he was constructing Chapter 13. 

Could one not also interpret the preceding and succeeding pieces as possibly distinct (but of a piece) sayings, such that the perceived unitary nature of the composite saying (presuming this 13:10 parenthetical was inserted) is of Mark’s stitching?  I struggle to see how one could one distinguish that here, empirically?

Robert said
In my opinion, the onus should be on anyone who claims to really understand Mark but also says the important parenthetical interpretive highlight does not make sense in Mark’s context. Bren begins with the unshakable belief that Matthew was first and that Mark was a bit of an idiot who made changes that did not really make sense sometimes not even to himself. That’s a silly premise. One should try to make sense of each author on his own terms.  

Alas, the brain is a funny thing that way. Rarely do we as a species say, “Let me continuously weigh all the pluses and minuses for my belief that X” in light of new evidence. Rather, we tend to implicitly operate under, “Is it still logically permissible for me to continue in my (cherished) belief that X? New evidence be damned…” It’s a hard thing to hold at bay. If I don’t keep reminding myself, I too succumb to it (and sometimes even with the reminder I still do)…