Anti-Marcionite Prologues of Mark and Jerome

 The latest round in the never-ending Mark wars started, fittingly enough, with a careful piece of source-work by someone else. The Early Writings thread “Anti-Marcionite Prologues of Mark and Jerome,” opened by Andrew Criddle on 29 April 2025, set out to do something very basic that almost no one had actually bothered with: put the short and long Latin Anti-Marcionite prologues to Mark on the table next to Jerome’s notice in De viris illustribus, translate the whole lot, and then ask what really depends on what. What followed was one of those discussions where, once you see the texts aligned, some scholarly commonplaces start to look a lot less secure.

The short prologue is the familiar little thing. Mark is “colobodactylus,” the man with the “maimed finger”; he is the interpreter of Peter; he writes his Gospel in Italy, and he does it after Peter’s death. That’s basically it. No Alexandria, no sweeping narrative arc—just a terse bit of Roman memory whose most colorful detail is the mangled hand.

The long prologue takes that skeleton and turns it into something like a miniature ecclesiastical romance. Mark is again Peter’s disciple and interpreter, but now he writes a brief Gospel in Italy at the request of the Roman believers. Peter hears the text, approves it, and gives it his blessing for use in church. Only after Peter’s “departure” does Mark head off to Egypt, where he becomes the first bishop of Alexandria, founds the church there, and is praised in nearly hagiographical tones for his sound doctrine and ascetic continence. Suddenly we are not just in Rome but on the Alexandrian stage, with Mark as proto-bishop and proto-monk.

Jerome’s De viris illustribus, when you lay it alongside, looks uncannily like the long prologue’s older Latin cousin. Jerome repeats the whole Roman sequence: the request from the brethren in Rome, Mark’s composition of a short Gospel, Peter’s approval and authorization for public reading. He then tacks on the Alexandrian dossier: Mark goes to Alexandria, founds the church, “first” preaches Christ there and establishes an episcopal succession. Jerome adds two things that the long prologue does not explicitly name: the remark about Philo and the Therapeutae, and the dating of Mark’s death to the eighth year of Nero. But the narrative core is the same.

Criddle’s thread made the payoff of the comparison very clear. In the short prologue the phrase “after Peter’s death” times the composition of the Gospel: Mark writes in Italy after Peter has died. In the long prologue, “after Peter’s departure” is re-deployed to time Mark’s move to Alexandria instead. One and the same little temporal tag gets reassigned to a different point in the story. That is exactly what you would expect if someone were reworking an older, briefer notice in light of a fuller Roman–Alexandrian saga, not what you would expect if the short version were a clumsy epitome of the long.

Once you start lining up the Latin, another point emerges. The long prologue and Jerome often march together almost word for word; the short prologue does not. The denser the overlap, the less plausible it becomes that we have two independent witnesses to a lost early “Mark tradition” that just happen to tell the same story in the same Latin phrases. You can, of course, always posit a Greek Vorlage behind both, translated twice into very similar Latin. But the economy of explanation is headed the other way: it is much easier to think that the long prologue is a synthesis, taking the older short notice and fleshing it out with material culled from Jerome (or from the same Latin dossier Jerome was drawing on).

One response in the thread tried to keep alive the idea of a Greek ancestor behind the long form, especially for the Alexandrian and ascetic elements, and to separate Jerome’s Therapeutae fantasy from the more general “Mark the ascetic founder” language. After all, the prologue itself does not say “Therapeutae”; it simply praises Mark’s continence, which could float around in Greek tradition quite apart from Philo. Fair enough as far as it goes. But this doesn’t really answer the textual problem: all the specifically long-form details that distinguish it from the short can be accounted for by the short plus Jerome (or Jerome’s own source), without invoking a ghost Greek original that no one has actually seen.

The thread also brought Eusebius into the picture. Eusebius quotes Clement of Alexandria for the classic story: Mark writes his Gospel in Rome at the request of Peter’s hearers; Peter neither positively authorizes nor forbids the publication, but eventually recognizes it. Later, Mark is associated with Alexandria as its first evangelist. The motif in the long prologue that Peter “approves” Mark’s work for church reading looks like a Latin afterlife of that Eusebianized Clementine tradition, with the indeterminate Clementine “Peter didn’t hinder” sharpened into an explicit episcopal fiat. If so, the ultimate source behind both Jerome and the long prologue is not some free-floating Alexandrian legend, but the Clement–Eusebius axis itself, already mediated through fourth-century historiography.

That brings us, inevitably, to Secret Mark. People have tried to use the long Anti-Marcionite prologue as an outside witness for the storyline in the Letter to Theodore: Mark writes in Rome for Peter’s audience and then relocates to Alexandria, where “more spiritual” material is preserved for the catechized. If the long prologue were early and independent, you could at least argue that Morton Smith stumbled into a pre-existing pattern of Markan memory. On the other side, if the long prologue were early and the letter late, you could flip the argument and say that the letter’s author pilfered his outline from the prologue.

What the Criddle thread quietly does is saw off that whole branch. If the long prologue is best understood as a late Latin expansion, stitched together from the short prologue and Jerome’s De viris illustribus, then it simply cannot function as an independent early witness to anything. It becomes, at most, a late antique digest of the Clement–Eusebius–Jerome storyline. In that light, the resemblance between the long prologue and the Letter to Theodore loses most of its probative edge. The two texts share Mark in Rome, Roman demand, Peter’s involvement, and an eventual Mark-to-Alexandria move—but those motifs are already present in the Clement fragments and in Eusebius’ History. The simplest explanation is that both the prologue and the letter inhabit the same small ecosystem of Mark traditions whose shape was largely set by Alexandrian writers and then by Eusebius, not that one is cribbing from the other.

That has an awkward consequence for polemic on both sides. If you wanted the long Anti-Marcionite prologue as a second-century prop for an Alexandrian Mark, it’s gone. If you wanted it as the smoking gun that a twentieth-century forger must have used to cook up his Alexandrian Mark fantasy, that’s gone too. The more the prologue looks like a late synthesis, the more it collapses into the same fourth-century horizon as Jerome, whose dependence on Eusebius is old news. The Mark-to-Alexandria line is still there, but its weight falls back where it always really belonged: on Clement, Origen, and Eusebius, not on a standalone Latin prologue.

In other words, once you actually read the texts the way Criddle’s thread invites you to, the Anti-Marcionite prologues turn out to be a sideshow for the Secret Mark controversy. The main stage is still the Alexandrian material itself—the Clementine style of the letter, its place in the broader Clement corpus, the Eusebian testimonia, and the paleographical and codicological arguments about the Mar Saba manuscript. The long Latin prologue remains interesting as a witness to how late antique Latin Christianity digested Greek traditions about Mark, Rome, and Alexandria. But as a weapon in the fight over Secret Mark, it has, ironically, been disarmed by the very close reading that once seemed poised to make it decisive.