WHEN WORDS WERE A POWER LOOSED - AUDIENCE EXPECTATION AND FINISHED NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE IN THE GOSPEL OF MARK

This essay examines the expectation on the part of audiences in antiqu ity that Hellenistic narratives would be emplotted according to the co mpositional technique of architectonic parallelism. After setting the debate concerning the recognition of this technique in the context of the emerging theory of orality and literacy in the work of Lord, Havel ock, and Ong, the term finished narratives (as contrasted with an unfi nished or half-finished narrative) is proposed as the theoretical mean s by which Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Diodorus Siculus narratives with reference to this organizing technique. This is followed by a rhe torical analysis of two narrative complexes from the Gospel of Mark. T hey are offered as evidence that the first century A.D. author, Mark, could assume a Greco-Roman audience would expect this phenomenon as a genre restraint, which, in turn, permitted him to allow argument to be a function of arrangement.