"Zuntz speaks of his 'strong impression' that 'something very important was being put forward here with a superior purpose and concentration throughout the book... The style and content of the story arouse a feeling of otherness, a feeling that this is not history like other histories, not a biography like other biographies, but a development of the actions, sayings, and sufferings of a higher being on his way through this anxious world of human beings and demons.'"
-- R. T. France in The Gospel of Mark quotes Gunther Zuntz's account of his experience from H. Cancik (ed.), Markusphilologie, 207. Zuntz was a German classical scholar who was, but his own admission, familiar with the literature of the Roman empire, but quite unfamiliar with Christianity and its literature.