Even beyond being a symbol of priesthood, this bestowal is entwined within a narrative web in which its significance and its implications can best be appreciated, and abused. Even the construction of the txyx bares upon its interpretation as a mnemonic trigger, forcing the student into the world of holiness restrictions, town prostitutes, cloth manufacturing, and dye procedures. The dye at hand (tlkt tekhlet) is but one color issue amid many related issues, whose proper interpretation is frequently skewed through spiritualizing zealots whose chief desire is to find Jesus hidden in every text. The dye chosen for these txyx is as significant as their location on the garment, and finds itself in the midst of many controversial issues concerning the identification of ancient colors and the symbolic significance given to them generally. The whole world of the ancient Near East, its histories, business records, covenant texts, myths, songs, proverbs and worship rituals must be laid bare as concerns these three elements of life. For this, the art and literary treasures of the ancient world must be scoured. As extensions of the garment and the hem, txyx are special adornments reserved for those whose lives and roles support such symbolism. The txyx is an adornment on the Hebrew garment, which itself has a broad symbolic life in the Semitic world, and is immediately attached to the garment's hem, which has an even broader symbolic life, particularly in the pages of the Bible. It is my intent in this thesis not only to establish the txyx as a tassel, which is symbolic of priesthood, which is bestowed on every member of a kingdom of priests, a symbol whose intent was to provide a mnemonic trigger linking the Israelites' privileged status with the responsibilities associated with that honor, but it is also my intent to carry the reader on a tour of the process involved in arriving at this conclusion. The image of an oval plate with three Hebrew letters on it, which can be seen under the chin of the body on the Turin Shroud, may be the image of John Mark’s petalon, the Jewish ornament which distinguished him as a ruler. I also account for the two missing corners of the Turin Shroud margin as an effort by John Mark to hide the fact that the burial shroud was his unique temple garment. This may account for the seam and margin in the Turin Shroud. I also identify John Mark as having a high office in the temple, for which he wore a white sindōn with an ornamental margin, at the corners of which a blue cord could be fastened or loosened, in order to fulfill both the commandment of Num 15,38 for all garments and the conflicting commandment of Ex 28,5-6 for temple garments. I explain that it is possible and probable that Joseph of Arimathea bought the garment to give Jesus a burial “as is the burial custom of the Jews” (John 19,40), namely: in a garment. In this article I identify the garment left by the young man who "ran away naked" (Mark 14,51-52) with the burial shroud of Jesus (John 19-20) and that young man with the secret disciple John Mark, co-author of the Gospel of John. The key aspects of symbolism portrayed through clothing in these texts as examined by this thesis include portrayals of virtues and vices, honor and shame, divine power, righteousness, status, and ethnicity. It then moves on to investigate symbolic elements of clothing in the character portrayals of Jesus and key portrayals of other figures in the Gospel of Luke. This thesis is attentive to potential constraint of culture and literary genre by investigating key elements of character portrayal through clothing in Virgil's Aeneid, Suetonius' Lives of the Caesars, and Josephus' Jewish Antiquities. Utilizing Paul Ricoeur's theory of symbols and Roland Barthes communication theory of clothing, this thesis considers the cultural and material world of clothing in 1st century BC to 2nd century AD as it bears on the literary use of clothing symbolism within the cultural literary world contemporary to Luke's gospel, and the literary-symbolic world created by the texts under investigation. This investigation considers both the symbolic meaning conveyed by the clothing regarding literary characters portrayed by that clothing, as well as the semantic bearing this symbolism has on the story or narrative in which the characters are functioning. This work investigates the use of clothing in conveying symbolic meaning in Greco-Roman literature and the Gospel of Luke.
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