Who Will See “The Kingdom of God Coming with Power” 23 group”. If Mark 9,1 were to follow immediately after this contrast in 8,35, the common conviction that the bystanders play a protagonist role would be more plausible. This long-standing supposition, however, is difficult to reconcile with Mark’s literary sequence which moves from a statement concerning potential insiders in v. 34 to a transitional statement contrasting potential insiders with potential outsiders in v. 35, and ending with a fuller statement concerning potential outsiders in vv. 36-38. The sequence moves toward judgment by incrementally raising the severity of the warning. Despite this sequence, the bystanders (those who will “not taste death”) have been commonly contrasted with the outsiders in vv. 36- 38, namely those “who are ashamed of Jesus” (8,38). The reason for this contrast usually stems from the assumption that the “coming of the kingdom of God with power” is a promise of vindication directed at the insiders who are identified as the “some who will not taste death”. The characters at whom the language is directed are unfortunately often ignored. And yet, the audiences’ (as well as the performers’) participation in the reception and rejection of the characters would have been central to the telling and/or performance of Mark in an oral- aural culture. More will be said on this issue below. Methodologically, it is a case in which a philological assumption (i.e., an inherited meaning of the “kingdom of God coming with power”) is allowed to overshadow, and in some cases neglect, larger literary features such as the interplay between character groups. The usual approach to reconciling “son of man coming in glory” and the “kingdom coming with power” is to suggest that each prediction offers a different perspective on the same event. Norman Perrin is still representative of many in his claim that the two are deliberately and artistically arranged in parallel to effectively present different aspects of the eschaton — the former referring to it as a threat and the latter as a promise (9). A parallelism is undoubtedly present in the narrative, despite the probability that each prediction had a different origin (10). But an antithetical parallelism raises several difficulties. First, given the shift of focus from the in-group to the out-group in 8,34-38, an antithetical parallelism introduces an unnecessary disjunction between 8,38 and (9) N. PERRIN, Rediscovering the Teaching of Jesus (London 1967) 200. (10) R. MORGAN, “From Reimarus to Sanders, The Kingdom of God, Jesus, and the Judaisms of His Day”, The Kingdom of God and Human Society. Essays by the Members of the Scripture, Theology and Society Group (ed. R.S. BARBOUR) (Edinburgh 1993) 80-139.