Bible Dictionaries
Young Man

　　YOUNG MAN.—In the Gospels we have on four occasions incidents of importance described, in which ‘a young man’ (νεανίσκος. He had not reached the prime of life,* stands for any age from boyhood up to 40 years. See Liddell and Scott, s.v., and cf. Swete’a note on Mark 10:17ἔδωκεν αὐτόν, Luke 7:15) made ample and unexpected compensation.

　　3. St. Mark (Mark 14:51-52) records a brief and somewhat mysterious incident, which occurred on the way from Gethsemane to the high priest’s palace on the night of the Betrayal. When ‘all the disciples forsook him and fled’ there ‘followed with him’ still ‘a certain young man’ who had ‘a linen cloth cast about him, over his naked body.’ Perhaps he had been roused from sleep that night, and so had nothing but his bed-robe on as he rushed from the house to see what was taking place at the garden. And when some of the ‘multitude with swords and staves’ who arrested Christ tried to lay hold on him also, he escaped, but left the linen cloth behind him in their grasp. Evidently the slight event had some special association for St. Mark with the memories of that night, and it has been conjectured that the δύο ἐφάνησαν αὐτῷ νεανίαι … Ant. V. viii. 2, where the angel who appears to Manoah’s wife is νεανίσκοι, the following may be consulted:—1. Lynch, Sermons for my Curates, p. 175 ff.; Martineau, End. after the Christian Life, p. 265 ff.; Expositor, i. vi. [1877] p. 229 ff. 2. Trench, Notes on the Miracles; W. M. Taylor, Miracles of Our Lord. 3. Expositor, i. i. [1875] p. 436 ff. See art. Mark 4. Maclaren, Sermons preached in Manchester, 2nd ser. p. 190 ff.

　　C. L. Feltoe.