There followed him a certain young man, &c.— Bishop Pococke, in describing the dresses of the people of Egypt, observes, "that it is almost a general custom among the Arabs and Mohammedan natives of the country, to wear a large blanket, either white or brown, and in summera blue or white cotton sheet; which the Christians constantly wear in the country. Putting one corner before over the left shoulder, they bring it behind and under the right arm, and so over their bodies, throwing it behind over the left shoulder, and so the right arm is left bare for action. When it is hot, and they are on horseback, they let it fall down on the saddle round them; and about Faiume I particularly observed,that young people especially, and the poorer sort, had nothing on whatever, but this blanket; and it is probable the young man was clothed in this manner, who followed our Saviour when he was taken, having a linen-cloth cast about his naked body; and when the young men laid hold on him, he left the linen-cloth, and fled from them naked." See his Description of the East, vol. 1: p. 190.
"I am very much disposed," says the author of the Observations on Scripture, "to think as theBishop does upon this point; and as he has made this remark, I should not have thought of noting it, had I not apprehended some additional observations might not be altogether useless. The account here given relates to Egypt; but Egmont and Heyman inform us, that the inhabitants of Palestine are as slightly clothed now as these Egyptians, and we may believe were so anciently. They observe, that they saw several Arabian inhabitants of Jaffa (called Joppa in the New Testament) going almost naked, the greatest part of them without so much as a shirt or drawers, though some wore a kind of mantle: as for the children there, they run about almost as naked as they were born, though they had all little chains about their legs, as an ornament, and some of silver." The ancients, or at least many of them, supposed that the young man here mentioned by St. Mark, was one of the apostles; though Grotius wonders how they could entertain such an idea; and apprehends that it was some youth who lodged in a country-house near the garden of Gethsemane, who ran out in a hurry to see what was the matter, in his night vestment, or in his shirt, as we should express it. But the word Σινδον, used to signify what he had upon him, denotes also such a cloth as they wrapped up the dead in, and occurs in no other sense in the Old Testament: but the Eastern people do not lie like corpses wrapped up in a winding-sheet, but in drawers, and one or two waistcoats, at Aleppo; and those who go without drawers (as the Arabs of Barbary do, according to Dr. Shaw, and many of the Holy Land, if we believe Egmont and Heyman) sleep in their raiment; and the hyke, which they wear by day, serves them for a bed and covering by night. It might as well then be an apostle in his day-dress, as an ordinary youth wrapped up in that in which he lay; and it is rather to be understood of an apostle in his common clothing, than of a person of figure in his drawers and waistcoat, in which such persons now lay; and which we maybelieve that Dionysius Alexandrinus meant by εν λινω εσθηματι, in his epistle quoted by Grotius. A late commentator takes notice, that though this youth is said to flyaway naked upon his leaving the linen cloth in the hands of those that secured him; yet it is by no means necessary to suppose that he was absolutely naked;—which is indeed very true: is not this precisely the thing, however, that the evangelist designs to intimate,—in order to mark out the extreme fear of this young man, who rather chose to quit his hyke than run the risk of being made a prisoner; though, by doing this, he became entirely exposed? Dr. Lightfoot supposes, as I do, says this author, that he had nothing on under this linen cloth; which he inclines to attribute to mortification or a superstitious austerity. But if he was not an apostle, yet he must be understood to have been a disciple of Jesus, or he needed not to have been afraid. And from ch. Mark 2:18 we learn, that though the disciples of John followed a rigorous institute, those of Christ did not. See the Observations, p. 403, &c. instead of young men at the end of Mark 14:51. Dr. Heylin reads soldiers, as the original word frequently signifies in the best writers.