This passage is also printed in Robert Fulk's collection of translations of non-canonical Gospels. It's hard for me not to take this episode as suggesting a union of spiritual and erotic attraction, and hard to imagine that the eroticism didn't play into Clement's warning that this wasn't a canonical passage. Interestingly, it's not in a non-canonical Gospel but was interpolated into texts of the Gospel of Mark--which presumably would get Clement even twitchier. I'm pretty sure the reference to nakedness except for the linen cloth is intended to look forward to that motif, cryptic as it is, in the Marcan Gethsemane scene. A New Testament scholar friend of mine with very solid queer-theory credentials said once it was generally tbought to be an allegory for baptism. I can't help but think that's a dodge. Theodore Jennings in The Man Jesus Loved argues that the "beloved community" of the Gospel of John preserved a memory of Jesus' erotic relationship with the Beloved Disciple (and Jennings also argues that that's Lazarus); this would be a parallel tradition in the Marcan account. (What you do with the difficulty of the story in the Gospels that Lazarus was a resuscitated corpse is anybody's guess. Presumably one takes it as a trope for a less literal historical experience of resurrection.)

That all makes me sound like I'm chiefly interested in recovering some historical kernel; but in terms of midrash, I'm myself mostly interested in what WE make of the story, rather than whether it preserves some secondary trace of "historic" detail. I'm deeply drawn to the way this passage opens up an unabashed connection of flesh and spirit.

Khrysso, I'm interested in your observation about the political motivations for the suppression of Jesus's sexuality. More to say on that?