Was Secret Mark used for minor orders?

Andrew Criddle and I, in comments below, began discussing what ceremony a Secret Mark could have been used for (actually, Andrew raised the question himself). I replied by suggesting it could have been a confirmation/chrismation ceremony, to which Andrew replied very well, but where's the evidence? I conceded there was very little. But researching the question a bit further, I had the following speculative ideas.


First, we know there were numerous minor orders within the early church, including reader, cantor, doorkeeper, and acolyte, some of which Pope Cornelius gives mid-third-century evidence of in Rome, only a few decades after Clement. As Paul F. Bradshaw states in Ordination Rites of the Ancient Churches of East and West, "The most ancient of these offices seem to have been those of reader and subdeacon, which are the only ones to appear consistently in the later rites of the East. The first source to mention both offices together is the Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus...but they may well have existed for some considerable time before this." (p. 93) The Apostolic Tradition is typically dated to 215 C.E. in Rome.

I noted to Andrew that Secret Mark in some ways evoked the foot-washing ritual featured in the Gospel of John. And the Orthodox rite for ordination of subdeacons (and the Antiochene Orthodox rite for deacons) involves a basin, jar of water, and towel which the candidates carry and use to wash the bishop's hands. The ceremony for subdeacons includes the prayer "Make him Your perfect servant at the time of Your Second Coming" (and the ceremony for Antiochene deacons says "and proclaim him Your perfect [TELEION] servant"). This language is also reflected in our earliest eastern subdeaconal ordination prayers (i.e. the Byzantine ones), from the eighth century.

And, the man carrying a jar of water in Mk 14 (just like the candidates for subdeacon, and sometimes deacon) is also clearly a tie with the foot-washing of Jn 13. (The evidence that Mk and Jn are textually linked via a common ancestor is IMO obvious). Notice it happens in Mk right after the pericope of the woman with the ointment--and that pericope, in Jn, happens at Lazarus' house, right after his resurrection!

(In Mk the woman with the ointment at "Simon the Leper's" house. It's also at a Simon's house in Lk 7, though in a different narrative location--notice that in Lk it's a foot-anointing, rather than a head-anointing.)

Early Western rites show no washing traditions in their subdeaconal texts, but Eastern rites do. (I should admit our earliest texts for many Eastern rites date from the medieval era.) There is no mention of washing in the Coptic rites for subdeacons, but there are in the Melkite rites. Melkite subdeacons are given the vessel for washing (as they are also in Maronite rites) and then wash the hands of the bishop. The Byzantine rites of the eighth century, too (again our earliest Eastern text unfortunately) have the subdeacon wash the bishop's hands, and later versions also feature the presentation of the ewer, basin, and towel. We might have no Eastern texts earlier than the eighth century, but if Peter Jeffrey (in his The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled) can use Byzantine-era texts to make his arguments, so can I. And as Bradshaw says:

"Though it is not specified in the rubrically sparse text of the older manuscripts, this ceremony may well have been practiced from earlier times, especially as it also turns up in the fifth-century Gallican Statuta Ecclesiae Antiqua, which seems to have been subject to some Eastern influence." (p. 98)

Furthermore, in the west, as early as the Apostolic Constitutions, subdeacons held the role of guardian of the "liturgical vessels". And in the Jacobite rites, the subdeacon is given the oil for lighting the lamps--as the subdeacon appears to have held the role of lamplighter in both Western and Eastern traditions, and doorkeeper in Eastern traditions, even when also assisting with the hand-washing.

Speaking of doorkeeping, one of the doorkeeper's jobs was to exclude the unbaptized from early Eucharistic rituals (echoed in the modern Orthodox liturgies where the cry of "The Doors! The Doors!" announces the beginning of the Liturgy of the Faithful, as it was originally a call to expel the unbaptized and catechumens and to close and guard the doors). And what does the water-carrier in Mk do? He leads the disciples to the unspoken (i.e. secret) location of the Last Supper! (In the Byzantine eighth-century rite, the subdeacon and reader are even ordained in a private--i.e. secret--ceremony in a diaconicon.)

My guess is also that the nakedness of the young man in Secret Mark refers to the bodily purity required to attend at altar. As the Jacobite rite of subdeaconal ordination says, "cleanse us from every defilement of body and spirit".

Probably this is also why Jesus refuses to receive the women in the other Secret Mark passage. (While I'm at it, this is also why Jesus tells Mary not to touch him at the end of Jn.) The Canons of Hippolytus--our earliest text from Egypt, mid-fourth-century--required that subdeacons be celibate (i.e. that they have witheld themselves from women, as in the second passage of Secret Mark): "He is not to be ordained still celibate and if he has not married, unless his neighbors bear witness for him and testify that he has kept himself away from women during the time of his maturity. One is not to lay the hand on someone in the state of celibacy, unless he has reached his maturity or is entering into mature age and is thought [worthy], when one bears witness for him." That is, the subdeaconate was reserved for men or young men who have attained adulthood and who can bring testimony that they have kept themselves celibate. The Testamentum Domini likewise orders subdeacons to "practice the ascetic life". So a subdeaconal ordination appointment sounds like a perfectly appropriate event for Secret Mark to have been read at (hypothetically).


None of this is demonstratory evidence of the ritual or rite that Secret Mark was used for. But they are real possibilities, are strongly suggestive, and merit further consideration. It's disappointing that Smith couldn't think outside of a baptismal ritual (but then he got so much else about Secret Mark wrong that it's not surprising).