I was recently reading a volume in Oxford’s Very Short Introduction series on the New Testament by Bible scholar Luke Timothy Johnson. In Johnson’s discussion of the Gospel of Mark he mentions the scene where Jesus is arrested and how “Among those following [Jesus] was a young man with nothing on but a linen cloth. They [the Roman soldiers] tried to seize him; but he slipped out of the linen cloth and ran away naked.”

I must have read this before but it’s not a detail I remembered. According to a footnote in the Oxford Study Edition of the New English Bible (the one I keep on hand for consulting on such matters) “The young man appears only in Mk. and his identity is unknown.” Turning to the Internet I found a wealth of further commentary on the passage. Over the years the young man has been identified as (and this is not a complete list): Lazarus (the young man’s “linen cloth” or sindon is the same as that used for the burial of the dead), the owner of the garden of Gethsemane (only rich people had linen cloth), and even Mark himself (according to the Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges: “The minuteness of the details given points to him [Mark]. Only one well acquainted with the scene from personal knowledge, probably as an eyewitness, would have introduced into his account of it so slight and seemingly so trivial an incident as this.”)

What I didn’t find except in one other source was the spin Johnson puts on it, identifying the young man with the figure (he’s not said to be an angel in Mark) who the women later find at the empty tomb of Jesus:

Careful readers recognize the messenger at the tomb. He is described by Mark as “a young man sitting at the right side, clothed in a white robe” (16:5). Mark wants readers to understand that the young man who fled naked (14:51) is already restored, as the first human witness to the resurrection.

I don’t think Johnson means that the young man sitting in the empty tomb is literally the same young man who fled naked from Jesus’s arrest. Though maybe he does. The same Greek word for a young man, neaniskos, is used to describe them, but that seems a generic label to me. In any event, I think you’d have to be a careful reader indeed to recognize the association. If this is what Mark wanted readers to understand from the incident I think he might have tried harder, as it doesn’t seem as though many readers over the years have made the connection. I raised the matter to a pair of retired ministers I know and they’d never heard of it, though they were familiar of the identification of the naked man with Mark.

Well, the Bible is a big house with many mansions and I don’t think there’s any end to the various interpretations and meanings that have been put on it. And I’m not saying I disagree with Johnson’s reading. I only flagged it because it struck me as odd, and because Johnson presents it so matter-of-factly. Also, having gone through the effort of looking into it, it’s probably going to be stuck in my head forever now.