Text:

At the end of the verse Textus Receptus, Soden, and Vogels add hoi neaniskoi ‘the young men,’ which is omitted by the majority of modern editions of the Greek text.

Exegesis:

neaniskos (16.5) ‘a young man.’

sunēkolouthei (cf. 5.37; cf. akolouthēo 1.18) ‘he was following with (him).’

peribeblēmenos sindona epi gumnou ‘clothed with a linen (sheet) about his naked (body).’ Arndt & Gingrich translate: ‘who wore (nothing but) a linen cloth on his naked body.’

periballō (16.5) ‘to place around’: the verb is used of clothing ‘to put on,’ ‘to clothe with,’ and in the passive, as here, it means ‘to be clothed with,’ ‘to wear.’ Field takes the word in its literal sense, ‘with a sheet wrapped about his naked body.’

sindōn (14.52; 15.46) ‘linen cloth’: here either a ‘sheet,’ or else a garment, the chitōn ‘under garment’ (cf. 6.9), made of the material . Lagrange conjectures that it was a flimsy sleeping garment.

epi gumnou ‘on his naked body’: here to gumnon, as a substantive, means ‘naked body.’ Moulton & Milligan show, from the papyri, that the word may mean ‘wearing only the chitōn [tunic].’ The meaning in this passage may be that the young man was wearing nothing except a linen tunic.

kratousin (cf. 1.31) ‘they seize.’

Translation:

Followed him should be understood in the sense of ‘followed along with.’

Linen cloth is variously translated, either as ‘a sheet’ or ‘a piece of white cloth’ (Southern Subanen, Barrow Eskimo), ‘one layer of clothing’ (Tzeltal), and ‘a cloth’ (Navajo).

They must refer to the men of the group who came out against Jesus, not to the immediately preceding third person plural pronoun which designates the disciples. Accordingly, this clause may be translated as ‘some men there grabbed him.’

Quoted with permission from Bratcher, Robert G. and Nida, Eugene A. A Handbook on the Gospel of Mark. (UBS Handbook Series). New York: UBS, 1961. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .