Mark’s story-telling can feel a bit choppy when picking it apart line-by-line, word-by-word. I’m indebted to one of my seminary professors, S.M. Baugh, who reminded us of the need to focus on the aurality of the text, which includes how the passage would sound to the original audience. It seems like good practice to come to the gospels with the assumption that the authors are seeking to compose a well-told story to convey their message. R.T. France highlighted this story-telling aspect in his discussion of some of the parenthetical comments in Mark 5:1-20:

“Commentators seem to have an irresistible tendency to take any such ‘aside’ as an indication of an originally composite story, inelegantly stitched together…It is not at all out of character for a storyteller to insert a piece of useful information to provide essential (or interesting) background, or to enable the hearer more easily to follow the development of the story, and repetition is a regular stock-in-trade of effective storytelling. The whole pericope reads well as a unity, provided that it is understood as a well-told story rather than the meticulous product of a scholar’s desk.”

R.T. France, The Gospel of Mark, 229 footnote 10.