I’ve just answered my own question, but I’ll post it here for others:
“Writers from the earliest days of the Church tell us that Peter’s disciple Mark wrote down the apostle’s account of the life of Jesus as he told it to the first Christians in Rome. The vivid, detailed, unadorned prose of the Gospel of Mark conveys the unmistakable immediacy of a first-hand account.”
Being written in Rome at that time Greek was the language of the Scholar.
Beginning a sentence with “and” was unusual, but was common in Hebrew.
From an article about the Hebrew background of Mark:
“Carmignac, a Dead Sea Scrolls translator and an expert in the Hebrew in use at the time of Christ. . . he came at the problem from a different angle.
“In order to facilitate the comparison between our Greek Gospels and the Hebrew text of Qumran, I tried, for my own personal use, to see what Mark would yield when translated back into the Hebrew of Qumran.
.....
“. . . He discovered the Greek translator of Mark had slavishly kept to the Hebrew word order and grammar.
” . . . could the awkward phrasings found in our Greek text have been nothing more than overly faithful translations (perhaps “transliterations” would be more accurate) of Semitic originals?
“If the second possibility were true, then we have synoptic Gospels written by eyewitnesses at a very early date.”
IOW, the translators into Greek tried as much as possible not to change a single word of what they had received, even when it made the grammar awkward.
Greek was also the language of the slave in Rome at the time—and usually the scholars were also slaves, but many slaves were not scholars.
The conquest of Greeks and importation of Greek-speaking teachers and Greek texts actually turned Rome into a predominantly Greek speaking city for several centuries.
The cradle of Ecclesiastical Latin was actually North Africa. The Liturgy in Rome didn’t switch to Latin until the time of Pope Damasus I in the later half of the fourth century.
BTW Check out my screen name. He was in the thick of it.