The Young Man in the Garden and the Garment of an Office

When the soldiers took the prisoner in Gethsemane, Mark says, all the disciples deserted him and fled. Then he adds two verses that no other Gospel keeps: “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.”[1] Mark gives the young man no name, no reason for being there, and no part in anything that follows. He appears for the length of two sentences at the moment of the arrest, loses his garment to the men who seized him, and is gone.

Readers have puzzled over these verses since antiquity, and Matthew and Luke, who copied the greater part of Mark’s account of the arrest, both left them out. The Gospel as Mirror reads the young man as the Galilean teacher himself, escaping while another man answered to his name, and it reads the linen he left behind as the garment of his office, left in the hands of the men who now held someone else under his title. This essay sets out that reading, places it beside the passages in the Hebrew Bible where an office changed hands through a garment, and follows the word Mark used for the cloth to the two other places where it matters. It also says, at the point where it matters, what the reading cannot claim.

Two Verses No One Else Kept

The young man has collected a long list of explanations, and each of them accounts for something. An old tradition made him Mark himself, signing his Gospel with a moment of his own fear, the way a medieval painter might put his own face among the crowd at the edge of a crucifixion. Others have read him as a figure for the disciples as a whole, stripped of everything in their haste to get away. Commentators have noticed that Amos says of the day of judgment that “those who are stout of heart among the mighty shall flee away naked in that day,” and have suggested that Mark wrote the scene to fulfill the prophecy.[2] The Markan scholar who sees the young man as a symbol of discipleship, failing here and restored in white at the tomb, has the support of a pattern in Mark’s own vocabulary that I will come to below.

None of these explanations deals with the detail Mark gives twice, the linen. Mark says the young man was wearing a linen cloth over his naked body, and then that he left the linen cloth and fled naked. A writer as sparing as Mark, who tells the whole trial before Pilate in fifteen verses, does not usually spend two clauses on a garment unless the garment carries something.

One further detail of Mark’s Greek deserves notice before the reading begins. The verb Mark uses for what the soldiers did to the young man, kratousin, “they seize,” is the verb he uses five verses earlier for what they did to the prisoner: “they laid hands on him and arrested him,” ekratēsan auton.[3] The arresting party took hold of two men in the garden. One of them stayed in their hands, and the other left them holding his clothes.

The Word for the Cloth

The cloth is a sindōn, a word for costly linen, used for garments of quality and for the wrapping of the dead. In the Greek translation of Judges, Samson wagers thirty sindones on his riddle, linen garments of the kind a wedding guest would prize, and in the Greek of Proverbs the capable wife makes sindones and sells them.[4] Linen was also the fabric of priestly vestments under the law of Moses, and a reader of the Greek Bible would have associated a linen garment of that kind with standing, with wealth, and with the sanctuary.[5]

Mark uses the word in only one other place. On the evening after the crucifixion, Joseph of Arimathea, a respected member of the council, went to Pilate and asked for the body, and when Pilate had confirmed that the man was dead and granted it, Joseph “bought a linen cloth, and taking down the body, wrapped it in the linen cloth, and laid it in a tomb.”[6] The word is sindōn again, twice, and it is the same word Mark used twice in the garden.

Here the reading has to be stated with care, because it would be easy to claim too much. Joseph bought the burial linen. Mark says so in as many words, agorasas sindona, “having bought a linen cloth,” and the cloth he wrapped around the body was a cloth from the market, not the one the young man left in the soldiers’ hands the night before.[7] The two pieces of linen are different pieces of linen. Whatever joins the young man in the garden to the body in the tomb, it is not the cloth itself. The link is the word, and only the word, and a reader should hold the argument that follows to that limit. Mark had a small vocabulary and used it economically, and the recurrence of sindōn may be no more than a writer reaching twice in two days of his story for the ordinary Greek for linen. I record that possibility because it is a real one.

Garments That Pass an Office

What the word can carry becomes visible when the garden is set beside the scenes in the Hebrew Bible where an office passed from one man to another through a garment. The fullest account is the death of Aaron. At Mount Hor, the Lord tells Moses to take Aaron and his son Eleazar up the mountain, strip Aaron of his vestments and put them on Eleazar, and Aaron dies there on the summit; two men come down the mountain, and the high priesthood has passed from father to son in an afternoon.[8] The vestments are the office. Whoever wears them is high priest, and the man who took them off dies without them.

Isaiah describes the same act in the royal household of Judah. The steward Shebna, who has cut himself a grand tomb in the rock, will be thrown away like a ball into a wide land, and the Lord says of his successor: “I will clothe him with your robe and bind your sash on him. I will commit your authority to his hand,” and “I will place on his shoulder the key of the house of David.”[9] Robe, sash, authority and key pass together, and with them the stewardship of the king’s house. When Elijah is taken up in the whirlwind, his mantle falls, Elisha takes it up and strikes the Jordan with it, and the prophets watching from Jericho say that the spirit of Elijah rests on Elisha.[10]

The book of Samuel adds two scenes that bear even more closely on a garden at night. When Jonathan, Saul’s son and heir, made a covenant with David, he “stripped himself of the robe that he was wearing, and gave it to David, and his armor, and even his sword and his bow and his belt.”[11] The king’s son took off the signs of his own succession and put them on the man who would reign in his place, and the tradition remembered the act as a covenant of love. Earlier, when Samuel turned to leave Saul after the king’s disobedience, Saul caught the hem of the prophet’s robe and it tore, and Samuel said, “The Lord has torn the kingdom of Israel from you this very day, and has given it to a neighbor of yours.”[12] A garment held in another man’s grip, and a garment left in it, were in Israel’s scriptures the visible form of a kingdom changing hands.

In none of these stories does the garment work like magic. It makes the transfer public. The people who see the robe on Eleazar, or the mantle in Elisha’s hand, treat the man who has it as the holder of the charge it signified, and the man who has lost it goes out of the story.

The Young Man as the Teacher

The reading of The Gospel as Mirror places Mark’s two verses in this company, and it is a reconstruction, which I mark before setting it out. The book argues that two men stood in the garden that night: the Galilean teacher, whose title “Jesus of Nazareth” the arresting party had come with, and the man the Gospels call Judas, whom the book identifies with Herod, a son of Herod the Great, known in Jerusalem as Jesus Barabbas. In John’s account of the arrest, the soldiers ask for Jesus of Nazareth and a voice answers “I am he,” and the book reads that answer as the claimant taking the teacher’s title before witnesses.

On that reading, Mark tells the same transaction from the other side, silently. The young man is the teacher. On Luke’s dating of the census, he was born in 6 CE, which made him a man in his early twenties in the year of the crucifixion, and neaniskos is the word Greek writers used for a man of that age. He was following, Mark says, and on this reading he followed the man who had just answered to his name, as far as the soldiers allowed. They seized him as one more of the prisoner’s companions, using the verb they had used for the prisoner, and he left the linen in their hands and escaped. The garment stayed with the arresting party. The name stayed with the man they were holding. And the man whose title it had been went out of the story naked, stripped of the sign of his charge, the way Aaron ended his days on Mount Hor without his vestments and Shebna lost his robe to the man who replaced him.

Mark, writing a generation later for a church in which the teacher and the claimant had become one Lord, could include the scene only without a name. That is why, on this reading, the two verses stand in his Gospel without explanation, and why Matthew and Luke, who did not understand them or understood them too well, dropped them.

The Young Man in White

Mark uses the word neaniskos once more. On the morning after the Sabbath, the women come to the tomb and find the stone rolled back, and inside they see a young man dressed in a white robe, seated on the right side, who tells them not to be alarmed: “You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here.” He tells them to go and say to the disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of them to Galilee, and they flee and say nothing to anyone.[13]

Mark has two young men in his Gospel, and only two, and they appear at the arrest and at the tomb, the first losing a linen garment and the second wearing a white robe, a stolē, the long garment of a man of standing. Commentators have read them as a pair for a long time, usually as a symbol of the disciple who fled in shame and is restored in the white of the resurrection. The Gospel as Mirror takes the pairing literally. The young man at the tomb is the young man of the garden, the teacher, who had left the linen of his charge with the soldiers on the night of the arrest, and on the morning after the Sabbath sat in the emptied tomb of the man who had borne it.

Two details support the identification, and one counts against it. Mary Magdalene was among the women at the tomb, and Mark gives no sign that she knew the young man. In John, on the same morning, she stands face to face with the risen man outside the tomb and takes him for the gardener until he speaks her name, and the word she answers with is Rabbouni, Teacher.[14] Her failure to recognize the young man in Mark is, on this reading, the same failure John describes, told from inside the tomb. The young man’s message also points where the teacher was going: “he is going ahead of you to Galilee,” which is where the teacher came from.

The detail that counts against it is the message itself. If the young man was the teacher, he told the women that “Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified,” had been raised, when on the book’s reconstruction he knew that the crucified man was dead and his body had been moved. The book offers two answers, and neither removes the difficulty. The wording of the message is Mark’s, set down a generation later by an evangelist for whom the resurrection stood at the center of the faith, and the memory beneath it may be smaller: a young man in the tomb who told the women the one they sought was not there and would be found in Galilee. And “Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified” names a title and its fate, so that a teacher speaking of his own title in the third person, as the soldiers and the placard had, told the women more than they could understand. A reader should weigh the difficulty at its full weight.

What the Two Verses Hold

At the source tier, Mark alone records a young man at the arrest wearing only a sindōn, whom the arresting party seized with the same verb they used for the prisoner, and who escaped naked, leaving the linen in their hands; Mark uses sindōn only once more, for the linen Joseph of Arimathea bought to wrap the body; and Mark’s only other neaniskos is seated in the tomb in a white robe and sends the women to Galilee. The Hebrew Bible records offices passing from one man to another through garments, at Mount Hor, in Shebna’s household, at the Jordan, and in Jonathan’s covenant with David.

At the inference tier, Mark’s two verses carry a detail, the linen, that the usual explanations do not account for, and Mark’s vocabulary joins the garden to the tomb through one word and one noun for a young man.

At the reconstruction tier, the young man was the Galilean teacher, who left the garment of his office with the men who had come for his title, while another man answered to it and was taken; Mark told the transfer in the language of the garment because he could not tell it in the language of names; and the same young man sat in the tomb three days later and sent the women to Galilee. The link between the linen in the garden and the linen in the tomb is a word and not a cloth, since Joseph bought the second at the market, and the argument holds only as far as a word can carry it. In Mark a word could carry a good deal, since he chose so few of them.

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[1]Mark 14:50–52. Biblical quotations follow the New Revised Standard Version unless otherwise noted.

[2]Amos 2:16.

[3]Mark 14:46, 51. The verb in both verses is krateō.

[4]Judg 14:12–13 in the Septuagint, ed. Alfred Rahlfs (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1935); Prov 31:24 in the Septuagint.

[5]Exod 28:39–42; Lev 16:4.

[6]Mark 15:42–46; the quotation is 15:46.

[7]Mark 15:46: kai agorasas sindona.

[8]Num 20:22–29.

[9]Isa 22:15–25; the quotations are from 22:21–22.

[10]2 Kgs 2:9–15.

[11]1 Sam 18:3–4.

[12]1 Sam 15:27–28.

[13]Mark 16:1–8; the quotation is from 16:5–6.

[14]John 20:11–16; Mark 16:1.