Presenting Jesus through Direct Speech: Vergegenwärtigung in the Gospel according to Mark

Scholars of the New Testament are, first and foremost, textual and literary scholars – philologists of religious texts charged with the hermeneutical task of interpreting documents from a distant ancient world. 2 At its core, our task is to engage these texts in full length, in their entirety , attending to all of their philological and literary complexity. Careful study of the compositional and stylistic features of the Greek text of Mark’s Gospel as narrative opens up new questions in our field of study. In this presentation, I shall attend more specifically to the use of direct speech by the main character, Jesus, addressed to his disciples.