Enough Criticism!! Why the naked slutboy in Mark 14:51?

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
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Irish1975
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Enough Criticism!! Why the naked slutboy in Mark 14:51?

Post by Irish1975 »


And there followed him a certain young man, having a linen cloth cast about his naked body; and the young men laid hold on him: And he left the linen cloth, and fled from them naked

By canons of historical criticism, I declare this vignette embarrassing. Surely St. Mark Church’s could not have been edified, excepting it be historical fact.

O that we yearn to discover the secret mysteries of the young man’s loin cloth! We are not satisfied.

#MarkanPriority
dbz
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Re: Enough Criticism!! Why the naked slutboy in Mark 14:51?

Post by dbz »

The naked young man is an allegory for death and resurrection. Notice he is stripped naked of a linen cloak at the arrest; and appears after the resurrection in a radiant white robe. These were well known literary tropes (the body of flesh as linen garment; the resurrection body as donning a glorious white robe). I analyze this in my chapter on the Empty Tomb legend in The Empty Tomb. The man’s anonymity allows him to stand in for everyone, including Mark’s readers/hearers.

There were certainly also secret teachings. Paul says so. And Mark does as well. But often we can’t know what they were. And speculation is idle. When we have evidence, we can say. When we don’t, we can’t. And here we have some evidence. Whether there was more to it, unknown.
Comment by Richard Carrier—27 October 2019—per "Mark's Use of Paul's Epistles". Richard Carrier Blogs. 25 October 2019.
Charles Wilson
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Re: Enough Criticism!! Why the naked slutboy in Mark 14:51?

Post by Charles Wilson »

Charles Wilson wrote: Wed Nov 16, 2016 7:47 pm Mark 14: 51 - 53 (RSV):

[51] And a young man followed him, with nothing but a linen cloth about his body; and they seized him,
[52] but he left the linen cloth and ran away naked.

Josephus, War..., Thackeray trans.:

"The promoters of the mourning for the doctors stood in a body in the temple, procuring recruits for their faction."

The next sentence states that this "...alarmed Archelaus..." as if the entire reason for calling in the soldiers was because of the recruits. Again, a very straightforward Logic appears. The youth is given a linen garment, emblematic of a recruit for the Priesthood. The Tribune in charge of a cohort is called in to the Temple and the Altar and they are stoned. Archelaus sends in the troops. 3000+ die. Of course the youth ran away and left the linen cloth. He's running for his life. He probably didn't make it to safety.
andrewcriddle
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Re: Enough Criticism!! Why the naked slutboy in Mark 14:51?

Post by andrewcriddle »

Irish1975 wrote: Fri Jun 02, 2023 3:51 pm
And there followed him a certain young man, having a linen cloth cast about his naked body; and the young men laid hold on him: And he left the linen cloth, and fled from them naked

By canons of historical criticism, I declare this vignette embarrassing. Surely St. Mark Church’s could not have been edified, excepting it be historical fact.

O that we yearn to discover the secret mysteries of the young man’s loin cloth! We are not satisfied.

#MarkanPriority
There may be a general issue here. In the Biblical world (and maybe in the ancient near east in general) involuntary nakedness tends IMO to be more about disgrace dishonour and disenpowerment than about sex.

andrew Criddle
nightshadetwine
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Re: Enough Criticism!! Why the naked slutboy in Mark 14:51?

Post by nightshadetwine »

dbz wrote: Fri Jun 02, 2023 4:15 pm
The naked young man is an allegory for death and resurrection. Notice he is stripped naked of a linen cloak at the arrest; and appears after the resurrection in a radiant white robe. These were well known literary tropes (the body of flesh as linen garment; the resurrection body as donning a glorious white robe). I analyze this in my chapter on the Empty Tomb legend in The Empty Tomb. The man’s anonymity allows him to stand in for everyone, including Mark’s readers/hearers.

There were certainly also secret teachings. Paul says so. And Mark does as well. But often we can’t know what they were. And speculation is idle. When we have evidence, we can say. When we don’t, we can’t. And here we have some evidence. Whether there was more to it, unknown.
Comment by Richard Carrier—27 October 2019—per "Mark's Use of Paul's Epistles". Richard Carrier Blogs. 25 October 2019.
I agree with Carrier on this. Initiates into mysteries would usually receive some kind of new clothing after being ritually reborn. The Egyptian mortuary ritual seems to be the earliest form of this mystery initiation. The mortuary ritual was referred to as an "initiation into the mysteries of the netherworld". The initiate is ritually identified with Osiris or the sun god (the two deities that experience and conquer death) during the mortuary ritual. So the boy fleeing and losing his garment when Jesus is arrested and then reappearing during the resurrection with a white robe is like the boy was initiated or died and resurrected with Jesus like in baptism. In Egyptian texts the resurrected remove the mummy wrappings and are given white garments after passing the judgement of the dead.

Mummies & Magic: The Funerary Arts of Ancient Egypt (Dallas Museum of Art, 1993), Sue D'Auria, Peter Lacovara :
The underlying idea was that life can only exist, be renewed, and be regained through death. Not only human beings, but also such gods as Re and Osiris were mortal: They had life in the sense that they had died and arisen from the dead. The renewal, that mysterious process that Kristensen called life from death, came about outside the created world in the unfathomable depth and darkness of the primeval waters (Nun) that surround this world. It is in that mysterious space that the deceased could live again. One sun-hymn reads: "How beautiful is thy shining forth in the horizon. We are in renewal of life. We have entered into Nun He has renovated (us) to one who is young for the first time. The (one) has been stripped off, the other put on." The last sentence has been interpreted to mean, “The old man is cast off and the new man is put on.“ It may also call to mind the mummy-bandages that are thrown off in the decisive moment of resurrection and the white garments that the glorified dead wear in depictions of the Underworld... Mummy-bindings had to be removed at the moment of resurrection. Mummification prepared the body for resurrection in the Underworld and protected it in its journey to that mysterious space. Mummy-bindings were both protective attire for the "space traveler" and, at the same time, the bonds of death. They may be called the bonds of Seth, because Seth was the god of death, who brought death into the world by murdering Osiris...
"Death and Initiation in the Funerary Religion of Ancient Egypt", Jan Assmann in Religion and Philosophy in Ancient Egypt(Yale Egyptological Studies 3, 1989):
In the initiation of Lucius, the voyage through the underworld stands for a symbolic death, followed on the next morning by his resurrection as the sun-god: adorned with a palm wreath, he appears to the cheering crowd, just as the justified deceased at the judgement of the dead... No one doubts that the initiation rites of the Isis mysteries, as Apuleius ventures to describe them, are deeply rooted in the uniquely elaborated rituals and conceptions of Egyptian funerary religion. The same holds true for other initiation rituals. Seen from this aspect, a relationship between death and initiation is not disputed...
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Irish1975
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Re: Enough Criticism!! Why the naked slutboy in Mark 14:51?

Post by Irish1975 »

Regulars will have surmised I was being semi-satirical in the title and OP; ho hum. Nonetheless, the topic presents interesting questions from any perspective.
Irish1975 wrote: Fri Jun 02, 2023 3:51 pm
And there followed him a certain young man, having a linen cloth cast about his naked body; and the young men laid hold on him: And he left the linen cloth, and fled from them naked

By canons of historical criticism, I declare this vignette embarrassing. Surely St. Mark Church’s could not have been edified, excepting it be historical fact.

O that we yearn to discover the secret mysteries of the young man’s loin cloth! We are not satisfied.

#MarkanPriority
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billd89
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Clue: The Naked Slutboy, quitting the Krater, w/o his Othoni?

Post by billd89 »

Failed try, older and my own.

A Christos stripped of his loincloth is basically a fleeing Therapeut. Lost his exomis, maybe? Problem: 'when your guru is gone' the cover's blown.

In Egypt during this period, a statue of the 'Young God' (ἄγαλμα νεανίσκος) was called an "Apollonius." At Pelusium in the Jewish Siriad, very recent archaeological evidence attests to this fact: Dioscasius Dios Apollonius = "God of Kasios, God Apollonius". So an Apollonius (even from ample literary evidence) was naturally an ephebos, the young god idealized as a nude adolescent in the 1st C. (This is likewise the Jewish Hadad-rimmon/Baal-Rimmon: ancient Semitic Adon of Palestine and Syria.) I would also note that a νεανίσκος was coincidentally a 'servant', like lolaos to Herakles in Libyan myth: we're not mistaken to see Eshmun/Asclepius in this Therapeutic role.

I've already shared a bronze example discovered in Gaza in c.2014, repeatedly:
Image

Read defensively, Philo Judaeus reacts as though this ribald criticism had already tainted the Therapeuts' reputation; see his own belabored denial in De Vita Contemplativa 52:
ἐφεδρεύουσι δ’ ἄλλοι, μειράκια πρωτογένεια, τοὺς ἰούλους ἄρτι ἀνθοῦντες, ἀθύρματα πρὸ μικροῦ παιδεραστῶν γεγονότες, ἠσκημένοι σφόδρα περιέργως πρὸς τὰς βαρυτέρας ὑπηρεσίας, ἐπίδειξις ἑστιατόρων εὐπορίας, ὡς ἴσασιν οἱ χρώμενοι, ὡς δὲ ἔχει τὸ ἀληθές, ἀπειροκαλίας.

On the Therapeuts' garment specifically, see De Vita Contemplativa 38:
... ἐξωμὶς δὲ θέρους ἢ ὀθόνη.

ἐξωμὶς/exomis = typically a simple/shabby sleeve-less tunic, notably employed for effect in Greek comedy.
θέρους = in summer
ὀθόνη/othóni is a fine linen drape, and probably an Egyptian product exported to Palestine.

This OP's title made me recall the Early 20th C. 'naturalist' photographer Wilhelm von Gloeden:
Image

Get a hoodie, brah. Note curious text on front: "Therapeutae" & "Ascelpius". Maybe.
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neilgodfrey
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Re: Enough Criticism!! Why the naked slutboy in Mark 14:51?

Post by neilgodfrey »

If we return to some good old-fashioned German criticism we will likely conclude that the passage is an interpolation.

1838, Christian Gottlob Wilke, explained the reasons:

1. the passage is about the fleeing of the disciples when the authorities come to arrest Jesus -- the flight of the young man is an irrelevant intrusion

2. the account of the flight of the young man is out of place in the way the story is worded: it suggests the authorities were attempting to arrest the followers of Jesus before the arrest of Jesus

3. the point of the story is to tell us that only one person followed Jesus, viz Peter.

4. the story begins with the express statement that Jesus went with the twelve disciples only, and then says that it was those twelve who fled -- leaving the introduction of the young man out of context.

Bruno Bauer drew attention to Wilke's conclusion and added that no other evangelist thought it fit to repeat the episode -- suggesting it was not there to begin with. I would add that Matthew loved to bring in as many explicit prophecy fulfillments as he could and even he passed up this opportunity to refer to the Amos prophecy of the flight of the youth naked.

Conclusion -- it was never part of the original gospel.


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and Bauer, Bruno: Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker. 3 (translation)


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Irish1975
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Re: Enough Criticism!! Why the naked slutboy in Mark 14:51?

Post by Irish1975 »

ἐπὶ γυμνοῦ is superfluous if Mark were simply saying, he wore linen, or he wore a linen tunic, shirt, etc. Instead it’s, he wore a linen cloth over his nakedness. It can be so hard to recognize sexual subject matter in the scriptures, since these matters are hardly found in the Biblical world; but hardly can a more becoming interpretation be put upon this perplexing interlude.
lclapshaw
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Re: Enough Criticism!! Why the naked slutboy in Mark 14:51?

Post by lclapshaw »

Irish1975 wrote: Sat Jun 03, 2023 1:10 pm Regulars will have surmised I was being semi-satirical in the title and OP; ho hum.
Don't feel too bad, no one laughed at my Tertullian joke either. :/
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