The Demonstrably Non-Sexual Meaning of "Nakeds with Naked" in Christianity

One way to see what’s gone wrong in the modern fight over “Secret Mark” is to notice how small a patch of Christian language we’re actually talking about. A single phrase – “nakeds with the Naked [One]” – has been made to bear the weight of an entire psycho-drama about suppressed sexuality, closeted scholars, and homoerotic initiation. The thread you’re mining basically says: slow down. Before you psychoanalyze the scene, at least learn how Christians have actually used “naked” language for the last couple of millennia.

The first move is simply lexical: there is a big, boring, and very well-attested Christian idiom about nakedness that has nothing to do with sex. Late antique Latin can talk about nudus nudum Christum sequi, “following the naked Christ naked,” as a slogan for radical poverty and renunciation. Byzantine liturgy can speak of being “nakeds to the Naked One” in contexts where the point is martyrdom, stripping off possessions and protections, or standing undefended before the judgment of God. The imagery keeps circling the same cluster of ideas: exposing oneself to God without ornament, giving up wealth and social armor, walking into suffering with nothing but the cross. It is about vulnerability and purity, not titillation.

Behind that sits an even older philosophical and Jewish-Alexandrian backstory. Plato’s Statesman famously imagines a primordial age in which human beings lived without houses, clothing, or bedding – a kind of pre-conventional state that later Platonists and moralists could use as a symbol for simplicity. Alexandrian Judaism, and then Alexandrian Christianity, were very good at turning that into allegory: the “naked” soul is the one that has stripped off opinions, passions, and cultural costumes and stands in its own truth before the Logos. When Clement talks about laying aside the “tunics of skin,” or when later Platonizing Christians talk about leaving behind mixtures to approach the Unmixed, they’re playing in this sandbox. Nakedness is a metaphor for being un-encrusted by habit and vice.

You can see how naturally that slides into praxis. Baptism in many early communities involved actual disrobing: you literally undressed to go down into the water, as a sign of putting off the old person and emerging clothed in Christ. Martyr stories love to dwell on bodies stripped for torture, not to leer at them but to insist that the martyr’s only real covering is the Spirit. Syriac writers who explore “holy folly” draw careful lines between madness that is a theatrical stripping of norms for Christ and actual disorder; again, the exposed or “foolish” body is a symbol for a soul freed from the world’s scripts.

Once you map all of that, the phrase “nakeds with the Naked [One]” stops looking exotic or automatically erotic. It sounds like standard ascetical shorthand: those who have stripped themselves of possessions, passions, and pretenses standing before the one who is “naked” in the sense of being simple, unmixed Truth. The plural and singular matter here. A group of “nakeds” with a single “Naked [One]” reads very naturally as a circle of purified initiates gathered around Christ in prayer, baptism, or instruction; it reads much less naturally as code for a private sexual tryst between Jesus and a single youth.

That doesn’t mean the metaphor is always safely non-literal. The evidence the thread gathers includes apocryphal texts where people are told to undress, and later ritual and mystical sources that blur the line between metaphor and act. The baptismal undressing is both symbolic and very physical. Claims that the Jewish high priest entered the Holy of Holies literally unclothed are textually shaky and better treated as later allegory. All of that is a good reminder that “naked” is a flexible sign in ancient religious discourse; it can be ritual, metaphor, or both at once. But the burden of proof shifts. Given how thick the ascetical and mystical usage is, you don’t get to assume sexual content just because the word “naked” appears in a text.

And that is where the implications for the Secret Mark fight bite. A huge amount of the heat in that debate has come from erotic readings of the “night with the youth” scene and its accompanying phrase. If you let the broader lexicon back into view, the line becomes far more at home in a baptismal or initiatory setting: the catechumen who has “loved him” and “begged to be with him” is the one who is now allowed, as a “naked,” to stand with others before the “Naked One,” Jesus, stripped for death and burial, stripped of worldly honor. The baptized are “nakeds” because they have put off their old self; Christ is “Naked” because he is unadorned Truth and because in the Passion he himself was literally disrobed.

None of that proves that the letter is ancient or that there ever was a longer Mark. Those questions still depend on ink and hand, codex habits and Clementine diction, not on how we choose to gloss a single adjective. What the thread really does is to pull one prop out from under the more lurid reconstructions. If a perfectly coherent, deeply traditional, non-sexual reading of “nakeds with the Naked [One]” is available – and the dossier shows that it is – then the erotic charge around that phrase belongs more to modern imagination than to ancient idiom. We’re back to where we probably should have been all along: arguing about authenticity on material and philological grounds, rather than on the thrill of what we think the word “naked” must mean.