The phrase ‘To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God’ (Mark 4.11) has been one of the most significant for the twentieth-century study of Mark's Gospel, for two reasons. The one concerns its theological interpretation, the other its relationship to the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.

In his book The Messianic Secret, published in 1901, the German scholar William Wrede argued that the key theological theme in Mark's Gospel is what he called the Messianic Secret, the idea that Jesus kept his messiahship hidden. There was, he claimed, a very good historical reason for this: that the earliest Christians believed God to have made Jesus the Messiah only after the resurrection (see Acts 2.36). The idea that he had already been the Messiah during his ministry was a later development and, to explain why it had not always been known, Mark developed the idea of a Messianic Secret. Jesus had indeed always been the Messiah, but he had told his disciples that only after the resurrection were they to speak about it (Mark 8.30; 9.9).