Clement in Amsterdam: Early-Modern Orthodoxy, Dutch Humanists, and the Invention of a “Mystic” Mark

Run the tape forward from Clement’s Alexandria to Dositheos’ Jerusalem and Voss’s Leiden, and the Letter to Theodore starts to look much less like a UFO and much more like something that could have been dreamed up in the late seventeenth-century Orthodox/Latin borderlands. The thought experiment goes like this: suppose Clare Rothschild is basically right about the rough horizon – Dutch humanists, Voss’s 1646 volume, early-modern scribal culture – even if the details are still fuzzy. What would make a Clementine letter about a “mystic” Markan gospel feel so natural, so “of the moment,” that someone would bother to inscribe it into that particular book, in Greek, on those blank pages after Barnabas?

Frangiskos Prossalendis is one very concrete answer. Here you have a Corfiot priest, trained in Woodroffe’s doomed “Greek College” in Oxford, hauled back into line by Gabriel III of Constantinople and trying to salvage his career by proving just how Orthodox he really is. The weapon he chooses is a Greek treatise printed in Amsterdam in 1706, The Heretical Teacher Confuted by the Orthodox Pupil, which stages a dialogue between a Calvin-tainted Anglican sophistes and an impeccably loyal student. The whole performance is a hymn to unwritten apostolic tradition: Christ teaching the apostles mysteries of the kingdom over forty days; the apostles passing things on “in writing and unwritten”; presbyters and bishops as custodians of ζῶσα φωνή and ἄρρητα μυστήρια; scripture “useless to us” without tradition. In page after page, Prossalendis reaches for Clement of Alexandria as the clearest voice on all this. The quotations from the Stromateis could almost be laid like tracing paper over the Letter to Theodore: the scriptures “hiding the sense” so the many will not be harmed; a “new book” in Isaiah that prefigures a still unwritten, inner knowledge now inscribed on hearts; seeds of blessed apostolic doctrine handed down to a few sons who resemble their fathers; the simple acknowledgment that “among the Hebrews some things were delivered unwritten.”

This is not just a vague resemblance of themes. It is Clement, in Greek, in Amsterdam, deployed explicitly to defend the very discipline of secrecy that the Letter claims for Mark’s “more spiritual” gospel. Prossalendis even leans on the same hinge texts in Eusebius. He quotes the Papias fragment in HE 3.39 about Mark as Peter’s interpreter, and uses it to argue that not all of Christ’s sayings and deeds made it into scripture. He quotes HE 2.15 on the origins of Mark and clearly reads ὑπόμνημα not as a full-blown literary composition, but as an aide-mémoire, a hint toward secret teaching – just as Clement uses ὑπομνήματα for his own jottings toward higher gnosis, and just as the Letter casts Mark as a mystagogue whose written narrative only gestures toward an unwritten depth. Prossalendis’ Greek is already halfway to a Clementine pastiche; you can see how little effort it would take, for a clever mind in the same milieu, to slide from “Clement as quoted by Prossalendis” to “Clement as author of an epistolary vignette about a mystic Mark.”

Once you widen the lens, Clement keeps popping up exactly where you would expect if he were the patron saint of early-modern disciplina arcani. Fénelon’s unpublished Le Gnostique de Saint Clément d’Alexandrie, written in French but steeped in Clement’s language, makes the same basic move: there is a continuous, secret Christian mystical tradition, and the “gnostic” is the one initiated into the mysteries of Scripture across the ages. Fénelon radicalizes it by claiming this gnosis for a spiritual elite that includes women and artisans, but the structure is recognizably Clementine. Schelstrate, writing in 1685, pulls Clement into a Catholic defence of the disciplina arcani against Protestant demands that everything be laid open in the pulpit. In other words, both sides in the confessional struggle treat Clement as the theorist of an inner, unwritten tradition. Add to that the free-thinking taste for “lost books,” the way Bacon’s New Atlantis mythologizes hidden Solomonic writings, the fact that Clement was reputedly a favourite in Queen Christina’s eclectic, semi-libertine court where Isaac Vossius moved – and Clement stops being an obscure Alexandrian and becomes, for a certain slice of Dutch and Catholic humanism, a very “live” author.

Against that background, the elements of the Letter to Theodore line up a little too neatly with Orthodox preoccupations to feel accidental. Mark as Petrine founder of Alexandria dovetails with the intense seventeenth-century Orthodox polemic on the “Petrine triad”: Antioch, Alexandria and Rome all claiming direct Petrine pedigree, with Rome’s primacy explicitly contested. Dositheos Notaras’ History of the Patriarchs of Jerusalem harps on exactly this point. Peter installs Ignatius in Antioch; Mark is Peter’s man in Alexandria; Rome is Petrine but, awkwardly, co-founded by Paul. If you are invested in that geography, a narrative in which Mark produces a gospel out of Peter’s preaching, with an inner, initiatory layer preserved in the Alexandrian church, is pure gold. It lets you say, with Prossalendis, that the written gospel is a ὑπόμνημα and the real goods are in the unwritten teaching of bishops who stand in the Petrine chain.

Then there are the Carpocratians and Barnabas. In our modern imagination, Barnabas is a first-century epistle, Carpocrates is a second-century Alexandrian troublemaker, and never the twain shall meet. But in the seventeenth century, Sirmond’s publication of the Praedestinatus injected a new line into the heresiological bloodstream: Barnabas, disciple of Christ, condemns the Carpocratians in Cyprus as ministers of Satan. Jesuits like Barthélemy Germon fold that throwaway remark into their catalogues, so that “Barnabas versus Carpocrates” becomes part of the standard Western dossier. Now take a printed Vossius volume whose frontispiece trumpets not only Ignatius but also the Epistle of Barnabas; add an Orthodox environment in which Carpocrates is a stock villain in lists of heresies (as in Dositheos and Symeon of Thessalonica); and suddenly a Clementine letter that uses Carpocrates as a foil for orthodoxy fits almost too well in the back pages after Barnabas. It is precisely the sort of thing a reader attuned to Praedestinatus might prize: fresh “evidence” about the sect Barnabas supposedly opposed, folded into the very volume where Barnabas appears.

The charge of interpolation, finally, is a live nerve in this world. In Germon’s treatise on heretics as corrupters of ecclesiastical codices, the thesis is that every Christian text has been exposed to heretical manipulation, and only the sheer multiplicity of manuscripts has prevented total disaster. Cyril Lucaris complains bitterly that Jesuits are printing the Fathers and “inserting their ungodly heresy” so subtly that unsuspecting Christians are drawn in, thinking they read Basil or Chrysostom when in fact they are imbibing Rome. Interpolation is how heretics operate. The Letter’s portrait of Carpocrates obtaining an ἀπόγραφον of Mark, polluting it with shameless fabrications, and passing it off as a “mystic gospel” plays perfectly into that anxiety. It lets an Orthodox reader say: yes, there is an inner layer of gospel truth, yes, Mark’s text can be read mystagogically, but the true text and the true interpretation are safe with us; what the heretics have is a corrupted notebook of excerpts.

Put all of this together and you get a scenario in which every major motif of the Letter – Mark as Petrine mystagogue at Alexandria, a longer gospel read only to initiates, unwritten mysteries reserved to bishops, Carpocrates as interpolator, Barnabas hovering on the horizon – is “of interest” in precisely the circles that had both Greek and Latin, both patristic libraries and printing presses, and habitually scribbled extracts into the blank leaves of printed volumes. It is not hard to imagine such a milieu in Venice or Constantinople, where the Jerusalem Patriarchate moved books and manuscripts around, or in Amsterdam and Leiden, where Voss’s book certainly circulated. In that environment, copying an already existing Clementine letter about a mystic Mark into the Voss volume makes sense. So does composing such a letter from scratch as a pastiche, using Clement, Eusebius, Praedestinatus and contemporary polemics as quarry.

But that is where the thought experiment has to stop. It gives a richly plausible context, not a smoking gun. The chronological weirdness of Praedestinatus’ Barnabas-versus-Carpocrates scene reminds you how loose late antique heresiology already was; seventeenth-century Jesuits and Orthodox writers inherit those oddities without necessarily understanding their implications. Fénelon’s unpublished Clementine mystical treatise shows how far one can run with the idea of a secret tradition without ever dreaming of forging a Greek epistle; Prossalendis shows how Clement can be ventriloquized in print without anyone confusing pastiche with authorship. The Amsterdam and Orthodox scenarios are real historical possibilities, not proofs.

Which brings everything back to the single most stubborn datum in the whole debate: that handwriting. If, as Tselikas and others suspect, the hand is modern, then the composition or inscription has to be modern as well, whether in Smith’s century or in the two before it. If the hand turns out, someday, to match a known scribe from a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century Greek or Dutch workshop, we will have a name and a date. At that point the options narrow: either that scribe was copying an older text, in which case the Letter’s composition recedes into the mists before 1700, or he was known for producing stylistic pastiches of Basil and the rest, in which case the Clementine letter is just one more exercise and the case is closed. In both directions, though, the payoff is the same. The fixation on Morton Smith as omnipotent forger becomes unnecessary, and the Letter is relocated to a more realistic horizon: either as a genuine late antique fragment that survived in the Orthodox diaspora and was jotted into the Voss volume, or as an early-modern Clementine bricolage that perfectly captures the obsessions of its own age.

Until that paleographic match turns up, the Clement-in-Amsterdam picture should be treated the way its proposer treats it: as a hypothesis that fits a lot of the available texture and explains why Clement was so “useful” around 1700, without pretending to settle the authorship question. What it does do – and this is already a gain – is loosen the binary that has dominated the conversation. One does not have to choose between “Clement of Alexandria in 200 CE” and “Morton Smith in 1958.” There is room in the middle for Dutch humanists, Orthodox polemicists, and an anonymous scribe with a fondness for Clementine secrets and the blank pages after Barnabas.