JBL 108/4fl989)613-634 COMPOSITION OF DIDACTIC SCENES IN MARKS GOSPEL PHILIP SELLEW University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455 Exploration of the compositional achievements of Mark and the other evangelists is one of the great interests of contemporary NT studies. Despite considerable progress in recent years, however, scholars have not fully come to terms with one of the greatest difficulties involved in understanding the editorial and literary strategies of our first known Gospel author. This is the need to isolate the Gospel writer's source material with some degree of precision and at the same time to distinguish that material clearly and per- suasively from the work of Mark himself—the separation of tradition from redaction and new composition. As a way to highlight the problem and then to show one means to overcome it, this article focuses on a category of speech material that appears to be characteristic both of Mark's source traditions and of his own compositional activity. This type of sayings material I call the didactic scene, a category that overlaps in some ways with Bultmann's form- critical classification of controversy or scholastic dialogues. 1 The didactic scene begins with public instruction by Jesus, followed by a change of locale, private questions from his close followers, a sarcastic retort from the teacher, and then finally an explanation. Examples in Mark include 4:3-20 and 7:14-23, both received from pre-Marcan tradition, and also 8:14-21; 9:14-29; and 10:1-12, which I shall argue were newly composed by Mark on the model of those earlier didactic scenes. The Gospel writer adopts and redeploys this traditional schema as one means of composing his narrative of Jesus and his relationship with his disciples. I Fifteen years ago in his study of Marcan "duality" and "duplicate expres- sions," Frans Neirynck drew attention to what he called "... a sort of homo- geneity in Mark," homogeneity ranging "from the wording of sentences to the 1 Rudolf Bultmann, Die Geschichte der synoptischen Tradition (FRLANT 12; Göttinnen: Vandenlioeck & Ruprecht, 1921; 8th ed, 1971) 9-26; The History of the Synoptic Tradition (rev. Kng. trans.; New York: Harper Ôf Row, 1968) 12-27. 613