Using both his background in interpreting biblical research and his interest in word-puzzles, nationally known journalist John Dart "decodes" the Gospel of Mark, with explosive results that will shake the foundation of New Testament studies.Dart uses ancient, puzzle-like writing devices called "chiasms," which are found throughout Mark, to reconstruct the original Gospel. By the presence or absence of these chiasms, he identifies sections of the Gospel that were added by a later editor, and he recovers passages from the Secret Gospel of Mark (a work discovered in 1958) that the pattern of chiasms indicates had been deleted from canonical Mark.The results are stunning and certain to be controversial. Scholars have long known of the presence of chiasms in the Bible and have proposed a few dozen in Mark. But Dart says that Mark contains more than 150 chiastic patterns, large and small.The bigger surprise is that those concentric catchword networks -- clever and witty -- show that a "young man" resurrection-initiation episode from Secret Mark was part of the original gospel. The "young man" story was deleted by the later editor, who inserted a miracle-laden section that Luke never saw (his "big omission"). Provocative and sure to be talked about, Dart's "decoding" sheds new light on a cast of honorable and disreputable figures in the Bible's pioneering gospel. John Dart, news editor of Christian Century magazine and a religion writer at the Los Angeles Times for 30 years, has written extensively about New Testament research.