{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.036237471087124135, 'fraction_numerical': 0.008481110254433308, 'mean_word_length': 4.818385650224215, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Irony in Mark's Gospel. Text and Subtext (Society for New Testament Studies, Monograph Series 72). By Jerry Camery-Hoggatt. Cambridge University Press, 1992. Pp. xii + 219. £30.00.

THE presence of irony in John's Gospel has long been recognised. That it is an equally pervasive feature of Mark, if more subtle, is the thesis of this new book byj. Camery-Hoggatt, Associate Professor of New Testament at Southern California College, Costa Mesa, California. Camery-Hoggatt's book adds to the increasing number of recent studies on Mark which are 'holistic' in scope and 'literary' in approach. The book presents a systematic treatment of irony in Mark, combining a literary-critical approach with insights from the sociology of knowledge. Roughly half of it (chapters 1-4) are given over to theoretical discussion, the remainder (chapters 5-6) to the evidence of irony in Mark and a brief summary. The wide distribution of the phenomenon in Mark suggests to him that 'it was born of the author's conscious intent' (p. ix). In the opening chapter, the state of the question is considered and a review of scholarship given. The second and third chapters are devoted respectively to the social functions of irony and to the literary functions of narrative while a fourth chapter draws the two discussions together into a single framework. This is achieved by employing the twin categories of'competencies assumed by the text' (the term is adopted from Umberto Eco and refers to background information which the reader may be assumed to bring to the text) and 'competencies generated by the text' (i.e. strategies guiding the reader and inherent in the text). The theoretical framework supplied by these twin 'assumed competencies' is then used as a kind of lens through which the Gospel of Mark (in its entirety) is read in chapter 5. While highlighting a variety of verbal ironies claimed for the evangelist, the 'core' of these, he concludes in his final summary (chapter 6), 'lies in the tension between exclusionary strategies (i.e. excluding the victim of irony from some part of the story and placing the critical information on the lips of another character) and veiled revelations' (p. 179). This book is much to be welcomed given the hitherto partial nature of contributions to this subject. One must appreciate, too, the attempt to integrate literary and sociological approaches, and the recognition that intrinsic and extrinsic factors should both be considered in the interpretative process. Camery-Hoggatt's perspective is a methodologically pluralistic one which accords legitimacy to