What language would be the primal source of the expression? Most New Testament scholars will of course tell you that the gospel was written in Greek. Yet there was certainly a powerful and very early Aramaic speaking Christian community which was at least as old - if not older - than the Greek Church. What would the 'naked with naked' motto look like in Aramaic, the presumed language of Jesus and the apostles? Here is where things get very, very interesting.
For when I started to work the problem out in my mind I realized at once that the Aramaic word for 'naked' would at once itself be a core concept of the Christian religion. שלח is one of many words in Aramaic that has two seemingly unrelated meanings. It means at once 'stripped' or 'naked' and is at the same time 'to send' - the root of the title 'the apostle.' Here is a link to the page in Sokoloff's Jewish Aramaic Dictionary so that the reader can see for his or herself.
In other words, 'nakedness' might well have added significance in LGM 1 if we assume with Morton Smith that Secret Mark itself derives from an Aramaic or Hebrew gospel. As it turns out we don't need to do a lot of imaginative speculation because the early Syriac writers like Ephrem the Syrian consistently develops a play on words on the shared meaning of the term in his writings. Robert Murray in his Symbols of Church and Kingdom: a Study in Early Syriac Tradition brings forward an important example here:
The principal passage on the Holy Spirit in all Ephrem's works is HFid. 74-2 The Spirit is symbolized mainly as warmth, emitted by the sun as the Spirit is sent by the Father. The Spirit warms the naked and clothes them as Adam was clothed with glory; and then, passing to the Apostles by means of an untranslatable play on shlikha which means both 'naked' and 'sent' (apostle), Ephrem continues:
[Warmth] is dear to all who are naked/sent,
sending them forth as eager workers for all [sorts of] tasks.
Even so the Spirit clothed the naked/Apostles,
as it sent them forth to the four winds [lit. directions] upon their tasks.
By means of warmth all things ripen,
as by the Spirit all are sanctified, a transparent symbol! [p. 80]
The point of course is that this is only one of many such references in the writings of Ephrem where it would appear that the 'apostles' are so called because they received baptism (i.e. that 'naked' they were clothed by the Holy Spirit).
This concept becomes a little clearer from other references in Ephrem's writings. In Rhythm the Fifth Jesus is likened to a pearl for whom men strip off their clothes to seek and find:
Men with their clothes off dived and drew thee out, pearl! It was not kings that put thee before men, but those naked ones who were a type of the poor and the fishers and the Galileans; for clothed bodies were not able to come to thee; they came that were stript as children; they buried their bodies and came down to thee, and thou didst much desire them, and thou didst aid them who thus loved thee.
Glad tidings did they give for thee : their tongues before their bosoms did the poor [fishers] open, and produced and showed the new riches among the merchants : upon the wrists of men they put thee as a medicine of life. The naked ones in a type saw thy rising again by the sea-shore ; and by the side of the lake they, the Apostles1 of a truth, saw the rising again of the Son of thy Creator.
By thee and by thy Lord the sea and the lake were beautified. The diver came up from the sea and put on his clothing ; and from the lake too Simon Peter came up swimming and put on his coat ; 1 clad as with coats, with the love of both of you, were these two.
And since I have wandered in thee pearl, I will gather up my mind, and by having contemplated thee, would become like thee, in that thou art all gathered up into thyself; and as thou in all times art one, one let me become by thee!
The point I am trying to make here is that we have I think finally confirmed that Morton Smith was absolutely right to identify LGM 1 as a baptism ritual. Yet more than this, it obviously suggests that the rich youth was more than just 'some guy' that he decided to initiate; he is undoubtedly 'the apostle' - i.e. the head of the Alexandrian Church whose experience with Jesus led to the establishment of the ritual we know from other sources was called the 'apolutrosis' i.e. the 'redemption.'
I think it is again quite reasonable to imagine that Secret Mark developed from an Aramaic source or may well have been itself preserved in Aramaic or Hebrew. The 'nakedness' metaphor here must have been connected to 'apostleship.' The difference between the culture of Ephrem and that of Clement of course is that the Alexandrian Church undoubtedly only had one apostle originally. The power of the 'nudus, nudum' metaphor now is clearly that the 'rich youth' is clearly being transformed into an 'apostle' from his nakedness taking on the person of Jesus who was after all an angelic 'apostle' sent for by the Father.
