Burial Shroud

Stephen Goranson's idea is to question whether the reconstructed Longer Gospel of Mark is deliberately playing with the image of a burial shroud, so that the νεανίσκος who returns “wrapped in a linen cloth over his naked body” is effectively re-entering the story in the very garment that anticipates, and then yields to, Jesus’ own σινδών. In the restored sequence, once two miscopied lines are transposed, the Bethany episode falls into a standard resurrection pattern—stone rolled away, voice, entry, raising—and the youth’s linen cloth becomes the narrative thread that binds together his raising, his later nocturnal visit in the garden, his flight in Mark 14:51–52, and the burial and empty tomb scenes in Mark 15:46 and 16:5.  The objection is that this seems to require a “used shroud,” which feels implausible as reportage. The rejoinder is that the text is not asking us to imagine somebody literally reusing a corpse’s winding sheet so much as to recognize a tightly worked symbol: the same σινδών that covers the anonymous youth “upon his naked body” (περιβεβλημένος σινδόνα ἐπὶ γυμνοῦ) at the arrest scene is the kind of fine linen in which Jesus is wrapped for burial, explicitly glossed by commentators as “a fine linen garment, or shroud, something like that in which the young man fled the night before.” On this reading, the cloth is not a prop but a theological device: it marks a figure who passes through death, initiation, failure, and restoration, and it visually bridges arrest, burial, and empty tomb. Ancient readers were used to seeing linen garments symbolically charged—one early commentator can say that “the whip and the linen and the napkin and all such things form an image of the power and energy of the Holy Spirit”—so the proposal treats the reused shroud not as a logistical problem but as a piece of Markan typology. If that restoration is right, the enigmatic youth of Secret Mark and canonical Mark is less an erotic cipher and more a narrative hinge: a baptized, raised disciple whose linen cloth is handed on, as it were, to Jesus in death and then left behind in the empty tomb as a sign that both have passed through the mystery the gospel proclaims.