A key to decoding these identities is the Secret Gospel of Mark, discovered in 1958 by Professor Morton Smith who found it quoted in a letter that had been written by a bishop of Alexandria, Egypt, at the end of the second century.
I have in mind a particular group of stories that appear to stand behind the gospels of Mark and John and seem to link the identities between five different figures. In the final versions of the gospels, we can still see traces of earlier stories that are neither fully developed nor explicitly acknowledged in the canonical texts or any surviving traditions about them.
In some cases, gospel writers and editors seem to have supplied characters with names where these figures had been unnamed in their sources, and even supplied characters with names inconsistently, not understanding that similar figures in different stories had been understood by some earlier Christians to be the same individual. While the evangelists often incorporated characters and stories intentionally from their sources, I believe that they also sometimes incorporated older stories they did not mean to keep but which came along with characters they wanted to preserve. MANY Christian viewpoints were lost when Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire, but some of the stories that expressed these lost viewpoints appear to be hidden within the canonical gospels. Note that in the footnotes "Smith (A)" refers to Morton Smith, Clement of Alexandria and the Secret Gospel of Mark and "Smith (B)" refers to Morton Smith, The Secret Gospel: The Discovery and Interpretation (see note 1) Identification of the Bethany Youth in the Secret Gospel of Mark with other Figures Found in Mark and John Miles Fowler: "The Bethany Youth in the Secret Gospel of Mark"
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