Mark’s gospel is notorious for its dangling pronouns. When Jesus is arrested, after the chaos of Judas’s treacherous kiss and a servant’s severed ear, we read (verse 14:50):
They left him, and they all fled.
Who are they? The reader probably infers that they are the eleven until-now loyal apostles of the chosen Twelve, whom Jesus had predicted would all scatter.
The apostles do flee, but – surprise – somebody else escapes, too:
A certain youth had been following him, wearing linen over his naked body. The men grabbed him, but he left his linen behind and fled from them naked.
Some believe that these verses, 14:51-52, don’t describe an incident in the story world, but rather are a purely literary vehicle for a Jewish scriptural allusion. Others believe that the verses are interpolated, added later by somebody other than Mark.
The principal findings of this post are that there are good reasons to accept the youth’s flight at face value as a story incident and as Mark’s authentic writing.
Characters and incidents often allude to scripture in Mark
In Genesis 39:7-20 Joseph escapes from Potiphar’s wife, not naked but leaving his cloak behind. Amos 2:16 describes a naked defeated soldier, but presumably stripped of something sturdier than cloth. Mark‘s verses, then, read like a mash-up of these two earlier writings, just as the opening lines of the gospel combine verses quoted from Isaiah 40:3 and Malachi 3:1.
It doesn’t follow, however, that the incident wasn’t also intended to be read as an actual story event. John the Baptist is likened throughout the gospel to the prophet Elijah. His killer quotes from Esther. Nevertheless John’s role in the story is as an actual character doing actual things.
Mark has prepared the audience to meet companions of Jesus besides the Twelve
Jesus asks the tax collector Levi, son of Alphaeus, to accompany him (2:14). The Greek verb used here for “accompany” is akoloutheó, whose etymology recalls sharing the same road (keleuthos) with someone. It is versatile and can be translated as “following” in the literal sense of walking behind someone or figuratively as subordinating oneself to a leader or teacher. Levi accepts Jesus’s invitation, once again expressed with a form of the same verb.
A while later (3:13-19), Jesus selects his Twelve, his apostles, who receive special powers and responsibilities. Levi isn’t one of them. Jesus chooses another son of Alphaeus named James instead.
As the gospel progresses, Jesus asks other people to join his entourage. Jesus invites anyone in a crowd who is willing to make specific sacrifices to follow him (8:34). He makes a similar offer to a rich man (10:21).
That some non-apostles have joined Jesus is suggested as the group sets out for Jerusalem (10:32). Jesus seems to take the Twelve aside from others to confer with them. As the group leaves Jericho, the healed blind man Bar Timaeus is plainly said to join them on the road (10:52). At Jerusalem, “many” (polloi) take part in the triumphal entry parade (11:8), although nothing is said about soliciting any locals to march.
By the time the youth in Gethsemane appears, then, there can be little surprise about the existence of people like him, non-apostolic fellow travelers of Jesus. What surprise there may be is because of artful misdirection. Nothing has been said about non-apostolic companions of Jesus that night, and nothing will be explained about where the youth and people like him have found their meals and lodging.
Other people are in the same unexplained circumstances. It turns out (15:40-41) that there have been many (pollai) women who have followed Jesus to Jerusalem. Their existence is suddenly revealed to the audience after the women have witnessed the crucifixion. While Mark might be criticized for leaving loose ends about the accommodations made for these women and others, the problem does not distinguish the Gethsemane youth from many other non-apostles who followed Jesus to Jerusalem.
Mark chooses language that ties the youth to these other fellow travelers
Given the commonness of akoloutheó, it is unsurprising that forms of this verb would be used both for our youth and for the many women who service is revealed when Jesus dies.
In both cases, Mark uses the imperfect tense, which conveys continued action in the past. Some of the women have followed Jesus for a considerable time. Although the imperfect tense doesn’t say how long the youth has followed Jesus, it is the antithesis of just suddenly “showing up” behind Jesus. However long it has been, Mark tells us that the youth has been with Jesus for a while.
The youth’s specific form of the verb is synēkolouthei, akoloutheó prefixed by syn-, or “with.” A connotation of this combination is that the youth has been following Jesus as part of a group. This form of the verb occurs only two other times in the New Testament, when Jesus chooses five people to visit Jairus’s daughter with him (5:37), and Luke 23:49 telling how the women followed Jesus to Jerusalem, that is, as part of a group.
The problem of the linen
The youth is dressed in linen (sindon). The word can refer specifically to a linen sheet (for example, and evocatively, a wrapping for a corpse) or more generally to a linen outfit.
It cannot be resolved from the brief words on offer what the youth was wearing beyond that it was made entirely of linen with nothing underneath. Whatever the design, linen may seem too light a fabric for comfort in the chill of a Judean desert night.
We don’t know what time of night it is, or how much earlier in the day the youth chose what he’s wearing now. Some argue that the chill is shown to be especially severe this night, since Peter warms himself at a courtyard fire – twice (14:54, 67).
However, Mark doesn’t mention anybody else warming themselves at these sources of both heat and light (contrast John 18:18). Later on, Mark will depict the women suffering physical symptoms because of their distressed emotional state (16:8). Perhaps Peter has good reason to feel cold tonight.
The transition between apostolic and youthful potential eyewitnesses
Throughout the gospel, Mark has positioned his narrator to tell the story based on information that would plausibly be available to a merely human investigator. Some reports of private interior mental or physical states are exceptions, but may be consonant with reasonable inferences from the facts (e.g., that an instantly healed woman would feel better fast, 5:29).
Whether Mark really had investigated the story is a separate issue. Even if the audience knew for a fact that he made the whole story up, a feature of that hypothetical fiction is that the narrator is positioned as a naturally informed reliable guide to the events of the story world. The narrator’s human limitation is a literary choice made by the author, regardless of the truth or fiction of the gospel.
The first audience of Mark surely noticed that the story supposedly took place about a generation before the composition of the gospel (the 30’s CE versus probably around the 70’s). Some might wonder how relevant information had bridged the gap between the events and the narrator’s current knowledge of them decades later.
For most of the gospel apart from the lurid gossip surrounding the Baptist’s execution, the apostles plausibly suffice as potential witnesses. The audience would likely have heard that these leaders had taught disciples of their own. The gap is bridged.
However, Jesus’s arrest is the last time any of the twelve apostles see Jesus alive. Other potential witnesses are therefore useful to maintain the effect of a naturally informed narrator. For example, the women see the crucifixion from afar. Simon of Cyrene sees some of it close up.
Unlike the apostles, neither these women nor Simon would likely have had successor disciples to bridge the generation gap. Mark tells us instead that they have children. Simon has sons, Alexander and Rufus. The women, too, have various named children.
There is also another way to bridge the gap: for the witness himself to be young. There are two youthful witnesses, the young man (neaniskos) of Gethsemane and the young man in the vacant tomb (also described as a neaniskos). Some critics have suggested that they are one and the same man. Mark doesn’t say, and the evidence that places the Gethsemane youth as part of some larger group could also place a different young man within that group.
Regardless, the young man at Gethsemane introduces the motif of young characters known to the narrator who are situated to obtain information about the Passion by natural means, personally or from their parents. That one such character was at Gethsemane the night of the arrest is a possible answer to the perennial puzzle about who heard Jesus pray when the apostles were asleep.
Another question concerns whether the youth in the tomb is supposed to be a natural person in Mark, unlike the angels who serve similar functions in the other canonical gospels. If he’s just an ordinary man, then how does he know about the risen Jesus’s plan to rendezvous with the disciples in Galilee and why would he specially emphasize Peter?
A possible answer is that maybe he, or maybe a companion, overheard Jesus telling the apostles his plans, with special attention to Peter (14:26-31). Interestingly, the youth in the tomb says nothing about when Jesus rose. The information that it was supposed to occur “on the third day” was not mentioned during Jesus’s final planning conversation.
Conclusions
The subject verses offer a crafty clarification of two dangling pronouns, a show-not-tell depiction of panic, a vivid image in its own right amid other vivid imagery, a further allusion to Jewish scripture, an introduction to a possible naturalistic inter-generational information channel at the very moment it is first needed, and a further glimpse of the many non-apostolic followers of Jesus. This is not an “intrusion” in the narrative. It is, in the opinion of your correspondent, the authentic work of Mark, integral to the story he is telling.
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Image: The Betrayal of Christ, by Bartolomeo di Tommaso (d. 1453/54) part of an unidentified altarpiece’s predella. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/435619
The Uncertaintist 