Then we have a significant balancing between the perception that Mark is not history, and that, after all, it is practically all there is:--
Already the oral tradition which he found had been condensed under the influence of the standpoint from which he set out. He is silent on this and that which he can omit as being known to his readers--for instance, the names of the parents of Jesus (!). Nevertheless, he has left little that is properly historical for his successors to glean after him; and what they know in addition is of doubtful worth....
Why is not something more, and something more trustworthy, reported of the intercourse of the Master with his disciples? It would rather seem that the narrative tradition in Mark did not come directly from the intimates of Jesus. It has on the whole a somewhat rude and demotic cast, as if it had previously by a long circulation in the mouth of the people come to the rough and drastic style in which it lies before us.... Mark took up what the tradition carried to him.
Such is the outcome of a close examination by an original scholar who takes for granted the historicity of Jesus. It is a poor support to a pretence of finding a lifelike narrative.
If the reader under Mr. Sinclair's tutelage will at this point vary his study somewhat (at the cost of a few extra hours) by reading samples of quite primitive folk-lore--say the Hottentot Fables and Tales collected by Dr. Bleek, in which the characters are mostly, but not always, animals; or some of the fairy tales in Gill's Myths and Songs of the South Pacific--and then proceed to the tale of Tom Tit Tot, as given by Mr. Edward Clodd in the dialect of East Anglia, he will perhaps begin to realize that unsophisticated narrators not only can but frequently do give certain touches of quasi-reality to "episodes" which no civilized reader can suppose to have been real. In particular he will find in the vivacious Tom Tit Tot an amount of "the freedom and variety of life" in comparison with which the archaic stiffness and bareness of the Gospel narrative is as dumb-show beside drama. And if he will next pay some attention to the narrative of Homer, in which Zeus and Hêrê are so much more life-like than a multitude of the human personages of the epic, and then turn to see how Plutarch writes professed biography, some of it absolutely mythical, but all of it on a documentary basis of some kind, he will perhaps begin to suspect that Mr. Sinclair has not even perceived the nature of the problem on which he pronounces, and so is not in a position to "consider" it at all. Plutarch is nearly as circumstantial about Theseus and Herakles and Romulus as about Solon. But when he has real biographical material to go upon as to real personages he gives us a "freedom and variety of life" which is as far as the poles asunder from the hieratic figures of the Christian Gospel. Take his Fabius Maximus. After the pedigree, with its due touch of myth, we read:--
