Who is Mark's Mystery Man?
Who is Mark's Mystery Man?
Five Candidates for the Gospel's Naked Fugitive
The setting is the Garden of Gethsemane. Jesus has received the kiss of Judas’ betrayal. And all of his disciples have fled before him.
Then a character appears on the scene who – as quickly as his arrival – has himself fled naked, leaving only a linen cloth behind him. The passage is Mark 14:51-52:
‘A certain young man was following him, wearing nothing but a linen cloth. They caught hold of him, but he left the linen cloth and ran off naked.’
The passage demands us to ask: Who is Mark’s mystery man?
Apparently Matthew and Luke had no firm opinion on the fugitive. Both of them remove the little pericope in their redaction of Mark.
And one can see why: there is almost nothing about the garden-scene which demands the young man’s presence. As soon as he arrives, he is gone.
Yet, while Matthew and Luke didn’t engage or clarify the matter, their editorial silence has not precluded speculation on Mark’s account.
For almost two millennia, Christians have speculated on the identity of the man.
Many of these speculations have little to them. But in what follows, I have lined up five of the most intriguing suspects for the role.1
1. An Anonymous Fugitive
For many exegetes, both ancient and modern, Mark 14:51-52 is treated as a historical event. The question therefore arises: why is the identity of the young man hidden?
Prolific New Testament scholar, Gerd Theissen, suggested that the youth’s identity is deliberately “shadowy.”2 There may have been some reason not to disclose his identity; a phenomenon which Theissen calls “protective anonymity.”
In this instance, the young man had “run afoul of the police.”3 It was therefore dangerous to mention his name, or to associate him with the Christian movement.
This is an intriguing speculation but not particularly unsatisfying. For one thing, it is unclear how why we should see any individual as “protectively” anonymous rather than literarily so. Reasons for ‘protective anonymity’ often read as ‘just so’ stories.
More importantly, this explanation does not explain why the youth was dressed as he was.4 Nor does it explain his role in the narrative. Surely, given his fleeting appearance, it would have been most ‘protective’ not to include him at all?
2. Mark Himself
A more tantalising candidate is Mark himself. As William Barclay once suggested, “we may take it as fairly certain that Mark put in these two verses because they were about himself. He could not forget that night.”5
Hence the author inserted himself, in a somewhat Hitchcockesque fashion, as a cameo into his own story. Too humble to name himself, he remained anonymous.
Yet, if we accept the Church’s own traditions on Markan authorship, this is doubtful. According to Papias, Mark recorded Peter’s testimony precisely because he was not himself a follower of the Lord.
And if we doubt the traditional authorship, there is no particular reason to suspect a cameo from our new ‘Mark’ either. The author does not relate events as an eyewitness elsewhere. It therefore seems unlikely that he is leaving his ‘signature’ here.
3. A Secret Disciple
In the mid-Twentieth Century, a more scandalous suspect emerged: a secret disciple whom Jesus had only recently ‘initiated’ into the Kingdom of God.
This sub-plot to the scantily-clad disciple is found in The Secret Gospel of Mark, a narrative discovered by New Testament scholar, Morton Smith, in 1958.
In Smith’s account, the disciple had spent the night with Jesus, being taught the secrets of the Kingdom. The narrative supposedly supplies the context to Mark’s pericope, which now sits somewhat oddly in the text.
Yet this ‘long lost’ narrative, mentioned nowhere in antiquity, has garnered little recognition amongst mainstream critics.
Francis Watson, a scholar at Durham University, represents the majority view on the account: ‘the letter [in which the narrative is found] is manifestly pseudonymous…” For him and many others, “it is clear that the author… is Morton Smith.”6
4. Jesus
A more plausible suggestion is that the young man is an image of Jesus’ fate.
Albert Vanhoye points to several parallels between Jesus and the young man; both are ‘arrested’ (kratein); both relate to a linen cloth; and both ‘escape’ that linen cloth - the young man, through fleeing and Jesus, through his resurrection.7
Moreover, the next time a ‘young man’ appears (at the tomb of Jesus), he is sitting on the right (16:5). This locates him at the same place that Jesus is seated, in heaven.
According to scholars from John Knox to Robert Gundry, then, we find in the young man a vignette of Jesus’ fate: his ‘arrest’, burial and resurrection.8
5. A Disciple
In my view, however, there is an even more satisfying candidate for the role; namely, that the young man is a follower of Jesus. There are four reasons to think this:
First, the disciple is explicitly said to have been ‘following’ Jesus. And ‘following’ is exactly what the disciples are called to do throughout the Gospel.9
Second, in fleeing, the disciple as a single individual epitomises all of Jesus’ disciples, who have abandoned him, just as Jesus predicted (14:27).
Third, in leaving everything behind, this follower becomes an ‘anti-disciple’, who contrasts those who left everything behind to follow Jesus in the first part of the Gospel.
Fourth, in wearing a linen cloth, the disciple has come ‘dressed for death.’ He has come ready to die with Jesus. Yet, like Peter, he ends up abandoning him.
The Reader…
If Mark’s mystery man is a disciple of Jesus, then how does this affect our interpretation of the Gospel?
To understand the young man’s significance, it is necessary that we turn to another passage, later in the Gospel, which curiously features another, unnamed ‘young man’ (neoniskos): the angel who appears to the women at the tomb.
Here we find another linen cloth left behind. Yet this time, it is a sign of Jesus’ resurrection. So how might we understand the relationship between the two young men and their respective linen cloths?
One idea is that a great exchange taking place here: the disciples’ shame was buried with Jesus, and it is now substituted by a glorious, angelic appearance.10
The first young man’s linen cloth (symbolising the disciples shame) goes down with Jesus into death, since it is the garment he wears in his burial; while the second young man is dressed in glorious white, reminding us of Jesus’ earlier transfiguration.
It also seems significant that the young man appears announcing Jesus’ future appearance to the disciples. Just as the first young man representing their failure to follow Christ, so the second young man precedes their imminent restoration.
In the story of the two young men, then, there may be a message for readers of Mark today: our own failure is not the end of the story.
While we may be faithless and fail to follow Jesus - and may even flee from him - there is hope in the second man’s renewed apparel and his rumours of resurrection.
Who, then, is the young man?
We can see that he is deliberately nameless, for he is every man, every disciple. And he is a sign-post to the second man, who casts a redemptive shadow on his flight.
For two good surveys of the various candidates for this role, see Abraham Kuravilla, “The Naked Runaway and the Enthroned Reporter of Mark 14 and 16: What is the Author Doing with What He is Saying?,” JETS 54 n.3 (2011): 527-45; Adela Yarbro Collins, Mark: A Commentary. Heremeneia. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 688-693. In this post, I largely follow these surveys.
See Gerd Theissen, The Gospels in Context: Social and Political History in the Synoptic Tradition (London: T&T Clark, 1992), 185-187.
Theissen, Gospels, 186-187.
So Collins, Mark, 689. For a contrary perspective, see Maurice Casey, who notes that it “was quite normal to wear what to us would be a bit of linen rather like a sheet or blanket draped round the body with very little fastening, and not everyone wore underclothes, so that a violent attempt to seize the man by his garment could leave him able to flee, provided he regarded the obvious dangers as more serious than losing his modesty by fleeing naked in the dark.” Maurice Casey, Jesus of Nazareth: An Independent Historian’s Account of His Life and Teaching. (T&T Clark, Edinburgh, 2010), 440. As examples of people in the ancient world losing their outer garments, Casey cites H. M. Jackson, ‘Why the Youth Shed His Cloak and Fled Naked: The Meaning and Purpose of Mark 14.51–52’, JBL 116 (1997): 273–89.
See William Barclay, The Gospel of Mark, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1956), 404.
Francis Watson, “Beyond Suspicion: On the Authorship of The Mar Saba Letter and The Secret Gospel of Mark,” JTS 61 (2010), 170.
Albert Vanhoye, “La fuite du jeune home nu (Mc 14,51–52),” Bib 52 (1971): 405.
Robert H. Gundry, Mark: A Commentary on His Apology for the Cross (Grand Rapids: Eerd- mans, 1993), 862.
See e.g. Mk. 1:18. 2:14, 15; 6:1; 10:28, 52.
For the details of this transfer, see Kuravilla, “Naked Runaway.”