Procedural Register in the Olivet Discourse: A Functional Linguistic Approach to Mark 13 I will rely on insights from Halliday’s register theory to explain the Markan Jesus’ use of a functional variety of language I call procedural register. The identification of procedural register in the main section of the Olivet Discourse (vv. 5b-23) will be shown to reveal the rhetorical design of the discourse within a first temporal horizon, of direct relevance for the audience and addressing the disciples’ question (v. 4). The absence of procedural register in vv. 24-27 indicates the opening of a second horizon in the speech, lacking immediate impact for the audience and no longer addressing the disciples’ question. I. Mark 13: Mark’s Agenda and Ours For the last few decades, the attention of Markan scholarship has been shifting consistently towards an appreciation of Mark’s gospel as a finished literary product. Be they socio-rhetorical, oral performance or reader response oriented, literary approaches predominate among current works in the gospel of Mark, all having in common an internal approach to the meaning of the text, rather than an external one. In the words of Elizabeth S. Malbon, the new focus is on how the text means what it does (1). This functional approach to texts is at the heart of my own functional-grammatical based work in Acts (2). In this study I will rely on the Hallidayan concept of register, a functional variety of language, to present and explain the linguistic choices made by Mark in his composition or editing of his text. That is, the Hallidayan notion of register will help us to understand and explain how Greek clauses, pericopes or major sections of Mark’s Olivet Discourse mean what they do. This is an objective shared by rhetorically oriented critics who have produced analyses and interpretations of Mark 13 in recent years. (1) E. STRUTHERS MALBON, “Narrative Criticism: How does the Story Mean?”, Mark and Method. New Approaches in Biblical Studies (eds. J.C. ANDERSON – S.D. MOORE) (Minneapolis, MN 1992) 24. (2) See G. MARTIN-ASENSIO, Transitivity-Based Foregrounding in the Acts of the Apostles. A Functional-Grammatical Approach to the Lukan Perspective (JSNTSup 202; SNTG 8; Sheffield 2000).