Yes, exactly. If you took all of this out of the story, then it wouldn't be the Passion any more. Plus there's an ongoing battle in Christian exegesis to keep the Passion (and the Christ story in general) visceral, in that sense of being about human bodies - people want to make it about transcendence and angels and superpowers beings made of light, but the story itself says over and over again, look, this Christ guy had a human body just like yours, full of disgusting liquids, with physical limitations, with weakness, with a mind and spirit that sometimes had to surrender to the body's needs and wants, and that's okay and that's the point.

And it has to keep saying that over and over because people don't want their gods to be human!

I'd heard of the Secret Gospel of Mark, I think, but it kind of hits my embarassment squick for some reason, so it's not on my list of "favorite apocryphal gospels." ^_^ Of course there's evidence for pretty much anything somewhere in the Christian writings.