The Night of the Arrest

  “A certain young man was following him, wearing nothing but a linen cloth. They caught hold of him, but he left the linen cloth and ran off naked.”

            --Mark 14:51

You’ve seen him here late at night all week. He’s come up the rambles between the trees to this knoll at the top of the garden. You thought he was looking for sex when he first showed up on Sunday night, but he didn’t prowl like most of the men who linger until they’re sure it’s safe and then offer to buy you for the night, or an hour, or just a quick fuck behind the biggest, oldest olive tree. Or else keep on looking for another man as hungry for sex as they are. 

He just leaned against what’s left of the stone hut that belonged to the gardener in the old days. Aware of what was going on around him. Not horny and panicked at his own desire and the danger of the place, like most newcomers. At peace, saying yes to it all, but wanting none of it for himself. 

You wear just a linen sheet wrapped around your waist when you’re up here working the hill.

Tonight he’s back with two friends, who for hours startled at the sound of every pebble that shifted underfoot as men cruised the paths. You saw more sadness than fright in his face, until he finally went off alone to the side of the garden, kneeling as he wept. You waved a john away, wondering if you should go to him. Now his friends have dozed off.

Another john comes up, and you’ve got to make enough to eat tomorrow. But then the man turns, and your eyes lock. The john glares, shrugs, and walks off.

Without thinking, you get up and walk over to him. He’s still weeping as he reaches out to you, but by the time his arms are around you, you realize the comfort he’s offering is beyond anything you can give back. For the next five minutes, you exchange no words, only sobs, until the two of you fall into a slow, steady rhythm, rocking back and forth, your breath matched to each other's. His hand burrows under your dreadlocks to stroke the back of your neck.

Down the hill, you hear the scuffle of men scattering, as they do whenever the police barrel through. You pull back in alarm. He smiles and says, “It’s O.K. Go, get out of here.”

As you pitch down the hill, a cop grabs for you, but you leave the sheet behind, clutched in his hand, as you run on to safety.

Mark's Secret, Once Again

"And they come into Bethany. And a certain woman whose brother had died was there. And, coming, she prostrated herself before Jesus and said 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."

In 1958, Morton Smith, a scholar of ancient history at Columbia University, discovered the Greek version of that passage, copied in an eighteenth-century hand, while exploring a monastery library east of Jerusalem. It's part of an incomplete letter by an early bishop of Alexandria that doesn't otherwise survive. The letter says that an augmented version of the Gospel of Mark including those lines was circulating in some second-century communities.

Unless the letter was Morton Smith's own forgery. Or an eighteenth-century forgery. Or a copy of a fifth-century forgery. Or anything else that could save modern scholars from taking it seriously as additional verses from an authentic alternative version of the Gospel of Mark. There's no dogfight more endless than a New Testament scholars' dogfight. 

An article in the April 2024 issue of The Atlantic  gives a précis of the controversy, which has continued unresolved since shortly after Smith published his book on the subject in 1973.  The scholarly debate, however, isn't the main topic of Ariel Sabar's essay, "The 'Secret' Gospel and a Scandalous New Episode in the Life of Jesus." Instead, springboarding from a recent book on the controversy by Geoffrey Smith and Brett Landau,  Sabar focuses on Morton Smith's biography as a gay Episcopal priest who broke with the Church, taught the rest of his career at Columbia, lived most of his life in the closet, held some wicked academic grudges, and committed suicide in 1991. (For a much fuller account of ongoing arguments over the passage's authenticity, the extensive Wikipedia article is a good place to start.) 

For all the accusations that have been levelled at Morton Smith's scholarly bias, the new book finally turns its attention directly on the bias of his opponents' claims in their own right, and the weakly supported arguments they've made against the letter's authenticity. (Which no one has seen in decades, since shortly after it was taken into the  "safekeeping" of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem.) 

The authors of the new study argue that the letter is a forgery, but a much earlier one, occasioned by anxiety over deep bonds formed by pairs of Eastern Orthodox monks. Such friendships were often celebrated, and honored by formal ceremonies of "becoming brothers," but they also came under suspicion of carnal attachment. 

The version of the Gospel of Mark to which the letter attests has come to be generally known as the "Secret Gospel of Mark." "Secret Gospel" was Smith's translation of the phrase "mystikon euangelion," but the Greek phrase could just as easily be translated as the "mystical Gospel" or perhaps the "initiated Gospel." Those alternative translations suggest more clearly the idea of an inner teaching, accessible to those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, but ignored or opposed by those who don't.

It would be great to know whether this passage really did circulate within some Christian communities in the second century. I can't deny that I hope it was. But I'm ready to assert its spiritual importance even if it was concocted in the fifth century--or indeed, in the eighteenth--by a monk whose devotional life embraced an erotic understanding of the Divine, and how a very fleshly Savior had touched his life.

The Tie That Binds

 

Detail, Bernini, The Ecstacy of St. Teresa

Religion.

The very term is toxic for many who've survived a history of homophobic spiritual abuse. 

The brutal sundering of flesh from spirit that poisons so much Christian teaching and piety has taken its toll on queer people for centuries. (And make no mistake--Christianity is far from alone in this among the world's major religious traditions.) For many, walking away from religion has been the healthiest, most life-giving choice available, the mark of hard-won ego strength and integrity. The search for an authentic spirituality on terms one can live with then becomes the task of years or decades.

There is enormous irony in this. The origin of the word "religion" is the "binding back together" of things that have been put asunder: a re-ligation of what has come apart. (OK, there's some debate about where the Latin word first came from. But recent scholars, as well as St Augustine, have my back.) It's an enormous irony that Christianity in particular has been responsibile for so much hostility toward the flesh. How did so many adherents of a religion that begins with the assertion, "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us," come to fear the body, the body's desires, and the body's inborn capacities for pleasure, so vehemently?

It hasn't always and everywhere been thus. It's not always  and everywhere thus today. A different thread of erotic spirituality runs quietly through the long history of Christian thought--stretching from the Song of Songs, through the nature-embracing vision of early Celtic Christianity, through medieval rites for the binding of same-sex couples, through the eroticized devotion of Simeon the New Theologian, Aelred of Rievalux, Catherine of Siena, St John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, and beyond. 

Two weeks ago, just a few days into Lent, I posted here the painting created by Salustiano García Cruz for Seville's official poster marking Holy Week of 2024. With it I included a link that covered the offense taken by local conservative Catholics. For them, this Jesus is too young, too beautiful, perhaps too androgynous, certainly too shamelessly at home in his flesh--in his resurrected flesh: with a hand bearing the healed yet visible mark of a nail, he points to the healed yet visible wound in his side. 

There is of course a further issue: that this Jesus is a pale-skinned European in a world where most people are not pale-skinned Europeans.  (At the same time that that needs to be acknowledged and taken seriously, it's hardly what occasioned the right-wing backlash.)

That said, García Cruz's Jesus offers me an affirmation that queer spirit belongs together with queer flesh, queer desire, and the possibility of queer sex. A binding back together, a religio, of what homophobia and hatred of the flesh have put asunder.  His painting, in my book, is as authentically religious as you can get.

If the core purpose of Lent is preparation for the observance of Easter, this Jesus is the image I choose this year for my meditations over the weeks to come.