that, meeting one person, then another, drawing forth this reaction, then that. And as you work through this collection of apparently disconnected anecdotes, you begin to see what sort of person he is—and also perhaps on a second reading to see how the arrangement of the anecdotes is nowhere near as random as might at first appear. In the jargon of the scholars this means that Mark is mostly composed of what scholars call pericopai—paragraphs of information leading to a kind of punch line and a report