Both the author and Nils Dahl, who directed it, are to be congratulated for this superb Yale Dissertation. It is everything a dissertation should be: a firstrate contribution, concise, and clear. Through the medium of the charge by false witnesses that Jesus would destroy the Temple, Juel studies the Marcan passion narrative and makes sense of it on a literary level. More important, he challenges some very prominent methodologies in vogue today in Marcan studies. In CBQ 39 (1977), 283-85, I reviewed a collection of essays related to the Perrin school, The Passion in Mark (ed. W. Kelber), and remarked that the style of Marcan exegesis exhibited in some of those essays was between 90* and 180" in the wrong direction. I find that Juel is almost entirely in the right direction. He resists the temptation to make the interpretation of Mark depend on highly conjectural distinctions between pre-Marcan tradition and Marcan redaction and works on the principle that the final product made good sense to the person who produced ita sense that can be detected without elaborate presuppositions about the author's adversaries. (One should not confuse John and Mark; it is not guesswork to suppose that John had adversaries inside and outside Christianity, for he makes that clear; Mark's adversaries can be reconstructed only by guesses about how Mark changed his sources and guesses about how anti-Twelve, anti-Petrine motifs go against the surface impressions of the Gospel.) For Mark, the two statements about the destructipn of the Temple and about Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed (14:57-62) are not to be interpreted as haphazard joinings from A and B passion sources. No matter where he got them, Mark sees them as belonging together, since he places them together again on the lips of Jesus' opponents at the foot of the cross (15:29-32). They are not totally false perceptions about Jesus' work and identity; rather, they are false only as they are crassly misunderstood by Jesus' opponents, whom Mark pictures as schemers determined to reject Jesus. An element of truth is already perceived in them as Jesus dies, for then, the veil of the Temple is torn, and the centurion is brought