The second excerpt from Secret Mark fills in an apparent lacuna in Mark 10:46: "They came to Jericho. As he and his disciples and a large crowd were leaving Jericho, Bartimaeus son of Timaeus, a blind beggar, was sitting by the roadside." Morton Smith notes that "one of Mark's favorite formulas" is to say that Jesus comes to a certain place, but "in all of these except Mark 3:20 and 10:46 it is followed by an account of some event which occurred in the place entered" before he leaves the place. Due to this apparent gap in the story, there has been speculation that the information about what happened in Jericho has been omitted. According to Robert Gundry, the fact that Jesus cures the blind Bartimaeus on the way from Jericho justifies that Mark said that Jesus came to Jericho without saying that he did anything there. As a parallel, Gundry refers to Mark 7:31 where Jesus "returned from the region of Tyre, and went by way of Sidon towards the Sea of Galilee". However, here Jesus is never said to have entered Sidon, and it is possible that this is an amalgamation of several introductory notices.