Are We Better Off Or Worse Off Excluding To Theodore Out Of “Caution”?

 Every time the Letter to Theodore comes up, somebody solemnly intones that we should be “cautious.” The phrase usually functions as a veto: the letter is too messy, too late, too exposed to the suspicion of forgery, and so the safest path is to leave it out of the discussion.

But I keep coming back to a simple question: in a field like early Christian studies, are we actually better off or worse off when we exclude a text like To Theodore “out of caution”?

Once you look at the rest of our evidence, the answer starts to look obvious.

No one has “clean” texts

I simply do not see any unquestionably “authentic” texts in the study of early Christianity. Not one.

Every major primary source carries some sort of scandal, some taint, some unresolved suspicion. The Marcionite side in antiquity already claimed that the four canonical gospels were patched-together, falsified versions of an earlier gospel. Acts reads like theological propaganda dressed up as travel diary. The Clementine literature was already branded as spurious in late antiquity. The Ignatian letters were “totally falsified” in various recensions. The Johannine literature was explicitly doubted by writers on the “orthodox” side themselves.

The further back we try to go, the worse it gets. We have no stable, documentary account of how the Church actually formed. We have myths about apostles in Acts, overlaid onto a canon that had already been reworked to make Marcion’s gospel and Paul’s letters compatible with that story. The very backbone of the “apostolic age” is an editorial construction resting on texts that are themselves debated, interpolated, and probably rewritten multiple times.

Against that background, what exactly is the harm in accepting that there exists a Clement-sounding letter, in a plausible place, witnessing to a “secret” gospel of Mark in Alexandria?

The myth of “reliable historical documents”

When someone says, “There are more reliable historical documents than the Letter to Theodore. Obviously,” my answer is: in what sense?

Of course there are texts that look better on paper. Some are older. Some are attested and quoted in antiquity. Some “fit” what we think we know about figures like Origen or Augustine. On a relative scale, you can say, “This looks more plausible as their work than that other thing.” Fine.

But that’s not the same as having solid, court-grade evidence.

On Origen, for instance, you don’t have to scratch very far before you find accusations of interpolation, doctrinal censorship, and selective quotation. Jerome and others are already arguing over what Origen “really” wrote versus what scribes have tampered with. The same games were played with virtually every major church figure whose works became politically important.

So yes, some texts comport “more reliably” with our reconstruction of someone like Origen or Augustine. But that reconstruction is itself based on a corpus that has been curated, sifted, re-edited, and in some cases heavily doctored by later church politics.

The field is not a clean lab bench where we keep the instruments sterile and occasionally one dirty object—To Theodore—tries to jump in. The whole table is already sticky with forgery, interpolation, and anonymous editorial work.

Christianity as a forgery-prone environment

The idea that Christianity relied heavily on forged and pseudonymous texts is not some edgy modern take; it is already visible in antiquity. Lucian’s Passing of Peregrinus mocks the Christians as gullible enthusiasts for a crucified sophist and his writings. Church fathers constantly complain about rival gospels, rival acts of apostles, rival apocalypses, and doctrinally suspect letters circulating under big apostolic names.

This is not an aberration at the margins. This is what the literary culture of early Christianity looked like. Writing in someone else’s name, rewriting someone else’s text, and creating “church histories” with a very obvious agenda was their specialty.

In that environment, to pretend that we have a clean line between “reliable historical documents” and “possible forgery” is fantasy. We have a spectrum of more or less dubious material, some of which we are used to and some of which we are not.

The pollster analogy

Think about how serious poll aggregators handle messy, conflicting data.

They know some pollsters lean one way, some another. They know some samples are tiny, some are better balanced, some are essentially junk. But the aggregator doesn’t heroically hunt down every “bad poll” and throw it in the trash while preserving a tiny canon of pure surveys.

Instead, they include as much as possible, assign different weights based on methodology and past performance, and assume that truth will emerge somewhere in the middle of the noisy cloud.

Our situation with To Theodore is similar. We are not dealing with a text that has been decisively proven to be a modern fake. What we have is a spectrum of possibilities: it could be genuinely Clementine; it could be Clementine plus later tampering; it could be an ancient pseudepigraphon; it could be medieval or Byzantine; it could, yes, be modern.

No one has made a “solid rational case” that compels exclusion. All we have are varying degrees of suspicion, aesthetic discomfort, and arguments from probability.

So why not treat it like a poll in a noisy dataset? We acknowledge the uncertainty, we give it less weight than, say, a well-attested Origen text, but we do not pretend it simply does not exist.

What “caution” actually does here

If early Christian studies were built on a robust core of unimpeachable documents and To Theodore was an outlier, then “caution” might mean “protecting a solid foundation from contamination.”

But that is not our situation.

We are trying to reconstruct the origins and early development of Christianity from:

– Gospels whose textual history is murky and whose alleged authors are shadowy.
– Acts, which reads like theological fiction.
– A Pauline corpus that has been expanded, arranged, and reframed in different canons.
– Fathers whose works survive in fragmentary, edited, and politically curated form.
– Church histories, like Eusebius, written under imperial patronage with clear agendas and, as even Arian historians admit, multiple versions and reworkings.

On top of that, we are told that To Theodore “doesn’t meet the threshold for a reliable historical document.”

Where are these supposedly “reliable historical documents” from the earliest period? Show me the pristine archive that To Theodore would be sullying. It does not exist.

What exists is a wall of texts that bear the marks of forgery, re-editing, or heavy-handed ideological shaping. To contrast one potentially spurious text against that wall of compromised material, and then pretend that the older forgeries are “trustworthy” while this newer possible forgery is uniquely “fake,” is misleading.

The harm of exclusion

So what is the real harm in excluding To Theodore “out of caution”?

We are not making our evidence cleaner. We are only making it thinner.

We are choosing to ignore a piece of data—however problematic—that might tell us something about how at least one Christian community understood Mark, Alexandria, secrecy, and catechesis. Even if it is a late pseudepigraphon, that is interesting. Even if it is an early forgery, that is interesting. The only scenario in which it is completely uninteresting is the one in which we decide, in advance, that it must be filtered out.

By contrast, the harm in including it is minimal, provided we are honest about the range of possibilities. No one has to pretend that it is unquestionably genuine. But to insist that it must be treated as if it simply never existed, because it makes some people nervous, is not caution. It is a way of controlling the narrative.

Conclusion: better off including it

In a field dominated by texts that are themselves revisionist, pseudonymous, or agenda-driven, “caution” cannot mean pretending we have a neat set of reliable documents and one embarrassing oddity.

Real caution means acknowledging how bad the whole evidence base is, and then refusing to amputate parts of it just because they are messy, recent, or controversial.

Until someone can demonstrate, with more than vibes and innuendo, that To Theodore is a modern forgery, the rational position is to include it in the discussion: clearly labeled, heavily caveated, but present.

We are not better off with less evidence in a world already flooded with forgeries and half-honest histories. We are better off admitting that Christianity grew up inside a culture that mastered the art of forgery—and then treating To Theodore as one more potential data point inside that forgery-prone landscape, not as an exception so terrifying that it must be left out of the picture.