Roy Kotansky, Back to the Garden (of Gethsemane) 2024

What if the “most scandalous” gospel passage of the twentieth century turns out not to be about sex at all, but about a botched bit of copying that hides a resurrection scene leading straight back to Gethsemane? That is the basic wager in Roy D. Kotansky’s article, “Back to the Garden (of Gethsemane): Restoring the Text and Meaning of Secret Mark,” published in Early Christianity 15.4 (2024), 478–513. The piece is both a defense of the Mar Saba letter’s antiquity and a detailed proposal for how a couple of swapped sentences in the fragment have distorted our reading of the so-called “Secret Gospel of Mark.”

An ancient line from Clement sets the tone for the whole discussion: “For not all true things are to be said to all people.” Kotansky’s goal is to show that what Secret Mark “tells” and “doesn’t tell” has been badly misunderstood, not least because the text we’ve been reading is internally scrambled.

He starts by revisiting the authenticity question, but not in the usual psychological or motive-driven terms. As a papyrologist and epigrapher who actually worked with Morton Smith on magical papyri, he zeroes in on the physical and scribal features of the Mar Saba pages. The letter’s hand, its lineation, its corrections and crowding in the margins, and the way the text is squeezed into the end leaves of a seventeenth-century printed book all look to him like exactly what they claim to be: an eighteenth-century monastic copy of an older text, not a mid-twentieth-century performance piece. On this basis he bluntly says that the manuscript evidence “points unequivocally to authenticity” of the letter as an old object, even if one still wants to debate the Clementine authorship and the content.

But the real heart of the article is textual, not forensic. Kotansky argues that “careful attention to the layout of the text reveals hidden evidence of transcriptional errors in the positioning of certain passages.” The scribe who copied Clement’s letter into the back of the Voss Ignatius volume, he suggests, accidentally switched the order of two little blocks of sentences. Later editors and translators, including Smith, then treated the misordered text as if it were deliberate, building elaborate interpretations—especially erotic ones—on what is in fact a corruption.

He focuses on the longer of the two Secret Mark excerpts, the famous Bethany scene in which Jesus raises a rich young man from a tomb and later teaches him the “mystery of the kingdom of God” at night. In the transmitted Greek, the sequence runs roughly like this: Jesus goes to the tomb in a garden at the young man’s sister’s plea, a loud cry comes from inside, Jesus rolls away the stone, goes in, grasps the youth’s hand, and raises him. The young man looks at Jesus, loves him, and begs to be with him. They go to the youth’s house because he is rich. Then “after six days” Jesus gives him a command; that evening the youth comes to Jesus wearing only a linen sheet over his naked body, and Jesus teaches him “the mystery of the kingdom of God.”

Kotansky proposes that two short segments—marked A and B in his analysis—have been misplaced in this chain. The error, he thinks, can be seen right on the photographs: marginal letters and cramped insertions show where the Mar Saba copyist seems to have lost and then re-inserted parts of the text, but in the wrong place. By “simply switching a pair of sentences” and relocating a second, longer block to where the narrative logic demands it, the story suddenly tightens, a dangling reference to “the garden” makes sense, and the connection to canonical Mark and John becomes explicit.

First, he re-orders the opening of the pericope so that the loud cry from the tomb comes after Jesus has rolled away the stone and gone in, not before. This small change removes an oddly timed miracle (why is someone shouting inside a sealed tomb before Jesus acts?) and restores a more natural resurrection sequence: approach, open, enter, cry, raising.

Second, and more dramatically, he moves the “after six days” instruction and its fulfilment. In the transmitted text, Jesus gives the command, and then immediately “when evening came, the young man comes to him” in the same verse block. Kotansky argues that, in the original, the command belongs at the end of the Bethany episode, just before Clement’s “six days later” temporal marker in Mark’s travel narrative, and that the evening visit belongs later, in connection with Gethsemane. When the two are separated and re-positioned, the story now reads as follows in his reconstruction:

Jesus raises the young man in a garden-tomb at Bethany. After some days, and after Jesus has withdrawn “to the other side of the Jordan,” he “orders him after six days to come back to the garden at night.” Only then, at the right narrative moment, “when it was evening,” does the young man return, wearing nothing but a linen sheet over his naked body, and Jesus teaches him the mystery of the kingdom.

With that move, the “garden” of the resurrection and the “garden” of the night-time meeting become one and the same place: Gethsemane. Kotansky connects this not only with Mark’s own passion narrative but also with John’s Lazarus story. In John, Jesus raises Lazarus at Bethany, then retreats to the region across the Jordan, and only later comes back to Bethany near Passover (John 11–12). Kotansky sees Secret Mark’s raised youth as a Markan cousin of Lazarus, and he points out that the mention of Jesus withdrawing to the “other side of the Jordan” and the “after six days” time reference line up strikingly with John’s sequence when you place the sentences where he thinks they originally stood.

The payoff is big. In his reading, the youth of Secret Mark is not a random rich disciple or a cipher for a homoerotic ritual, but a Lazarus-figure who passes through two linked initiations in one “garden”: first, from death to life at his tomb; second, from fear to discipleship in the dark of Gethsemane. The infamous “naked youth” of Mark 14:51–52, who flees the arrest leaving his linen cloth behind, becomes the same young man—now failing his test. The white-robed youth at the empty tomb in Mark 16:5 may then be the narrative echo of his restoration. This could create a tight symbolic arc: burial-linen, baptismal-linen, resurrection-linen, all woven around a single unnamed disciple whose story was mostly stripped out of canonical Mark but left behind in a secondary Alexandrian version.

For Kotansky, this reconstruction also drains much of the erotic charge that has dominated popular and scholarly discussion. If the crucial sentences were not where we have been reading them, then the image of a newly raised youth immediately spending the night alone with Jesus in nothing but a linen cloth dissolves. The scene becomes, instead, a delayed, symbol-laden return to the place of Jesus’ own agony, shaped by baptismal and eschatological motifs rather than by sexual innuendo. The “mystery of the kingdom of God” that Jesus teaches is a mystery of dying and rising—his and the youth’s—not a secret initiation into forbidden pleasures.

None of this, of course, settles the big external questions. The physical manuscript is still missing; the Nea Sion notice remains a mediated echo rather than a fully independent witness; and the larger forgery debate continues, with substantial voices on both sides.  Kotansky himself knows this, and he frames his proposal as a contribution to how we read the text we have, not as a magic proof of origin. But his article insists on two important points for anyone following the Secret Mark saga.

First, that the letter and its excerpts have to be read as artifacts with a copying history. The Mar Saba scribe was capable of making mistakes in ordering lines, and those mistakes can be detected and, at least in part, corrected by paying attention to layout and narrative logic.

Second, that once you make those corrections, the “Secret Gospel” looks much less like an outlier concocted to shock modern sensibilities and much more like a creative but coherent variant within the orbit of Mark and John—a garden text that brings us “back to Gethsemane” by way of Bethany and back again.

In that sense, the paper is a reminder that secrecy in early Christianity was never just about hiding embarrassing material. It was also about structuring who was ready to hear which version of a story, and when. Kotansky’s reconstructed Secret Mark offers one more version of the Jesus story to reckon with: one where the most unsettling thing is not a possibly erotic night lesson, but the possibility that a misplaced sentence has kept us from seeing a carefully crafted narrative about death, discipleship, and a garden where everything is decided.