Students of the “Synoptic Problem” have long been concerned about the composition of the Gospel of Mark. Whether one believes that mark is the major source for Matthew and Luke (and, perhaps John) or that Mark as copied from Matthew and Luke, all agree that the author of Mark complied and edited-in scholarly terms, “redacted”- the materials from the Jesus tradition that were available in his time and place. David Peabody, in an intricately detailed analysis, proposes to circumvent the usual circular studies by developing a method that “presupposes no particular solution to the Synoptic problem” and “employs minimal presuppositions about ‘redactional passages’ within the gospel.” His study seeks to collect and display systematically the “potentially redactional features of the text of mark as a whole” and to isolate the “redactional features” within that larger body of “potentially redactional materials” that he believes, “have the highest probability of coming from the hand of the author/composer of the gospel.”