Secret Alias
Wasn't that Mark's intent?
Well there's the $64 question. All we know of Mark is what we find in about 11,000 words, which aren't about him, and may not even be a singly authored work.
Maybe the endless chiasms are like curtains in a shrine and the truth is in the inner sanctum.
And maybe they're epiphenomenal to craftsmanship. If every moment's action recalls something that happened earlier and anticipates something yet to come, then you as author can count on your audience to organize their experience using straight lines, spontaneously.
What if there are just curtains and Mark cleverly avoided defining what that truth was at the center of the text because it is the act of penetrating the veils which is the path to salvation.
Or what if what was interesting and dramatically tractable about that "anthropomorphic divinity who came to earth during a certain year/period" was the variety of human reactions to his progress?
Indeed, why would Mark need or want to "pick winners" in an interesting situation like that? The last century's phrase was "Let a thousand flowers bloom." What's wrong with that? What would be wrong with that from the perspective of a non-big-C Catholic or Protestant? (Now there's something we can know about Mark, that he wasn't one of those, since there were no such critters back then.)
What's wrong with that from a storytelling craft perspective?
2001: A Space Odyssey, as filmed (= retold) by Kubrick "from" Clarke's short story* uses as its narrative spine the variety of human reactions to a tangible revelation of something from beyond. It's a durable structure. It's also just fine that the performance concludes without specifying the "truth" about that big black rectangular thing. The story is about the reaction to its intrusion into human experience.
Sell the sizzle, not the steak.
Is there an inner brilliance to Mark's composition that hasn't been understood?
Matthew and Luke seem to have understood the inner brilliance just fine
. Plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery.
But don't you wonder how a religion developed around a book saves people?
I don't know that it did. All I know is that the book found a Christian audience, who seem to have liked it even better after it was tuned up some.
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* The film's screenplay was joint work by Kubrick and Clarke, developed in tandem with a novel-length expansion of the prose story, with the novel credited to Clarke (solo, but acknowledged by him as joint work).
