James and John as Protomartyrs

The idea is to use the Jericho healing as a test case for whether an Alexandrian, expanded “Mark” like the one implied by Clement’s letter could lie behind Luke’s wording. The puzzle is familiar: Luke has the blind man healed “as he drew near to Jericho” (Luke 18:35), while Mark places the miracle as Jesus is leaving the city, and Matthew agrees with Mark’s “going out” placement. Origen already noticed that the three accounts do not line up cleanly and tried to solve it both mystically and historically, suggesting that in a “mystical” sense Luke’s order is first, Mark’s second, Matthew’s third, “for it is necessary first to draw near to Jericho, then to enter it, and after these things to go out from it,” and then concluding that there were in fact three distinct healings at Jericho, one for each Gospel.

The proposal here takes a different route. It starts from Clement’s quotation of a “secret” or more spiritual Mark in which, after “And he comes into Jericho,” there was once an extra sentence: “And the sister of the youth whom Jesus loved and his mother and Salome were there, and Jesus did not receive them.” The longer form of Mark implied by Clement seems to have had a further transitional phrase (“after he comes into Jericho, he continues alone”) that inserts a deliberate pause between entering and leaving the city. That pause effectively shifts the dramatic weight of the story to the threshold of Jericho: Jesus comes to the city, pointedly refuses certain people, and then moves on alone. If Luke knew a Markan tradition shaped by that transitional wording, his “as he drew near to Jericho” could be read as focusing on the same liminal moment—the approach and boundary of the city—rather than as a flat contradiction of Mark’s location. On this reading, Luke is not misplacing the miracle but choosing a different camera angle on a narrative whose center of gravity has already been pulled toward Jericho’s edge by an Alexandrian Mark.

The force of the argument is mostly literary and source-critical. It treats the Secret Mark Jericho notice as a small but elegant key: it explains why anyone might have thought the “near Jericho” phase was where the story really happens; it fits Origen’s instinct that the sequence “near / in / out” encodes something more than geography; and it dovetails with Clement’s claim that a more spiritual Mark was circulating in Alexandria, potentially accessible to Luke if that material is genuinely early. The problem is evidentiary. The only witness to this Jericho sentence is a much later letter; using it to explain Luke’s wording means assuming the letter is authentic, that the excerpt really preserves an older Markan layer, and that Luke had contact with that tradition. Since the Jericho discrepancy can already be handled with cheaper tools—Origen’s own “three healings” solution, old/new Jericho harmonizations, or textual and translational nuances in Luke—the Secret Mark line works best here as a suggestive illustration of what an Alexandrian proto-Mark could do, not as a necessary or demonstrable source lurking behind Luke.