There are two familiar approaches to the subject of Markan Christology – indeed to New Testament Christology in general – that are taken as axiomatic. The first seeks to investigate how Jesus, according to Mark, used the existing messianic titles and the other redemptive categories that were to be found in pre-70 c.e. Judaism. The second seeks to describe the function of the messianic secret in Mark, on the assumption that messiahship was a known category, but that Jesus (as depicted in Mark) wanted to keep his personal identification with the messianic role a secret from the public in general and his antagonists in particular. These christological axioms rest in turn on a pair of historical assumptions: (1) that messianic titles and concepts were fixed entities in Judaism of the Second Temple, and (2) that since there was common agreement as to what messiahship entailed, the difficulty between Jesus and Jewish leaders of his time was his claim that he was the Messiah: A negative corollary of these two assumptions is that, if the use of a title or a concept cannot be documented in Jewish sources of the first century and earlier, then that term or point of view is a later construct of the tradition or the evangelist. It is my considered opinion that none of these axioms and assumptions is valid, and that to pursue the questions of christology on the basis of them results in unintentional ignoring of an important line of evidence.