Anyone familiar with the study of irony in the biblical narrative will be struck by two outstanding developments. First, before 1970 discussions of irony were widely scattered. When it was discussed, it was primarily as a matter incidental to some other concern. Studies which focused on irony as such were exceptional, and were often dismissed as speculative. Since 1970 however, something remarkable has happened. There has been a growing interest in irony, not only in the Gospel of Mark, but throughout the biblical narrative. Studies of irony have appeared more frequently, have treated irony as a literary phenomenon worthy of exploration in its own right, and have discovered irony in places where it would been virtually invisible before. In this essay, I have argued that the wide distribution of irony suggests that it was born of the author's conscious intent. Irony lies close to the narrative's core.

We are brought in this way to my second point: I would go so far as to say that the interest in irony is evidence that the interpretative paradigms employed in the study of the Bible are undergoing a fundamental shift. The shift raises basic questions which bring into focus important dimensions of the current hermeneutical climate.