page_title: Secret Gospel of Mark
section_title: The young man in the linen cloth
hierarchical_section_title: Secret Gospel of Mark / Interpretation / Lacunae and continuity / The young man in the linen cloth
caption_attribution_description: English: Bethany 1913
context_page_description: The Secret Gospel of Mark or the Mystic Gospel of Mark, also the Longer Gospel of Mark, is a putative longer and secret or mystic version of the Gospel of Mark. The gospel is mentioned exclusively in the Mar Saba letter, a document of disputed authenticity, which is said to be written by Clement of Alexandria. This letter, in turn, is preserved only in photographs of a Greek handwritten copy seemingly transcribed in the eighteenth century into the endpapers of a seventeenth-century printed edition of the works of Ignatius of Antioch.
  In 1958, Morton Smith, a professor of ancient history at Columbia University, found a previously unknown letter of Clement of Alexandria in the monastery of Mar Saba situated 20 kilometers south-east of Jerusalem. He made a formal announcement of the discovery in 1960 and published his study of the text in 1973. The original manuscript was subsequently transferred to the library of the Greek Orthodox Church in Jerusalem, and sometime after 1990, it was lost. Further research has relied upon photographs and copies, including those made by Smith himself.
context_section_description: In Mark 14:51–52, a young man (Greek: νεανίσκος, neaniskos) in a linen cloth (Greek: σινδόνα, sindona) is seized during Jesus' arrest, but he escapes at the cost of his clothing. This passage seems to have little to do with the rest of the narrative, and it has given cause to various interpretations. Sometimes it is suggested that the young man is Mark himself. However, the same Greek words (neaniskos and sindona) are also used in Secret Mark. Several scholars, such as Robert Grant and Robert Gundry, suggest that Secret Mark was created based on Mark 14:51, 16:5 and other passages and that this would explain the similarities. Other scholars, such as Helmut Koester and J. D. Crossan, argue that the canonical Mark is a revision of Secret Mark. Koester thinks that an original Proto-Mark was expanded with, among other things, the raising of the youth in Secret Mark and the fleeing naked youth during Jesus' arrest in Mark 14:51–52, and that this gospel version later was abridged to form the canonical Mark. According to Crossan, Secret Mark was the original gospel. In the creation of canonical Mark, the two Secret Mark passages quoted by Clement were removed and then dismembered and scattered throughout canonical Mark to form the neaniskos-passages. Miles Fowler and others argue that Secret Mark originally told a coherent story, including that of a young man. From this gospel, some passages were removed (by the original author or by someone else) to form canonical Mark. In this process, some remnants were left, such as that of the fleeing naked young man, while other passages may have been completely lost.
  Marvin Meyer sees the young man in Secret Mark as a paradigmatic disciple that "functions as a literary rather than a historical figure." The young man (neaniskos) wears only "a linen cloth" (sindona) "over his naked body". This is reminiscent of Mark 14:51–52, where, in the garden of Gethsemane, an unnamed young man (neaniskos) who is wearing nothing but a linen cloth (sindona) about his body is said to follow Jesus, and as they seize him, he runs away naked, leaving his linen cloth behind. The word sindōn is also found in Mark 15:46 where it refers to Jesus' burial wrapping. And in Mark 16:5 a neaniskos (young man) in a white robe, who in Mark does not seem to function as an angel, is sitting in the empty tomb when the women arrive to anoint Jesus' body.
  Miles Fowler suggests that the naked fleeing youth in Mark 14:51–52, the youth in the tomb of Jesus in Mark 16:5 and the youth Jesus raises from the dead in Secret Mark are the same youth; but that he also appears as the rich (and in the parallel account in Matthew 19:20, "young") man in Mark 10:17–22, whom Jesus loves and urges to give all his possessions to the poor and join him. This young man is furthermore by some scholars identified as both Lazarus (due to the similarities between Secret Mark 1 and John 11) and the beloved disciple (due to the fact that Jesus in Secret Mark 2 is said to have loved the youth, and that in the gospels he is said to have loved only the three siblings Martha, Mary and Lazarus (Joh 11:5), the rich man (Mark 10:22) and the beloved disciple). Hans-Martin Schenke interprets the scene of the fleeing youth in Gethsemane (Mark 14:51–52) as a symbolic story in which the youth is not human but rather a shadow, a symbol, an ideal disciple. He sees the reappearing youth as a spiritual double of Jesus and the stripping of the body as a symbol of the soul being naked.
  Marvin Meyer finds a subplot, or scenes or vignettes, "in Secret Mark that is present in only a truncated form in canonical Mark", about a young man as a symbol of discipleship who follows Jesus throughout the gospel story.). The first trace of this young man is found in the story of the rich man in Mark 10:17–22 whom Jesus loves and "who is a candidate for discipleship"; the second is the story of the young man in the first Secret Mark passage (after Mark 10:34) whom Jesus raises from the dead and teaches the mystery of the kingdom of God and who loves Jesus; the third is found in the s
caption: The road from Jericho into the village of Bethany on the Mount of Olives about 3 kilometers from Jerusalem, in a photo from 1913. Here Jesus, according to John 11, rose Lazarus from the dead. This, however, is another Bethany than the one where Jesus raises the young man in Secret Mark.
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