by Michael Haag
Jesus knew Bethany well and independently from his disciples from Galilee. Everything about his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, from obtaining the donkey to rousing the multitudes, was arranged with help from friends in Bethany; supper in the Upper Room in Jerusalem was also pre-arranged without his disciples knowing. From what we have seen at Cana (a stone’s throw from Ruma of the Gurion family), where Jesus was a wedding guest at a household full of servants, and later at Bethany where he was lavishly anointed with a fortune’s worth of spices, and at Jerusalem where he was honoured by Joseph of Armimathea and Nicodemus of the Sanhedrin, Jesus had a number of wealthy and well-placed friends; his women followers were independent and wealthy and in the case of Joanna married to one of the most powerful figures in the court of Herod Antipas; and John the Baptist, Jesus’ own cousin according to Luke, for all that he lived in the wilderness was born the son of a Temple priest.
That Jesus himself was a man of some substance is indicated by John 19:23-24 which describes how the soldiers at the crucifixion divided his clothes between them but threw lots for his tunic rather than rend it for it ‘was without seam, woven from the top throughout’. Pope Benedict XVI in his book Jesus of Nazareth underscores this point when he writes that in the casting of lots for the seamless tunic ‘we may detect an allusion to Jesus’ high-priestly dignity’, explaining that Josephus reports that the high priest of Israel wore just such a seamless garment.
A connection between Mary Magdalene and the Gurion dynasty of Nicodemus fits with what we can deduce of her life. She was an upper class Jewish woman, Hellenised, wealthy and independent, perhaps an aristocrat and linked to the priesthood. The name Nicodemus itself is Greek; Nicodemus means Conqueror of the People, perhaps an epithet earnt by an ancestor who was a successful general in the Hasmonean period – the family’s estates in conquered Galilee, annexed to the Hasmonean Temple state, perhaps being a reward for distinguished military service. His Hebrew name was Buni, short for Benaiah, the name of a famous hero among King David’s military commanders (which is why Israel’s first prime minister adopted the name David Ben-Gurion; his name had been Grün); it was not unusual for an aristocratic Palestinian Jew also to bear a Greek name; in fact it is what one would expect of a Hellenising Jew who would oppose the fanatically nationalist Zealots and was prepared to talk peace with the Romans. Nicodemus was sympathetic to Jesus whose kingdom was not of this world; he was sympathetic to Mary Magdalene too. Moreover as one of the three or four richest men in Jerusalem, as a leading Pharisee and a member of the Sanhedrin, as a doer of good works and overseer of supplies for the various festivals and pilgrimages he would not be a man who could easily be slapped down by the high priest and his Temple coterie, though they tried with their sneering remark about no prophet arising from Nicodemus’ native Galilee. A hundred pounds of spices for the burial of Jesus was Nicodemus’ reply.
A Small and Intimate Circle
The numbers involved in the Jesus movement were very small. Though Jesus travelled about Galilee and occasionally gave sermons to thousands at a time and crowds welcomed him when he rode astride an ass from Bethany into Jerusalem, these were ephemeral gatherings. The Acts of the Apostles tells us that when his followers gathered at Pentecost, fifty days after Jesus’ crucifixion, they numbered about a hundred and twenty in all (Acts 1:15).
These hundred and twenty, all of them Jews, would have known one another and many would have been related to one another; several were brothers and sisters and cousins of one another and of Jesus too. We are dealing with a very small and intimate circle of people.
The Bethany Connection
Bethany was on the pilgrimage route between Galilee and Jerusalem; it was a place where pilgrims stayed while visiting the Temple during the feasts and Galileans, who had to travel especially far from the north, established a colony in Bethany, taking in guests and providing hospices and almshouses for the sick and poor. Nicodemus himself, who had a reputation for good works and ensuring water for Jerusalem during pilgrimages, might well have been connected with Bethany, providing hostelries and hospices for pilgrims there. When Nicodemus talked one evening with Jesus about rebirth, that was when Jesus was staying in Bethany; perhaps Nicodemus also sometimes stayed in Bethany; possibly he had a home there. In fact are we looking at a family? Typically in first-century Palestine extended families lived together, communally using the same courtyards and doorless internal passages, an arrangement in which the movements of people could be quite fluid. Martha and Mary, unusual for apparently being unmarried, are both living in Bethany, both are well off; and they are living with their brother Lazarus. Were they all part of an extended family household?
And what about Mary Magdalene, to whom the gospels give no home, who goes to the tomb to anoint Jesus and finds it empty; and what about Mary who anoints Jesus at Bethany against his burial but then fails to appear at his crucifixion or at his tomb; are these two different women or are they one? Nowhere in the gospels is there a woman called ‘Mary of Bethany’; she is only ever called Mary, and there are grounds for believing that in early tradition the Mary living in Bethany and Mary Magdalene were the same Mary.
The Secret Gospel of Mark
A controversial document called the Secret Gospel of Mark was discovered by Morton Smith, a professor of history at Columbia University, in 1958 at Mar Saba, a Greek Orthodox monastery clinging to the walls of the valley of the Kidron seven miles southeast of Jerusalem, one of the oldest continuously inhabited monasteries in the world and once famous for its ancient library. The document is a letter from the late second-century Church Father Clement of Alexandria which reproduces verses from a previously unknown gospel which reveal that Jesus practiced some form of initiation or ritual with a young man who came to him at night, scantily dressed, to be taught ‘the mystery of the kingdom of God’. The young man is clearly Lazarus and the verses lead to the conclusion that Mary Magdalene is his sister.
Clement refers to these verses as part of the mystikon euangelion, literally the mystic gospel, to distinguish it from the ordinary canonical gospel of Mark in general circulation. The letter is addressed to Theodore who is concerned that the Secret Gospel is being distorted by the Carpocratians, a libertine gnostic sect, to justify their own licentious practices.
The Secret Gospel of Mark was discovered at the ancient monastery of Mar Saba which clings to the walls of the Kidron valley seven miles southeast of Jerusalem.
Mar Saba. Picturesque Palestine, Sinai and Egypt by Sir Charles William Wilson and Stanley Lane-Poole. London 1881-84.
According to Clement’s letter the Secret Gospel is a longer version of canonical Mark reserved for an initiated elite. Mark, he writes, while in Rome, ‘wrote an account of the Lord’s doings, not, however, declaring all of them, nor yet hinting at the secret ones, but selecting what he thought most useful for increasing the faith of those who were being instructed’. But later when Mark came to Alexandria he ‘brought his own notes and those of Peter’ and ‘composed a more spiritual Gospel for the use of those who were being perfected’, and at his death left these to the Alexandrian Church ‘where it even yet is most carefully guarded, being read only to those who are being initiated into the great mysteries’.
But a copy of this Secret Gospel of Mark fell into the hands of the Carpocratians, who Clement says have wandered into ‘a boundless abyss of the carnal and bodily sins’. Theodore has been combating their ‘unspeakable teachings’ but has written to Clement to learn exactly what is the true Secret Gospel of Mark and what has been corrupted by the Carpocratians. Clement’s reply, in what survives of it, contains two sections of verse that he cites to Theodore as authentic, refuting the falsifications of the Carpocratians.
Morton Smith published Clement’s letter in 1973 along with his exhaustive analysis and interpretation of the find. In Smith’s own words the consequences of the find ‘for the history of the early Christian Church and for New Testament criticism are revolutionary’.
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sp; The letter was immediately controversial. It upset many Christians because it meant that there was more than one version of Mark’s gospel and also because the text struck some as homoerotic. Smith’s interpretation also produced a reaction, independently of the contents of the letter, because it explained Jesus as a spiritually-inspired magus whose miracles were mystical visions; this went against the beliefs of those who saw the miracles as proof of divine power, but it also went against the thinking of those who prefer to see Jesus as a voice for social justice, a teacher of ethics. But also the letter was and remains controversial because of the nature of the discovery itself. Judging from the handwriting Clement’s letter had been copied out by an eighteenth-century monk in the endpapers of an 1646 printing of the works of Ignatius of Antioch – as though the monk was preserving an earlier and deteriorating copy of the letter by transferring its contents to the book. But the authenticity of the letter’s provenance was questioned. Were these really the words of Clement or had someone faked them, perhaps back in the earliest centuries of Christianity or perhaps much later? Possibly Morton Smith had faked the letter himself. But attempts to prove that the letter is a fraud or a hoax have been less than convincing and its authenticity is accepted by many distinguished scholars of Early Christianity at Cambridge, Harvard and other universities. For many others, even given their doubts, Secret Mark, as it is commonly called, cannot be ignored and its authenticity is treated as a working hypothesis.
Resurrection Ritual at Bethany
The first and longest of the verses included in Clement’s letter concern the resurrection of a young man similar to the story of the raising of Lazarus in the gospel of John. The story in Secret Mark falls right after canonical Mark 10:34 in which Jesus tells the twelve disciples the fate that will befall him in Jerusalem: ‘And they shall mock him, and shall scourge him, and shall spit upon him, and shall kill him: and the third day he shall rise again’. The verse from Secret Mark which is inserted here tells of a visit to Bethany where in response to the plea of a woman Jesus rolls back the door of a tomb and raises a rich young man from the dead. This young man, neaniskos in Greek, looks upon Jesus, loves him and begs to be with him. After six days Jesus commands the young man to come to him at night which he does wearing only a linen garment, called a sindon in Greek, over his naked body. During the night Jesus instructs the young man in the ‘mystery of the kingdom of God’.
This is the entirety of the longer set of verses of Secret Mark quoted by Clement in his letter.
And they come into Bethany. And a certain woman whose brother had died was there. And, coming, she prostrated herself before Jesus and says to him, “Son of David, have mercy on me.” But the disciples rebuked her. And Jesus, being angered, went off with her into the garden where the tomb was, and straightway a great cry was heard from the tomb. And going near Jesus rolled away the stone from the door of the tomb. And straightway, going in where the youth was, he stretched forth his hand and raised him, seizing his hand. But the youth, looking upon him, loved him and began to beseech him that he might be with him. And going out of the tomb they came into the house of the youth, for he was rich. And after six days Jesus told him what to do and in the evening the youth comes to him, wearing a linen cloth over his naked body. And he remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God. And thence, arising, he returned to the other side of the Jordan.
Morton Smith concludes that the story in Secret Mark, though similar to the raising of Lazarus in the gospel of John, is not dependent on John nor is John dependent on Secret Mark; instead that it was a story in Aramaic that pre-existed both gospels, with each gospel drawing on the story in its own way. Smith believes that the initiation was a baptism, though not a baptism with water, rather with the spirit. In fact it looks like a ritual of rebirth, an enacting of death and resurrection, for the word sindon means a shroud, the same word used to describe the linen in which Joseph of Arimathea wrapped Jesus when he placed him in the sepulchre in Mark 15:46 and also the same word used to describe the cloth worn by the youth in the garden of Gethsemane in one of the strangest and otherwise inexplicable scenes in the gospels (Mark 14:51) – when the Temple militia burst into the garden to arrest Jesus, his disciples flee, and only a scantily dressed youth stays behind until the militia attempts to arrest him too, tearing the garment from his body, and he makes his escape naked into the night. In the gospel of Mark the naked youth in the garden has no context, no meaning, no explanation whatsoever; it reads like a memory fragment of a forgotten event.
The Secret Gospel of Mark provides an insight into one of the strangest scenes in the gospels, that moment when the Temple militia burst into the garden of Gethsemane to arrest Jesus and attempt to seize a youth who makes his escape, leaving his garment in their clutches and runs off naked into the night. Painting by Correggio, Italian, c.1522.
Fleeing Youth by Correggio. Wikimedia Commons.
Likewise neaniskos, not the most usual word for a young man, is used to describe this young man in Gethsemane, and the young man, apparently a mortal, in the long white garment inside the empty tomb (Mark 16:5). Sindon and neaniskos are each used on only these two occasions in the canonical gospel of Mark, but they are also used to describe the appearance of the young man whom Jesus raises from the dead at Bethany in Secret Mark. Possibly it is always the same young man. What began as a ritual ends as history.
Nor is it just the repetition of a single word: the phrase ‘a linen cloth cast about his naked body’ is exactly the same when describing the initiation of the Bethany youth and the young man who flees from the garden of Gethsemane. These words and phrases amount to a signature linking the events and the people they describe.
Mary Magdalene and her Brother Lazarus
The second and shorter of the Secret Mark verses included by Clement in his letter to Theodore occurs further along in canonical Mark 10 where there is clearly a break in verse 46, as though something has been removed. As it stands it reads, ‘And they came to Jericho: and as he went out of Jericho with his disciples and a great number of people, blind Bartimaeus, the son of Timaeus, sat by the highway side begging’ – Jesus comes to Jericho and leaves Jericho, a completely pointless statement. Something happened in Jericho but canonical Mark does not say what. Secret Mark fills the gap, though obscurely; right after ‘And they came to Jericho’ it says,
And the sister of the youth whom Jesus loved and his mother and Salome were there, and Jesus did not receive them.
Then canonical verse 46 resumes: ‘and as he went out of Jericho with his disciples’, etc. Clement is about to give ‘the true explanation’ and ‘the true philosophy’ of these interpolations, including the words ‘and Jesus did not receive them’, as opposed to what the Carpocratians have been making of them, when the manuscript of Secret Mark breaks off.
But the list of three women, ‘the sister of the youth whom Jesus loved and his mother and Salome’, does tell us something important. The word for youth here is again neaniskos, which identifies him with the young man at Bethany. And just as the young man at Bethany is clearly the same as the young man in the garden of Gethsemane, and both are therefore identified with Lazarus in the gospel of John, so we are being told the identity of ‘the sister of the youth whom Jesus loved’; she is the sister of Lazarus. In the same way that neaniskos and sindon link events and characters together, so the naming of Salome serves the same purpose for she is mentioned only twice in the canonical gospel of Mark, at 15:40 where the women are at the crucifixion ‘looking on afar off: among whom was Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the less and of Joses, and Salome’; and at 16:1 when on the morning after the sabbath the women came to the sepulchre, ‘Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, had bought sweet spices, that they might come and anoint him’.
In each case in canonical Mark Salome is last. Mary the mother of James and Jose is second; she is ‘his mother’, that is the mother of Jesus, who according t
o Mark 6:3 had four brothers, James, Joses, Juda and Simon, not to mention at least two sisters, a fact widely accepted in the first centuries of Christianity, at the time of the Church Fathers, until the fourth century when the invention of the doctrine of Mary’s perpetual virginity began to gain ground, necessitating the identification of ‘other’ Marys to mother her children. And in first position in the list is ‘the sister of the youth whom Jesus loved’, that is the sister of Lazarus, who is Mary Magdalene.
The Bethany Family
We are presented with the story of a Bethany family linked across the gospels of John, Matthew, canonical Mark and Secret Mark. The family is wealthy and includes a brother and at least one sister who become prominent followers of Jesus, help finance his ministry, and offer their home in Bethany as a headquarters when he comes to Jerusalem. The brother is Lazarus and the sister is Mary Magdalene.
This early 20th-century photograph shows the church of Lazarus at Bethany which stands atop the traditional site of his tomb.
Church of Lazarus at Bethany. Library of Congress.
Lazarus was a wanted man. Whether he had actually been raised from the dead to life or had been engaged in a ritual of death and rebirth, the effect was so sensational that the Temple authorities not only conspired to kill Jesus but also Lazarus. When Jesus came to Bethany at Passover, people came from Jerusalem ‘not for Jesus’ sake only, but that they might see Lazarus also, whom he had raised from the dead. But the chief priests consulted that they might put Lazarus also to death’ (John 12:9-10). And when Jesus made his triumphal entry to Jerusalem the people who gathered and shouted their hosannas were as much excited by Lazarus as by Jesus. ‘On the next day much people that were come to the feast, when they heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem, Took branches of palm trees, and went forth to meet him, and cried, Hosanna: Blessed is the King of Israel that cometh in the name of the Lord. And Jesus, when he had found a young ass, sat thereon; as it is written, Fear not, daughter of Sion: behold, thy King cometh, sitting on an ass’s colt. . . . The people therefore that was with him when he called Lazarus out of his grave, and raised him from the dead, bare record. For this cause the people also met him, for that they heard that he had done this miracle’ (John 12:12-15, 17-18).