I think that Mark decided to include the ten miracles into a travelogue because they connect Jesus to some of the very important Jewish Prophets. They are incorporated throughout the time of Jesus’ travels because they show his life building up to the point where he is arrested and crucified. This build up, as in every good story, leads to the climax and adds a lot of drama, which would have been very important to Mark. This would be important because the Gospel of Mark was meant to be performed or read aloud. This tradition of oral storytelling is shown as well in the repetition of the miracle stories, as seen in the box on pg.270 of Scripting Jesus. As a part of the oral tradition, stories would be repeated and just changed very slightly and this can be seen in Marks gospel where Jesus’ miracles occur in doubles. This occurrence is a choice by Mark that he uses to emphasize the Jesus of his Gospel as a, as White puts it, “misunderstood messiah”.

The miracle stories are given a deeper theological meaning when Mark pairs them with his idea of Jesus as a misunderstood messiah. In Mark 4-6 there is an exorcism, two healings, and the feeding of thousands of people. Then in Mark 6-8 these miracles occur again in a similar form. When the miracles are repeated they are slightly more miraculous and they build the story for dramatic effect. But along with dramatic effect, the miracles are used to emphasize the messianic secret. The messianic secret is the phrase used to describe how, when Jesus performed one of his many miracles, he would then immediately tell all involved to never speak a word of the miracle. This contributed to the misunderstood messiah theme in the Gospel of Mark because it showed the disciples confusion at what Jesus message really was and how to interpret the things that he said and did. In this way the miracles were theologically tied with Jesus and his repetitive urging of his disciples to not spread the word about him being the son of god until he had been resurrected.

The miracle stories and messianic secret relate to Mark’s portrayal of Jesus, as the bringer of the good news, in that they both boost Jesus to a higher state than just a regular human and show him as a man of wisdom who, as the Jewish prophets did, is in direct contact with God.