![]() ![]() And the last takes up arms in defense of the rebel king. ![]() The householder then hosts the new rebel king. ![]() The woman anointed Jesus, which could be seen as consecrating him for his role as the Messiah, the king of the Jews. What these figures have in common is that they committed acts that would be considered seditious by the Jerusalem authorities. These include the woman who anoints Jesus (Mark 14:3), the owner of the house where Jesus eats the Last Supper (14:14-15), and the disciple who strikes off the ear of the high priest’s servant (14:47). Scholars have noted that, in the synoptic Gospels, certain people remain curiously anonymous in the Passion narrative. In that case, the question would be: Why isn’t his name mentioned? The preservation of the story-and its use by Mark-would be more logical if the person was known to the evangelist and his audience. The problem is that people also sometimes wore just one garment, so the man was not clearly underdressed.įurther, if he were not a Christian, why would the authorities grab him? Mark tells us that “a crowd” was present for the arrest (14:43), and a person walking along with the crowd would not be grabbed unless he previously had been seen among Jesus’ followers.Īlso, if this man had no connection with the Christian community, how did this story get preserved? The way Mark tells it, the Eleven had already fled, and the arresting party would have no reason to tell the story to the Christian community later on. So perhaps the young man was asleep, heard the noise, quickly put on a single garment, and went to see what the commotion was. The argument is that people normally wore two garments, an inner one and an outer one. This isn’t impossible, but the argument for it is weak. That isn’t what Mark’s audience would expect, so this theory reads a much later artistic and cinematic technique into ancient literature.Īnother proposal is that this was a random person-not a member of the Christian community-who happened to be following out of curiosity and got nabbed. We also have testimony from a first-century figure named John the Presbyter, who says Mark “had not heard the Lord, nor had he followed him” during his ministry (Eusebius, Church History 3:39:15).įinally, we don’t have evidence of an ancient literary tradition of authors giving themselves brief, anonymous appearances in their works. 43-a decade after the Crucifixion-and it appears that Mark is a young man then, not one pushing or over thirty. One is that the Greek word for “young man” ( neaniskos) indicates a man who is past puberty and thus in his late teens or early twenties.īut when we meet Mark in Acts 12:12, it is the year A.D. The Church Fathers made other proposals, and this theory became common only in the late nineteenth century. Some may suppose this is the traditional answer that has always been believed, but it’s not. Today, many say it was Mark himself-that he recorded this incident the way medieval artists sometimes put tiny portraits of themselves in their paintings or the way Alfred Hitchcock briefly appears in his films. ![]()
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