When it comes to Jesus’ “cry on the cross,” the fact that it begins his death with a quotation from Psalms 22:1 actually establishes a clue to the rest of the passion-ressurection narrative, which is based on a three-day sequence of Psalms (Psalm 22: crucifixion and death; Psalm 23: burial and sojourn among the dead; Psalm 24: resurrection “on the first day of the week,” Mark 16:2 quoting the Septuagint edition of Psalms 24:1). Once the pattern is evident, the conclusion is inescapable: this whole narrative is a literary creation, structured with well-crafted allusions to the Psalms (so well, I believe, that we can be certain we are not reading an eyewitness record of what happened, but whether that conclusion is valid I will examine in my second volume)…Mark is almost certainly inventing. Once we realize what Mark as an author is doing here, it no longer becomes plausible to see Mark as reluctantly including the “cry of dereliction” out of “embarrassment,” for he could easily have invented it to suit his literary intent.