In more than one sense the project in which we are engaged meets its most critical challenges in this chapter. Here we shall present a thoroughgoing reading of Mark's Gospel, pointing out and elaborating the ironies which appear along the way. But Mark is massive, and any interpreter who attempts to explore its details or its strategies of composition exhaustively is bound to suffer the fate of Sisyphus. One can live out one's days on an inexhaustible mountain of tedium. At the same time we shall want to engage in dialogue with those scholars whose views in one way or another impinge upon that reading, and to answer in our discussion the challenges they may raise. If the Gospel of Mark is massive, the literature which treats it is more so. The scholarship on Mark is enormous. It is enormous, but it is not monolithic, and one can take little comfort in the fact that it is riddled with cracks and fissures. Would Sisyphus have welcomed an end to his tedium if it came at the bottom of an avalanche?

The sheer volume of material requires that we take steps to keep our focus narrow.