ABSTRACT
Jesus’s intimate prayer for release from suffering to come marks the beginning of the story of his arrest and trials in the gospel of Mark. At the center of Mark's frame-within-a-frame appears the revelation of Jesus's identity before the high priest, as elsewhere in the arrest/trials scenes in Mark, the reader is given an answer. Something further is required in order to make sense of the text, and that is the ideology of the passion itself, which unfolds from intertextual networks of Christian belief and provides its own frame for the reading of these texts. The ideology of the passion arises from the desire of Christian readers to let go of the frames and keep the framed. However, if Jesus was innocent but was found guilty, then he must have been framed by someone, either the Jewish priests or the Romans. Mark’s sequence of arrest/trials stories functions as a series of frames within frames.
