Theophlylact on the "Secret" Section of the Gospel of Mark (Corresponding to the End of Chapter 10)

The material here turns on the possibility that some pre-modern readers already sensed a “secret approach” by James and John in the Markan request scene, and that this perception might dovetail with wider traditions about the Zebedean brothers, martyrdom, and esoteric instruction. The argument begins from the observation that a medieval commentator, reading Mark 10:35 (“Then James and John, the sons of Zebedee, come to him…”), glosses their coming as a quiet, semi-hidden move. In the Matthean parallel he writes that the brothers “persuaded their mother to approach Him, as they themselves were afraid to approach openly. For they too approached secretly, as Mark says (Mk 10:35), writing that James and John came to Him, meaning that they approached Him secretly and by themselves.” In other words, the bare Markan notice that “James and John came to him” is taken not as a neutral stage direction but as code for a private, almost clandestine audience apart from the rest of the Twelve.

That reading sits alongside a larger reconstruction in which James and John are remembered, in more than one late-antique and early-medieval strand, as joint protomartyrs after Stephen, and in which at least one “John” is both priestly and martyred while another Johannine line, nourished by the Acts of John, insists on a non-martyred, hyper-ascetic, long-lived figure. On this view, Mark 10:35–45—where the brothers ask for places at Jesus’ right and left and are told they will drink his cup and share his baptism—can be heard as a cryptic prefiguration of their martyrdom and as a narrative template for private, more demanding teaching. The suggestion is that a perceived “secret approach” in Mark 10 already offered a precedent for later talk of “secret” Markan material: once the Zebedeans were seen as slipping away from the group to seek a privileged word about suffering glory, it became easier to imagine a Markan tradition in which select disciples received further catechesis—up to and including the kind of expanded, more spiritual Mark presupposed by Clement’s story about material reserved “for those who are being perfected.” In that light, the Theophylact-style gloss on Mark 10:35 is not mere homiletic embroidery but a small window into how Christian readers could naturalize the idea of discrete, even hidden, instruction built into the Gospel narrative itself.