This makes (with the readjustment in the order of some of the sections) a remarkably straightforward and connected narrative. Von Soden's remarks concerning it are well worth quoting:
These narratives are without any embellishment or secondary interest. They are plastic and concrete in every feature. The local coloring is strikingly fresh and yet in no way artificial. No edificatory remarks are inserted, no reflections, only deeds and striking sayings. No story requires its secret meaning to be explained by symbol or allegory. In no one of them does one feel any occasion to inquire for the meaning, which lies clear upon the surface. Situations and words are too original to have been invented. Everything breathes the odor of Palestine. There is no reminiscence of Old Testament stories. Miracles appear only here and there, and incidentally.... The christological or soteriological question never constitutes the motive of a story. Not once is there any expression from the language of the schools, especially from that of Paul. Words and sentences are reminiscent of the Aramaic. The figure of Jesus itself bears in every reference a human outline. He is stirred and astonished, he is angry and trembles, he needs recuperation and feels himself forsaken of God, he will not have the thotless, conventional designation "good" addressed to him, and confesses that he does not know when all which he sees to be approaching shall be fulfilled. His mother and his sisters fear that he may be out of his mind. This and much else is told with the greatest naïveté. So Jesus lived; so he expressed himself; thus they received him; thus the apostolic circle was formed and developed--this is what the writer intends to tell.[56]
These sections of Mark certainly have a very primary character; so far as their contents is concerned, they may well go back to the Petrine tradition.
With these sections von Soden contrasts the remaining parts of the Gospel, in which he finds not only much interruption of the primary narrative, but much interpretation, much allegorizing, much absence of actual situations, much reminiscence of Old Testament stories, much influence from Paul, and many reflections of the experiences of individual Christians and the Christian church.[57] No one can work thru this analysis of von Soden's without feeling that it is easy to distinguish between primary and secondary elements in the Gospel of Mark, and that von Soden has at least pointed out many of the junctures between these two.