Chapter Four

Naked with the Naked One

Chapter Four

Naked with the Naked One

After several chapters spent weighing what others have said, it is time to put my own cards on the table. I do not claim certainty about every detail that follows. Some of what I propose remains hypothetical. But the broad direction of the argument seems to me clear: the most scandalous reading of the Letter to Theodore rests on a fragile interpretation of a few Greek words.

The gospel referred to in the Letter to Theodore as the “mystic gospel of Mark” was probably not originally known by a formal title such as “According to Mark.” Like the oldest forms of the evangelist’s text, it may simply have been understood as “the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” The gospel belonged first to Christ. Mark’s connection to it was preserved by tradition, usage, and ecclesiastical memory, not necessarily by a written title fixed at the head of the text.

Something like this confusion may already be visible in the ancient heresiological compendium usually called the Philosophumena. On the one hand, as I read that work, it describes a sect whose canon appears to have included an edition of the Gospel of Mark suffused with mystical interpretation, alongside the letters of Paul. On the other hand, it also discusses a group directly associated with “Mark,” refers to secret baptismal rites administered by their “bishop,” and says that they never tell the truth but “always deny” the very things they know. Both notices seem to me to resemble Clement’s description of the Alexandrian “mystic” Gospel of Mark in the Letter to Theodore.

These are conclusions I have reached after years of research, but I have not published them elsewhere in this form. The reason is simple: I am not entirely sure that I can yet prove them. My larger theory involves a Pauline culture, a mystical reading of Mark, and perhaps even the possibility that Paul himself stood behind the figure of the youth who dies and is raised in the longer Markan passage quoted by Clement. That is a large claim. It requires more than an instinct.

Had I been trained differently, perhaps I would be more willing to publish hunches as discoveries. But the history of Secret Mark is already full of hunches hardened into facts. Fifty years of conjecture, suspicion, and biographical speculation have done real damage. The cost of theory-mongering has been high.

The question of authority therefore lies at the heart of the Letter to Theodore controversy. Who is allowed merely to have an opinion, and who is allowed to transform an opinion into an authoritative judgment? How did otherwise serious scholars come to advance claims that, on inspection, rest on little more than insinuation? The answer, I think, has something to do with the dangers of assumed authority.

When one is an undergraduate looking up at the world of scholarship, the rules of academic argument can appear clear and unbreakable. But once one has spent time inside the system, one sees that some of the guardrails are more flexible than they first appeared. Reputation, institutional connections, editorial sympathy, and disciplinary fashion can matter as much as evidence. Sometimes they matter more.

Quesnell’s relationship with the Catholic Biblical Quarterly helped bring into print the germinal form of his conspiracy theory, and that theory became the seedbed for many later suspicions about Secret Mark. Similar things can be said about much of what followed. Otherwise, how did we reach the point where “suspicion,” undefined and unproven, could help lead to the disappearance of the very manuscript under discussion?

Before speculating about how Clement’s letter might be authentic, we should begin with a simpler point: there is no homosexuality in the Letter to Theodore.

The idea that Secret Mark might be a “gay gospel” was, ironically, an idea Morton Smith himself helped make possible. His translation shaped the reception of the text from the beginning. The decisive phrase was rendered by him as “naked man with naked man.” Once the words were translated that way, readers naturally assumed that Clement was referring to Jesus and the unnamed young man in the longer Alexandrian passage. The phrase seemed to name a scene of two naked males together at night.

That assumption is understandable. Clement’s denial comes immediately after his quotation from the gospel text, and the referent is not perfectly clear. But understandable does not mean correct.

The manuscript, as read by experts familiar with Greek handwriting of this period, does not say “naked man with naked man.” It says something much closer to “naked ones with the naked one”: γυμνοὶ γυμνῷ. In plain English, this can mean “the naked ones with the Naked One,” that is, the apostles or martyrs stripped before Christ.

For the phrase to mean “naked man with naked man,” the final letter of the first word would have to be a sigma, an “s” sound. But the letter is not only accented, which points to a vowel rather than a consonant; it also lacks the expected shape of a sigma in this hand. A sigma would require an additional stroke at the top, moving in the opposite direction, roughly analogous to the top curve of our letter “s.” That is not what appears in the manuscript.

Smith never adequately explains why he read the word as masculine singular rather than plural. His reading seems to have been governed by his interpretation of the surrounding material. He thought the phrase referred to the young man and Jesus. But if the word is plural, the reference is not to two naked men spending the night together. It is to something else.

And that “something else” is not difficult to identify. The phrase appears in the traditional Greek Orthodox calendar for June 29, the feast of the apostles. In that festal language, the apostles are described as stripped of mortal and corruptible nature, communing with the Logos, and being mystically united to Christ.

The Synaxarion passage reads:

“And thus, stripping off the whole mortal and corruptible nature, and, naked with the naked one (γυμνοὶ γυμνῷ) and pure with the purest one, having communed with the Word, they were still more perfectly and mystically united and fitted together with him. Just as he is in the Father and the Father is one in him, so also the Apostles are in the Lord Jesus, and the Lord is one in them.”

This is the key point: γυμνοὶ γυμνῷ was not automatically obscene language. It could belong to an entirely orthodox Christian vocabulary of martyrdom, purification, and union with Christ. To be “naked with the naked one” meant to be stripped of mortal life and brought before the naked and pure Logos. The nakedness was not sexual exposure. It was the final stripping away of mortality.

This gives us a better starting point for the phrase in the Letter to Theodore.

Clement is answering Theodore’s question about a longer passage in the Alexandrian Gospel of Mark. He says that he will answer by using the exact words of the Gospel and by refuting what has been falsely said:

I shall not hesitate to answer the questions you have asked, refuting the falsifications by the very words of the Gospel.

Clement then identifies where the longer passage belongs. It comes after the words in Mark 10 where Jesus and the disciples are on the road going up to Jerusalem. This is important. In canonical Mark, Jesus is going up to Jerusalem. The disciples are amazed. Those following are afraid. Jesus then tells the Twelve what is about to happen to him: he will be handed over, condemned, mocked, spat upon, flogged, killed, and after three days raised.

Immediately after the inserted Alexandrian passage, the Gospel continues with the request of James and John. They ask to sit at Jesus’s right and left in his glory. Jesus answers:

“Can you drink the cup I drink, or be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with?”

They say that they can. Jesus replies that they will indeed drink his cup and be baptized with his baptism.

This setting matters. The longer passage is not randomly inserted into a story about private eroticism. It stands between two scenes about suffering, death, baptism, and participation in the fate of Jesus. Before the passage, Jesus predicts his passion. After the passage, Jesus tells James and John that they too must share his cup and baptism.

The frame is not sex. The frame is martyrdom.

If that is the frame, then γυμνοὶ γυμνῷ naturally belongs to the same symbolic world as the Synaxarion passage. The apostles drink the cup. They are baptized with the baptism. They suffer. They are stripped, exposed, mocked, wounded, and killed. In that sense they become “naked with the naked one,” not sexually, but as martyrs stripped before Christ.

This also makes Clement’s denial more precise. The key sentence in the Letter to Theodore is:

But the (τὸ δὲ) ‘naked ones with the naked one’ and the other things about which you wrote are not found.

Clement is not saying that there is no nakedness in the passage. He cannot mean that, because he has just quoted the phrase:

wearing a linen cloth over his naked body.

That phrase is in the gospel passage Clement quotes word for word. Clement is therefore not denying that the young man is described as naked under a linen cloth. He is denying the extra phrase γυμνοὶ γυμνῷ, along with “the other things” Theodore had written about.

In other words, Clement’s denial is local and textual. He is saying: those words are not in this gospel passage.

This is how Clement uses τὸ δὲ elsewhere. The phrase means something like “as for this item” or “but the thing in question.” Clement uses it when he wants to isolate one phrase, practice, or idea and correct a misunderstanding about it.

For example, in the Paedagogus he writes:

And this very same thing (τὸ δὲ) is attached by nature to both the male and female hyena.

There Clement points back to a specific bodily feature and corrects a false interpretation of it. He does the same thing again elsewhere:

And this same thing (τὸ δὲ) happens also in our case.

Here too Clement points to one specific issue and explains it.

That is what is happening in the Letter to Theodore. Τὸ δὲ γυμνοὶ γυμνῷ does not mean, “There is no nakedness here.” It means, “As for the phrase ‘naked ones with the naked one,’ that phrase is not found here.” Clement isolates the disputed phrase and says that it is absent from the gospel text.

This has an important consequence. If γυμνοὶ γυμνῷ is read in light of Mark 10 and the later orthodox use of the phrase, the words need not be obscene. They can refer to apostolic martyrdom: the stripping off of mortal life, the naked encounter with Christ, and the union of the martyr with the Logos.

Clement’s point is therefore almost certainly simple. The Alexandrian Gospel does contain a secret Markan passage about the young man, the linen cloth, the night, and the mystery of the kingdom of God. But the words γυμνοὶ γυμνῷ are not present in that passage. If they belong anywhere, they belong to the larger symbolic world of apostolic suffering and union with Christ, not to the wording of this particular gospel passage.

The reading becomes still stronger when we notice where the later Christian formula seems to come from. The Synaxarion phrase appears to be built from the language of Gregory Nazianzen. This is not surprising. Gregory’s writings furnished Byzantine liturgical and rhetorical culture with a vast storehouse of language for sanctity, death, purification, and union with God.

In Gregory’s funeral oration for his father, Gregory the Elder, delivered in the presence of Basil of Caesarea, Gregory describes his dead father as a purified soul now closer to God than he was in life. The elder Gregory has shaken off the chains of the body, escaped the mud that darkens the mind, and now stands before God:

naked, encountering the naked, the first and purest Mind.

Here again, “naked” does not mean sexual nakedness. It means that the soul has been stripped of the body. The dead man is no longer weighed down by flesh, passion, and confusion. He now meets God directly, as a purified soul before the purest Mind.

This is the same basic idea we find in the Synaxarion which we have already noted says:

naked ones with the naked one, and pure with the purest Logos.

The wording has changed from singular to plural. Gregory is speaking about one dead bishop. The Synaxarion is speaking about the apostles. But the idea is the same. Death strips away the mortal body. Purity brings the soul closer to God. The holy person, or the holy apostles, become “naked with the naked one” because they have been stripped of mortality and joined to Christ.

This helps us see why the phrase matters for the Letter to Theodore. If later Orthodox Christian tradition could use γυμνοὶ γυμνῷ for the apostles in a holy and mystical sense, then the phrase itself cannot be treated as self-evidently sexual. The scandal is not in the words. The scandal comes from the way modern interpreters have imagined the words.

The point becomes still more interesting when we consider Nicetas the Paphlagonian, the writer who assigned γυμνοὶ γυμνῷ to the Feast of the Apostles. Nicetas had a direct connection to the intellectual world of Arethas of Caesarea. Laurent Pernot describes Nicetas as both the “student and friend” of Arethas, and the relationship is confirmed by the surviving letter in which Arethas sharply criticizes Nicetas’s encomium of Gregory of Nazianzus. The criticism is not merely personal. It shows Arethas acting as a learned master of rhetoric, measuring Nicetas’s style against the technical standards of Hermogenes and the older rhetorical tradition.

This connection matters because Arethas was not merely a teacher or critic. He was one of the decisive mediators of Greek Christian literature. In the case of Clement of Alexandria, almost all of our primary manuscript tradition depends on Arethas. The principal medieval transmission of Clement’s major works goes back to the great tenth-century codex copied for Arethas. In practical terms, Arethas is the indispensable conduit through which Clement’s writings survived for Byzantium and for the modern world.

Nicetas’s use of γυμνοὶ γυμνῷ can be demonstrated most directly from Gregory Nazianzen. But Gregory himself stands within a broader Alexandrian and Origenist intellectual inheritance, through his association with Basil, his family’s theological culture, and the memory of his namesake, Gregory Thaumaturgus. Origen, rather than Clement, has sometimes been proposed as the real author of the Letter to Theodore. I do not accept that proposal. The letter is Clementine, and stylometric work supports that conclusion. But the connection between “naked with naked” and Alexandrian Christianity is nevertheless real. To biographize Morton Smith, declare him homosexual, and then turn γυμνοὶ γυμνῷ into a “gay manifesto” is, in my judgment, methodologically indefensible.

We must also remember that the Letter to Theodore contains not one citation from the Alexandrian Gospel of Mark, but two. After denying that the text contains “naked ones with the naked one,” Clement moves to the next line in the commonly held text of Mark and cites the words “and he comes to Jericho.” He then says that the Alexandrian text adds a line that ordinary Mark does not contain.

Origen, Clement’s successor in Alexandria, does something strikingly similar in his Commentary on Matthew. He often compares what Mark and Luke add to Matthew. In his discussion of the Jericho material, he cites the same opening words from Mark and contrasts Mark’s “bare history” with Luke’s account, which he says is closer to the “mystic word.” These definitions are not explicitly laid out in the Letter to Theodore, but they are implicit throughout the Alexandrian handling of the gospel tradition.

It is often said that there are no references to Secret Mark in patristic literature. But Origen’s phrase κατὰ τὸν μυστικὸν λόγον — “according to the mystic word” — is very close, perhaps even conceptually identical, to Clement’s τὸ μυστικὸν εὐαγγέλιον, “the mystic gospel,” which Clement is careful not to identify too crudely with Mark as a public title.

Why does Origen think Luke is closer to the “mystic word”? He explains that Mark says only that Jesus entered Jericho and then abruptly left it. Mark avoids saying what happened in Jericho. Luke, by contrast, reveals what happened there. Origen writes:

For first one must draw near to Jericho, then enter into it, and after that go out from it.

Luke’s additional narrative is the story of Zacchaeus, who receives Jesus and gives a banquet. From the perspective of the whole section, Zacchaeus puts into practice the lesson that begins in Mark 10. This is not merely my own interpretation of the gospel. It is also Clement’s interpretation in Who Is the Rich Man Who Can Be Saved? Clement begins that work by noting that some people use another gospel tradition to claim that Jesus mandated religious communism. Clement, appealing instead to his Alexandrian understanding of Mark, argues that Jesus calls not for literal dispossession as an absolute social rule, but for the stripping away of the passions. The Zacchaeus narrative in Luke then becomes the bookend of the larger pericope that begins with Mark 10:17–31.

Justin Gohl interprets Origen’s reference to the “mystic word” as a way of saying that what is irreconcilable on the literal level becomes an avenue for reaching the deeper spiritual reality intended by the Holy Spirit, who “cooperated” with the evangelists in the composition of the Gospels. That is a valuable observation, but I do not think it goes far enough. The “bare” gospel of common Mark is the starting point for both Clement and Origen. Clement explains additional material in the Alexandrian narrative. Origen does not cite that material, but he speaks in terms of a “mystic word” reflected more fully in Luke because something mystical happened in Jericho that is absent from the bare narrative of Mark.

Origen also recognizes that Mark is peculiarly interested in clothing, stripping, and nakedness — perhaps as part of Mark’s own unadorned style. Earlier, when discussing Bartimaeus before Jesus enters Jericho, Origen writes:

After this, Mark says that ‘he cast off his garment, jumped up, and came to Jesus’ (Mark 10:50). Does Mark have nothing in mind when he recorded that he cast off his garment when he jumped up to come to Jesus? Would we dare to say that these things have been included in the Gospel in vain? For my part, I do not believe that there is one iota or a single stroke that is empty in the divine lessons. I think that the successful interpreter needs a robust faculty of reason because of the difficulty of the matters involved. Perhaps, therefore, the garments of the blind beggar, by which Bartimaeus was covered, indicate the veils and coverings that the blind man cast off when he heard, ‘Take heart, arise, he is calling you.’ And after casting away the veils and coverings of begging, he jumped up and arose in order to come to Jesus.

It is rarely emphasized that Clement cites two passages from the Alexandrian Gospel of Mark in order to show that the text does not contain the words “naked ones with the naked one.” The traditional judgment, shaped by Morton Smith’s translation, has focused almost entirely on the two supposed naked men in the Alexandrian addition. But the actual text of Theodore brings forward two narratives and, if we include Bartimaeus at Jericho, at least three possible candidates for symbolic nakedness. Even in a limited sense, this helps justify the plural reading γυμνοὶ γυμνῷ.

One final point should be made. Origen consistently reconciles the “bare” narrative of common Mark with the “mystic word” and with its closest canonical counterpart. He argues that Luke is essentially an expansion of "bare" Mark in the manner in which Clement says canonical Mark was developed in Alexandria to create a text which hinted at the "mystic gospel." 

Origen’s writings therefore provide clear evidence that the Alexandrian tradition knew how to distinguish between a bare gospel narrative and a mystic interpretation or fuller mystic account. Origen, like Clement before him, was reluctant to speak too openly in terms of a specific secret text. To go beyond that would be speculative. But to go this far is, I think, justified.

In the end, Clement is not nervously denying an erotic scene as some would have it. He is doing what he said he would do: answering Theodore by the exact words of the Gospel. The authentic wording is quoted. The disputed wording is excluded.

The Markan setting remains a passion setting. Jesus goes up to Jerusalem to suffer and rise. James and John are told that they too will drink his cup and share his baptism. Within that world, “naked with the naked one” points not to sexual contact, but to the stripping of mortality before Christ.

That is the point Smith missed when he translated the words as “naked man with naked man.” He turned a plural phrase into a singular one, and that decision changed the entire history of interpretation. Once the words became “naked man with naked man,” the passage could be imagined as a sexual scene between Jesus and the young man. But if the manuscript says γυμνοὶ γυμνῷ, then the phrase points away from private eroticism and toward apostolic martyrdom, purification, and union with the Logos.

The Letter to Theodore does not give us a gay gospel. It gives us a dispute over words: what is in the Alexandrian Gospel, what is not in it, and how easily a mistaken reading can create an entire scandal.