It is the inconceivable omission of the exegetes to face such problems that forces us finally to insist on their serious inadequacy in this regard. They laboriously conduct an investigation up to the point at which it leaves us, more certainly than ever, facing the incredible, and there they leave it. Their work is done. That the story of the Last Night was never framed as a narrative, but is primarily a drama, which the Gospel simply transcribes, is manifest in every section, and is definitely proved by the verses (Mk. xiv, 41-42) in which, without an intervening exit, Jesus says: "Sleep on now, and take your rest.... Arise, let us be going." The moment the document is realized to be a transcript of a drama it becomes clear that the "Sleep on now, and take your rest" should be inserted before the otherwise speechless exit in verse 40, where the text says that "they wist not what to answer him." Two divergent speeches have by an oversight in transcription been fused into one.
That the story of the tragedy is a separate composition has been partly perceived by critics of different schools without drawing any elucidating inference. Wellhausen pronounces that the Passion cannot be excepted from the verdict that Mark as a whole lacks the character of history. "Nothing is motived and explained by preliminaries." [32] But "we learn as much about the week in Jerusalem as about the year in Galilee." [33] And the Rev. Mr. Wright gets further, though following a wrong track:--
The very fact that S. Mark devotes six chapters out of sixteen to events which took place in the precincts of Jerusalem makes me suspicious. Important though the passion was, it seems to be narrated at undue length. The proportions of the history are destroyed. [34]
Precisely. The story of the events in Jerusalem is no proper part either of a primary document or of the first or second Gospel. In its detail it has no congruity with the scanty and incoherent narrative of Mark. It is of another provenance, although, as Wellhausen notes, quite as unhistorical as the rest. The non-historicity of the entire action is as plain as in the case of any episode in the Gospels. Judas is paid to betray a man who could easily have been arrested without any process of betrayal; and the conducting of the trial immediately upon the arrest, throughout the night, the very witnesses being "sought for" in the darkness, is plain fiction, explicable only by the dramatic obligation to continuous action.