"kai euthus" as discourse marker in the gospel of Mark

S. Scott Schupbach LING 214; Fall 2013 as discourse marker in the gospel of Mark 0. Introduction. Biblical scholars have long been aware of a number of linguistic idiosyncrasies

produced by the author (or compiler) of the New Testament gospel of Mark (Decker 2009). Among these

are the author’s recurrent and often atypical uses of the temporal adverb s ‘immediately, at once’

and especially its frequent co-occurrence with the conjunction ‘and’. Much of the prior research on

the use of in Mark has attempted to assign consistent semantic value to the word, often resulting

in the proposal of some sort of overarching narratological theme of urgency to account for its frequent

use (e.g. Gundry 1993; Riley 1989). The present study assumes that the frequency with which

occurs is a result of the idiosyncratic stylistic choices of the author (or of the author’s sources) and

analyzes each occurrence of the word based on the discourse context in which it occurs. Using this

approach, I demonstrate that in Mark is often best classified as a discourse marker when it

occurs at the beginning of an episode and discuss the importance of this finding for source critical work

on Mark.

I begin by providing some background to the areas of discourse analysis and source criticism

that are most relevant to this paper as ell as a fe remar s a out oin ree (§1). I then describe

the method of analysis used to identify discourse marker uses of in Mark (§2). Next, I discuss

the distribution and patterns of usage of eu s in Mark, demonstrate that kaì s is often used as a

discourse marker, and identify the contexts in which this is the case (§3). Finally, I provide the

conclusions of the study (§4) and discuss the implications of those conclusions and topics for further

research (§5).

1. Background. An investigation of patterns of language use in a text as widely and thoroughly

studied as Mark necessarily entails stepping into a variety of other disciplines. While my approach is

primarily linguistic and seeks to demonstrate the applicability of the discourse-functional approach to

ancient texts, it is also the case that issues of textual criticism, source criticism, and at times even

Schupbach, 2

literary criticism provide clues to understanding the phenomenon under investigation. The remainder of

this section provides an overview of my approach to identifying discourse markers as well as background

on various related issues that are relevant to the present study.

1.1. Discourse markers. Discourse markers, broadly defined, are a pragmatic class of lexical

expressions that signal a relationship between the preceding portion of the discourse and the following

portion (adapted from Fraser 1999). There is some disagreement about whether discourse markers

occur only in oral discourse, or in both oral and written discourse. Brinton, for example, argues that

discourse markers are a consequence of “the informality of oral discourse” and are “caused y the lac

of planning time hich ma es the use of pragmatic mar ers expedient” (1996:33). Ho ever such a

position implies a minimum level of formality inherent in written discourse which is certainly not always

present. Brinton goes on to concede that DMs are not restricted to oral discourse, but proposes that

when they occur in written discourse, they have different forms and occur for different reasons,

seemingly implying that they are qualitatively different and should be treated separately. However in

this study, I treat DMs in written discourse no differently. The primary reason for this is that the much of

the text of Mark was likely part of a long oral tradition, and so certain DMs from oral discourse may have

been incorporated into the written text. I return to this in §5.

For the purposes of this study, I take the following points as the requisite characteristics of DMs,

adopted primarily from Schiffrin (1987), Jucker & Ziv (1998), and Fischer (2006):

DMs are detached from (or very loosely attached to) the syntactic structure of the clause

DMs add little or no propositional meaning to the proposition of which they are a part

DMs often link units of discourse at the levels of intonation and episode (connective DMs)

DMs bracket units of discourse (connective DMs)

The first and second points account for the fact that in natural speech, DMs may occur

spontaneously and unexpectedly mid-utterance, but have no great impact on the overall meaning of the

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utterance. They also account for the observation that in both spoken and written discourse, DMs are

syntactically optional, although their removal often results in a change in the interpretation of the unit,

making them pragmatically important.

The third point brings into focus the issue of defining component parts of a discourse. One

common notion in defining and analyzing DMs is that of the episode. I take an EPISODE to be a semantic

unit that comprises part of a larger whole, has a beginning and an end, contains a sequence of related

actions, and is coherent and self-contained (van Dijk 1981). Thus each episode has two EPISODE

BOUNDARIES, one at the beginning, and one at the end. Episode boundaries often correspond to

paragraph boundaries in written discourse, or to chapter boundaries in the New Testament (NT).

However, because these structural boundaries in the NT are impositions on the text by later scribes and

scholars, they do not always reflect actual episode boundaries. Thus the absence or presence of a

paragraph or chapter boundary will be taken as evidence for determining the likelihood of an episode

boundary, but not as conclusive proof one way or the other.

The third and fourth points are closely intertwined as the function of linking the coming unit to

the preceding one is almost necessarily done at the boundary between the two units. These two points

also take into account the role that DMs play in creating discourse coherence. One of the ways

coherence is accomplished is through the linking, semantic or structural, of discourse units (Halladay &

Hassan 1976). Connective DMs are one method for establishing both structural and semantic links

within a text (Schiffrin 1987).

1.2. The synoptic problem. That there is a high degree of lexical and morphosyntactic similarity

in three of the four canonical gospels found in the New Testament is well established (e.g. Dungan

1999). These three gospels are Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The degree of similarity between these three

varies from gospel to gospel and pericope to pericope, ranging from verbatim phrases, sentences, or

passages found in all three gospels (Mt. 9:6; Mk. 2:10; Lk. 5:24), to general plot points or events that are

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similar, but are told using very different words and phrases (Mt 4:22; Mk. 1:20; Lk. 5:11), to passages

that are found in two of the gospels, but not all three. Additionally there are a number of pericopes that

only appear in one of the synoptic gospels, such as the nativity narratives of Matthew and Luke (which

are very different from one another and completely lacking in Mark). But because there is such a high

level of agreement between these three overall, they are referred to collectively as the synoptic gospels.

The source-critical problem of determining why they are so similar is what is known in Biblical

scholarship as “the synoptic problem”.

There have been a number of theories that attempt to account for the similarities and

difference found among the synoptic gospels, but only one has gained a significant degree of consensus.

When the problem was first identified, the simplest solution seemed to be that one of the gospels was

written first, and the other two copied portions from the prior. Logically then there are three

possibilities: Matthean priority, Markan priority, and Lukan priority. But because Mark is the shortest

and most of Mar ’s material is found in one or oth of the other t o only Markan priority gained wide

acceptance, although Matthean priority gained early acceptance among prominent early Church leaders

and was the motivation for the canonical ordering of the gospels by Augustine (Dungan 1999). Markan

priority has been the most widely accepted over the years, and especially in the last couple centuries,

with one modification. In order to account for the passages shared between Matthew and Luke that are

not found in Mark, scholars hypothesize that there must have been a second source that was available

to Matthew and Luke, but not Mark.1 This is known as the two-source (or two-document) hypothesis

and is currently the most widely accepted among biblical scholars (Burkett 2004; White 2010). For the

purposes of this paper, I will adopt the assumptions of the two-source hypothesis, which allows for

1 This non-extant source is referred to as Q, from the German word Quelle ‘source’. Since I am looking at passages

in Mark that are handled differently by Matthew and/or Luke, and Q is that material that is not found in Mark, Q will not factor into the discussion directly, except to provide evidence that hypotheses may include non-extant sources in order to account for the data. I discuss this further in §5.

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comparison of Markan stylistic choices with those of Matthew and Luke in shared material and makes

stylistic differences between them particularly salient.

However certain problems with Markan priority have led some scholars to posit that all three

gospels depended on a set of earlier sources that are no longer extant (Burkett 2004). One such theory

is that of Rolland (1999) in which he proposes an early gospel that itself disseminated in two different

versions, one of which of was available to Matthew and Mark, the other available to Luke and Mark. In

addition, there were other sources (such as Q) available to both Matthew and Luke, as well as individual

material available to each of the three gospel writers. Although more complex, this type of theory better

accounts for the complexity found in the patterns of similarity in the synoptic gospels.2

While this study does not address the synoptic problem directly, the methodology used may be

applied on a broader scale to eventually evaluate these different hypotheses based on stylistic features

of each gospel. However I believe that before this can happen, an even more fine-grained hypothesis

that explicitly delineates Greek sources from non-Greek sources will first need to be developed in order

to account for the large number of passages that are extremely similar in content, but differ in lexical

selection and minor morphosyntactic features, indicating that they may be two different Greek

translations of the same non-Greek source (e.g. Mark 1:23-28; Luke 4:33-37). Then the distribution of

in Mark may help to identify some of those source types and boundaries.

1.3. Greek and he ree of the e estament is a variety no n as oin from

the ree ord meaning ‘common’ (Mounce 1993). It was the Greek spoken by the citizens of

Alexander’s ree empire after his untimely death. oin is very closely related to the Attic dialect of

the classical era, as that was the dialect spoken by Alexander and was spread during his conquest of the

region. oin is distinguished from Attic Greek by a number of lexical and morphosyntactic changes that

likely arose though contact phenomena as the language spread through what is now eastern Europe,

2 Burkett (2004), in an attempt to retain Markan priority, proposes a similar claim involving multiple earlier versions and later redactions of Mark, used at different stages in the composition of Matthew and Luke.

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the Middle East, north Africa, and Iran, interacting with a variety of language communities along the

way.

In most Greek literature, the word s is a temporal adverb and is usually translated into

English as ‘immediately at once straighta ay forth ith’. It is derived from the adjective s

‘straight direct right’. In the ever-growing Greek corpus Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG), which is

currently up to about 105 million words, occurs 36,673 times, or about 3.5 times every 10,000

words. The word appears once in the 7th c. BCE, but is not used regularly by any author until Aesop

(including his fables and related works attributed to him), occurring 35 times in the 98,000 word

collection. Aesop himself is thought to have lived in the 6th and 5th centuries BCE, however the earliest

collections of his fables do not appear until the 4th c. BCE, so it is unclear if the uses of are original

or found their way into the tales through their frequent retellings over the 100 years after his death. By

the 5th c. BCE, however, there is clearer evidence of as it appears 252 times in hucydides’

153,292-word history of the Peloponnesian War, or about 16 times every 10,000 words. By way of

comparison, Table 1 below contains the relative frequencies of in a sampling of Greek authors

whose works are primarily narrations of sequences of events, both fiction and non-fiction.

Author Date All words per 10,000

Homer 8th BCE 203,242 0 0

Aesop 6th/5th (4th?) BCE 98,000 35 3.57

Herodotus 5th BCE 189,489 0 0

Thucydides Late 5th BCE 153,292 252 16.44

Xenophon 4th/5th BCE 318,000 293 9.21

Josephus 1st CE 491,000 192 3.91

Matthew 1st/2nd CE 19,521 6 3.07

Mark 1st CE 12,076 41 33.95

Luke 1st/2nd CE 20,728 3 1.45

Acts 1st/2nd CE 19,551 4 2.05

TLG Corpus 105,000,000 36,673 3.49

Table 1 - Frequencies of in select Greek authors

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The Date column indicates the timeframe during which the author is thought to have been writing. The

fifth column shows the relative frequency of ithin each author’s ody of or , specifically how

often it occurs per 10,000 words.

2. Data and methodology. The Greek data for this study come from Aland’s (1993) Synopsis of

the Four Gospels (10th edition) which is based on the 26th edition of the Nestle-Aland critical edition of

the New Testament (NA26). Altogether, the gospel of Mark contains 41 occurrences of . I use the

following criteria to classify each of the 41 instances of in Mark as a DM, a temporal adverb, or

somewhere in between:

Does it occur at an episode boundary? 3

o If not, it is likely not a DM

Does it occur at an event, sentence, or clause boundary?

o If none of these, it is very likely not a DM

Does it co-occur with another word or phrase that might influence or shed light on its meaning?

o conjunctions, such as ; the absence of such points toward an adverbial use

o other temporal words that may support its use as a temporal adverb, such as

‘ henever as soon as’ as in Mark 4:5, 16, 29

o prepositional phrases, such as ‘ ith haste’ in Mar 6:25 point to its use

as a temporal adverb

Does the sense of the event require or preclude immediacy as part of the meaning?

o This was determined primarily by comparing the two events being linked to determine

the possibility of a temporal interpretation of . For example in Mar 1ː21 Jesus is

described as calling four disciples to follow him on his way to Capernaum from

Nazareth. hey then al to Capernaum together. he next portion states: “And

3 I allow one thing to come between and the episode boundary: conjunctions such as that could be part of a phrasal DM with .

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immediately on the Sabbath, he as teaching in the synagogue”. Ho ever the t o

events cannot be temporally linked since the walk from the nearest town outside of

Capernaum is over 2 miles and the maximum distance a Jew was aloud to travel by foot

on the Sabbath was less than a mile. Thus, the teaching in the synagogue cannot occur

“immediately” upon entering Capernaum as it could not have been the Sabbath day

when they arrived.

o Achievement verbs like ‘realize’ that imply an often sudden change of

state, as in Mark 5:30

Does it occur in an episode that is included in Matthew and/or Luke?

o If the parallel passages are lexically and morphosyntactically similar but not verbatim,

do Matthew/Luke represent the word with a different temporal expression, a

different DM, or an omission of the word entirely? If one of the latter two, this is strong

evidence that the Markan use is a DM, since a clearly temporal meaning would have

been rendered as such by the other gospel authors

Based on these criteria, I classify each use of as one of the following: a discourse marker,

a temporal adverb, or an ambiguous form. For ambiguous forms, I determine whether they are more

likely DMs, more likely a temporal adverb, or whether both are equally likely. The first two categories of

ambiguous forms are used when one or more criteria seem to support one analysis over the other, but

are not conclusive. The last category is used when the diagnostic criteria are entirely inconclusive or

there is not enough contextual information to make an evaluation.

By way of example, in Mark 1:28-30 given in (1) through (6) below, there are three occurrences

of : one temporal adverb in (1); one DM in (3); and one ambiguous case in (6).

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(1)

and go.out.3.S DET.NOM rumor.NOM him.GEN immediately everywhere

“And the rumor about him went out immediately every here…”

(2) eis s.

into whole.ACC DET.ACC surrounding.area.ACC DET.GEN Galilee.GEN

“…into the hole area surrounding alilee.”

(3) ek eis

DM out DET.GEN synagogue.GEN going.out.PL go.3.PL.AOR into DET.ACC house.ACC

“And then leaving the synagogue they ent into the house…”

(4)

Simon.GEN and Andrew.GEN with Jacon.GEN and John.GEN

“…of Simon and Andre ith Jaco and John.”

(5)

DET.NOM and mother.in.law.NOM Simon.GEN lay.down.3.SG.IMPF have.fever.F.S.NOM.PTC

“And Simon’s mother-in-la as lying do n ecause she had a fever…”

(6) s.

and euthus say.3.PL.PRES him.DAT about her.GEN

“…and then/immediately they told him about her. “

In (1) the adverbial is clearly embedded within the clause, coming after the verb and

subject, and before a cluster of locative phrases. Although it is not the case that all adverbial uses are

embedded deep within the clause, it is generally the case that embedded occurrences of are

temporal adverbs as they are less structurally detached from the clause. There is also the juxtaposition

of with ‘every here’ hich indicates the unusual virality of this rumor; that it spread

everywhere, and quickly. The fact that occurs in the same syntactic positions as other adverbs

also supports its classification as a temporal adverb.

In (3), the scene is changing from the synagogue in Capernaum, where Jesus was just teaching

and healing a demoniac, to the house of one of his recently converted followers, Simon. Although the

author of Mar does not ma e it explicit here Simon’s house is it was revealed earlier in the narrative

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that Jesus met Simon on his way to Capernaum from Nazareth, and that they went to Capernaum

together.4 hus a trip to Simon’s house as li ely again more than the group would have been able to

travel on the Sabbath, and thus the use of cannot have a literal temporal meaning since it is still

the same Sabbath day as when Jesus began teaching in the synagogue. Furthermore the group’s arrival

at Simon’s home begins a new episode in hich Jesus heals Simon’s mother-in-law. Its occurrence at an

episode boundary solidifies its status as a DM. Based solely on the contextual evidence, it might seem

that could be analyzed as functioning temporally, however upon comparing this passage to

Matthew 8ː14 and Luke 4ː38, we see that in both cases Jesus is described as “going into the house”5 and

in both Matthew and Luke, a more prototypical DM is used to mark this transition without any temporal

adverbs or indications of hastiness. Matthew uses the conjunction without and Luke uses the

more literary ‘and’, which is a general purpose conjunction that can express continuation or contrast,

or sometimes both.6

In (6), the function of is unclear partly because it does not occur at an episode

boundary, although it is at an event boundary, which is identified by some as a potential position for

DMs insomuch as a DM may link two events with the same sort of connective meanings used to link

episodes (Schiffrin 2001). The fact that occurs at the beginning of the clause that introduces a

new event and is preceded only by could e enough to consider it a DM except that in Lu e’s version

of events, another temporal adverb ‘instantly at once immediately’ is used. Lu e’s position

of the temporal adverb among the events is slightly different: in Mark it is used to describe the speed

with which they told Jesus about the sick woman; but in Luke, it refers to the speed with which she

4 The Gospel of John states explicitly that Simon’s city as Bethsaida (John 1ː44) hich as more than a Sa ath

day’s al from Capernaum. Ho ever e cannot assume that John’s location for Simon’s home is the same as Mar ’s. 5 In Matthew and Luke, similar lexical items are used, but with different morphosyntactic properties. This may indicate that the source of this particular episode was not Greek, but Hebrew or Aramaic. I discuss this possibility further in §5. 6 When coupled with , a particle that often signals a comparison of two or more things, the subsequent entities are marked with , signaling contrast, as well as continuation when more than one entity is marked with .

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arises after she is healed. But given that this passage is not verbatim across Mark and Luke, the presence

of a temporal adverb in two of the accounts is enough to conclude that the temporal sense may be

relevant here. However the fact that Matthew uses a discourse marker and uses no temporal language

problematizes the classification of this instance as a temporal adverb, leaving enough uncertainty about

its function in Mark that it must e classified “am iguous”.

3. Analysis. Of the 41 instances of , 24 of them are preceded by the word . This in itself

is not significant, since it could simply be the case that Mark also uses more frequently and so

naturally has more collocations. However in Table 2 below, the frequencies of and

and the collocation for selected authors paints a different picture.

Author per 100,000 per 100,000 % of

Thucydides 10,232 667.48 252 16.44 17 6.74%

Xenophon 17,401 547.20 293 9.21 45 15.36%

Matthew 707 362.17 6 3.07 1 16.67%

Mark 555 459.59 41 33.95 25 60.98%

Luke 831 400.91 3 1.45 1 33.33%

Acts 661 338.09 4 2.05 1 25.00%

Josephus 26,189 533.38 192 3.91 0 0.00%

TLG 5,931,489 564.90 36,673 3.49 1598 4.3574%

Table 2 - Frequencies of and in select Greek authors

Here, Thucydides is the only author who uses even half as frequently as the author of Mark does.

He also uses with an even greater frequency than the author of Mark. That being the case, we might

expect to find a higher collocation rate for Thucydides, however this is not so. Additionally, Xenophon

uses both and with less frequency than Thucydides, yet has a significantly higher percentage

of collocations than Thucydides, indicating that the occurrence of these two words together

is not just a coincidental result of the frequency of the two words individually. This is even more

apparent when we see that the author of Mark uses about 19% less often than the average for the

entire corpus, but has a significantly higher percentage of instances of being preceded by

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than are found in the overall corpus. This indicates that the excessive use of and the excessive

use of are not necessarily related, and that they may need to be examined separately.

Table 3 provides a summary of the categorial distribution of instances of and .

Frequencies DM Ambiguous

DM Ambiguous

Ambiguous TADV

TADV

All instances of (41) 6 4 3 11 17

% of all tokens 14.63% 9.76% 7.32% 26.83% 41.46%

All instances of (25) 6 4 2 4 9

% of collocations 24% 16% 8% 16% 36%

Table 3 - Frequency counts of and

Here we see that temporal adverb use is still the primary function of . However the percentage of

DM functions increases significantly (from less than 25% up to 40%) when the scope is focused to

include only the collocations.

Table 4 (below) provides an overview of the distributions and categories of instances of

in Mark and the temporal adverb equivalency in Matthew and Luke.

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Temp. adv. equivalent7 Context Category8

Mark Matt. Luke Matt.

or Luke Episode

boundary Event

boundary Clause

boundary With kai DM Amb TADV

1 10

0.5 0.5

1 12 1 1 18

1

1 20 --

1 1 21 -- 1

1 23 -- 1 1 28 Ø Ø

1

1 29 1 1 30 --

1

1 42

1

1 43 -- -- --

1

2 08 0.5 0.5 2 12 Ø

1

3 6 Ø Ø

0.5 0.5

4 5 --

1

4 15 Ø

1

4 16 Ø

0.5 0.5

4 17 Ø

0.5 0.5

4 29 -- -- --

0.5 0.5 5 2 Ø Ø

0.5 0.5

5 29

1

5 30 Ø

0.5 0.5

5 42 Ø

1

5 42 Ø Ø

1

6 25 Ø --

1

6 27 Ø --

0.5 0.5 6 45 -- 0.5 0.5

6 50 --

1

6 54 Ø --

1

7 25 --

1 8 10 -- 1

9 15 Ø Ø

0.5 0.5 9 20 -- Ø

1

9 24 -- -- --

0.5 0.5

10 52

1

11 2 Ø

0.5 0.5

11 3 --

1

14 43 Ø 1 14 45 Ø

0.5 0.5

14 72

1 15 1 0.5 0.5

TOTALS9 13 6 15 9 27 32 25 10 3 28

Table 4 - All instances of euthus in Mark

7 In the Matthe /Lu e temporal equivalents column “--“ signifies that there as no section similar enough for comparison. A blank cell indicates that the parallel passage had a different DM and Ø means was omitted. 8 In order to calculate correlations, I assigned unambiguous DMs and temporal adverbs a value of 1 in their respective columns, and ambiguous forms a value of 0.5 in whichever column they seemed most likely to fit. 9 The totals in the last three columns represent the overall counts of clear and likely but ambiguous cases for each category, rather than sums of the values used for correlation. Thus, the only instances that counted as “am iguous” ere those that ere not leaning toward a DM or temporal adverb classification.

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The most significant finding is that DM uses of correlated almost perfectly with episode

boundaries (r=0.93, p<0.0001). Also significant is that the collocation of with correlated most

strongly overall with clause boundaries (r=0.68, p<0.0001). There were also significant correlations

between the presence of an equivalent temporal adverb in Matthew or Luke and the adverbial status of

in Mark (r= 0.50, p<0.0009), but of course this is to be expected since the presence of a temporal

adverb in another gospel was one of the criterion for determining whether the use in Mark was

temporal. However when the data are divided into two groups: and lone- , there is a

strong correlation between temporal equivalents in Matthew or Luke and adverbial use in Mark

(r=0.915, p<0.0001), but the same correlation does not hold true with the lone- group.10

In addition to the distribution of DM uses of within discourse contexts, patterns of

distribution of within the text itself emerged. 50% of the instances of as a DM occur

within a span of 40 verses in chapter 1 and the beginning of chapter 2 (out of 678 verses in all of Mark).

71% of all the instances of occur in the first six chapters of the book, a section that comprises

only 37% of all the total verses in the book. Another 10% of the instances of occur in a 30-verse

portion from 14:43 to 15:1. These -dense portions of the book help to highlight the fact that the

author of Mark likely had multiple sources that were used in composing his text. Similarly, there are

large portions of the text in which the word does not appear at all, such as the 152-verse stretch

from 11:4 to 14:42 – over 22% of the text without a single use. Though not very fine-grained, these

general trends can be seen by looking at the frequency of by chapter in Table 5.11

10 It’s difficult to say exactly hat the significance is ithout further investigation ut I suspect it may provide clues as to the types of sources used, and may correlate with sections translated from non-Greek sources. 11 A better method would be to view them by episode, but that level of analysis will be left for future research.

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Chapters in Mark

# of verses per chapter

Total12

DM TADV DM TADV

1 45 0 2 4 3 9

2 28 0 0 1 1 2

3 35 0 1 0 0 1

4 41 0 4 0 1 5

5 43 0 2 0 3 5

6 56 0 3 1 1 5

7 37 0 0 0 0 1

8 38 0 0 1 0 1

9 50 0 2 0 0 3

10 52 0 0 0 1 1

11 33 0 0 0 2 2

12 44 0 0 0 0 0

13 37 0 0 0 0 0

14 72 0 1 1 1 3

15 47 0 0 1 0 1

16 20 0 0 0 0 0

Totals 678 0 15 9 13 41

Table 5 - Comparison of and

4. Conclusions. While not completely uncommon among ancient Greek historians (c.f.

Thucydides), the author of Mark shows a marked preference toward the use of . However the

author of Mar ’s use differs from that of other authors both in the degree of the preference and in the

frequency of collocations with . This author also employs an idiosyncratic use of the collocation

as a discourse marker at episode boundaries. In the text, every instance of functioning as

a DM occurs at the beginning of an episode and is preceded by kai. This DM function of

accounts for 40% of the total occurrences of .

It is possible that the idiosyncratic use of reflect the stylistic choices of one or more of

the author’s sources, rather than the author’s o n style. Ho ever it may also e the case that

signals those portions that were composed by the author from memory of oral narratives, or translated

from a non-Greek source. Either way, it is most likely the case that the -dense and -sparse

portions represent a division between two different sources or groups of sources.

12 The total includes the ambiguous uses of that are not in any of the columns on this chart.

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Ultimately, I have shown that a discourse analytic approach to linguistic peculiarities in ancient

texts can open new paths of investigation, and together with source-critical approaches can advance our

understanding of the origins and earlier forms of these texts.

5. Implications and further research. The uses of as a discourse marker, and

especially the skewed distribution of these uses, may provide additional clues for addressing source-

critical questions of authorship and primacy. I stated in §1.2 that for the purposes of this study I am

working under the assumptions of the two-source hypothesis but that an alternative possibility is that a

number of different (mostly oral) sources existed at the respective times of writing of the synoptic

gospels, and that different combinations of these sources were available to each of the three authors. In

such a scenario, we would expect that if a Greek source were available to all three authors, we would

get verbatim or near-verbatim passages in all three gospels. But if it were only available to two of the

authors, then the episode would be missing from that author that did not have access to it. Similarly, if

one or more of the sources were in another language, such as Hebrew or Aramaic, then we would

expect to see similar episodes, likely with similar event-by-event ordering shared among those authors

that had access to it, but the lexical items and morphosyntactic structures would likely differ significantly

from one another. And these are exactly the types of similarities we find.

A multi-language, multi-source hypothesis would account for not only the varying degrees of

similitude found in the synoptic gospels, but also the abnormal distribution of within episodes

and groups of episodes, as well as a number of other stylistic idiosyncrasies that occur in dense pockets

throughout the synoptics (e.g., distinctive Matthean uses of omai ‘go to ard’ ‘ ho

is called’ and the genitive a solute construction follo ed y ‘ ehold’ as detailed in Burkett 2004).

A comprehensive study of the distributions of all the individual stylistic preferences found in the

synoptics would likely produce a number of well defined boundaries that would correlate with the

Schupbach, 17

patterns of similarity expected from shared sources and especially independent translations of non-

Greek sources.

The presence of as a DM in Mark may provide further support for a source hypothesis

that involves the author of Mark using knowledge of oral narratives directly. If, as Jucker & Ziv (1998)

claim, discourse markers are a feature of oral discourse, then their presence in Mark would provide

support for the oral nature of the sources from which the -dense portions come. Furthermore,

their elimination from parallel passages in Luke and Matthew is motivated by the fact that DMs are

“stylistically stigmatized and negatively evaluated” (Brinton 1996; Juc er & Ziv 1998). This explains the

choice of Matthew and Luke to use simple or enclitic ‘and ut’ or simply omit

completely in verbatim passages.

One possible explanation for the frequency of in Mark where Matthew and Luke use

alternate strategies is that the Hebrew phrase və ‘and ehold’ is sometimes translated into ree

as in the Septuagint (the oin ree translation of the Hebrew Tanakh), but only in Genesis

15:4, 24:45, 38:29, and Ezekiel 23:40. It could be the case that was a regionally specific Greek

equivalent for the Hebrew phrase and that the sources that are dense with collocations came

from those regions. Or there may be some other motivation that explains the preference of Mar ’s

sources for over the more common ‘and ehold’, used by the author of Mark only 7

times (4 of which occur in large -sparse portions from chapters 10, 11, and 14). The specific

motivations for these lexical choices are left for future research.

Schupbach, 18

Works Cited

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evangelorium, 10th edition. Stuttgart: German Bible Society.

Brinton, Laurel J. 1996. Pragmatic markers in English: grammaticalization and discourse functions.

Berlin: DeGruyter. [Topics in English Linguistics 19]

Burkett, Delbert. 2004. Rethinking the gospel sources: from proto-Mark to Mark. New York: T&T Clark

International.

Decker, Rod. 2009. Markan idiolect in the study of the Greek of the New Testament. Evangelical

Theological Society annual meeting. New Orleans.

Dungan, David Laird. 1999. A history of the synoptic problem: the canon, the text, the composition and

the interpretation of the gospels. New York: Doubleday.

Ellingworth, Paul. 1978. Ho soon is “immediately” in Mar ?. The Bible Translator 29(4):414-419.

Fischer, Kerstin, ed. 2006. Approaches to discourse particles. Oxford: Elsevier.

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Eerdmans.

Halliday, M. A. K., & Ruqaiya Hasan. 1976. Cohesion in English. London: Longman.

Jucker, Andreas H. & Yael Ziv. 1998. Discourse markers: introduction. In Jucker & Ziv, eds. Discourse

markers: descriptions and theories. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. [Pragmatics & beyond; new

series 57]

Mounce, William D. 1993. Basics of biblical Greek. Grand Rapids: Zondervan.

Riley, Harold. 1989. The making of Mark: an exploration. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press.

Schiffrin, Deborah. 1987. Discourse markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

van Dijk, Teun A. 1981. Episodes as units of discourse analysis, in Tannen, Deborah (ed.) Analyzing

discourse text and talk. Georgetown: Georgetown Univ. Press.

White, L. Michael. 2010. Scripting Jesus: the gospels in rewrite. New York: HarperCollins.