Roy Kotansky: Back to the Garden (of Gethsemane) Discussion

The core idea is that a small, very specific copying mistake in the “Longer Gospel of Mark” passage (LGM 1) could be doing most of the work that people have been attributing to theology or sexuality. A 2024 article by Roy D. Kotansky argues that two short segments in the Bethany resurrection story preserved in the so-called Secret Gospel of Mark were transposed by a later scribe; putting them back in their likely original order produces a much more natural Markan narrative, aligns tightly with known resurrection templates, and undercuts the standard erotic reading of the text. 

The longer Secret Mark excerpt, known from a letter ascribed to Clement of Alexandria, tells of Jesus raising a rich youth from a tomb in a garden at Bethany and later receiving him at night, “wearing a linen cloth over his naked body,” to teach him “the mystery of the kingdom of God.”  Because Clement calls this an advanced, “mystic” or “secret” gospel (μυστικόν εὐαγγέλιον), interpreters have long treated its oddities—especially the night-time scene with the linen-clad youth—as invitations to read sexual or esoteric ritual into the episode. The letter famously instructs its recipient that, faced with heretical misuses of the text, one should “even deny it on oath,” adding the maxim, “For, ‘Not all true things are to be said to all men.’” 

Kotansky’s proposal is that the weirdness of LGM 1 is less a deliberate signal of “hidden rites” and more a side effect of a scribal transposition. In the transmitted text, the loud cry from inside the tomb appears before Jesus has rolled away the stone and entered, and the “after six days” command and the youth’s evening visit are tightly jammed together, making it look as though the youth, freshly raised, almost immediately spends a night alone with Jesus in a way that has struck many readers as sexually charged. By reordering two small segments so that the sequence becomes “approach the tomb → roll away the stone → enter → loud cry → raising,” the miracle falls into a familiar pattern parallel to other resurrection stories (including John’s Lazarus), removing the odd pre-emptive shout from a still-sealed grave. And by separating the “after six days” instruction from the actual evening visit, the scene becomes a delayed rendezvous back in the same garden, now aligned with Gethsemane and the mysterious νεανίσκος (young man) of Mark 14:51–52 who flees naked, leaving his linen cloth behind. 

On this reading, the youth of Secret Mark is not primarily a cipher for an erotic initiation but a Lazarus-type disciple whose story arcs through resurrection, instruction, failure in Gethsemane, and perhaps reappearance as the white-robed youth at the tomb. The linen cloth and the repeated νεανίσκος language become Markan literary motifs rather than clues to a sub rosa sex rite. The emendation integrates the fragment more cleanly into Mark’s passion narrative and into Johannine resurrection imagery, making the passage look less like a free-floating oddity and more like a sophisticated variant strand within early Markan tradition. 

Where this matters for the authenticity debate is in the way it rebalances the arguments. If the strangest features of LGM 1 can be explained as routine scribal phenomena—misplacement of segments, marginal re-insertion in the wrong place, confusion around repeated “tomb” phrases—then less weight needs to be placed on psychological scenarios about a modern forger deliberately crafting a homoerotic bait text. Internal coherence improves on ordinary text-critical grounds, regardless of whether one dates the underlying composition in the first century, the second, or much later. At the same time, smoothing the narrative does not, by itself, prove that the letter is genuinely Clement’s or that the excerpt goes back to the historical evangelist Mark; a clever modern fabricator could, in principle, write a text that also benefits from a plausible emendation. So the strongest part of the idea is not the leap from “good emendation” to “unquestionable authenticity,” but the more modest claim that the passage makes better sense as a Markan-Johannine resurrection-discipleship tableau than as a purposely titillating fringe gospel.

Taken seriously, this approach nudges the conversation away from fixating on scandal and toward the quieter work of reconstructing how a single “mystic gospel” episode might have been copied, scrambled, and partially preserved. It honors the old Clementine warning—“not all true things are to be said to all men”—not by imagining a secret sex ritual veiled from the uninitiated, but by suggesting that what has been veiled from us may instead be a carefully crafted narrative about death, discipleship, and failure in a garden, half-hidden by the accidents of transmission.