Clement in Amsterdam

 From an idea by Mark Buckley. Imagine shifting the whole problem of the Letter to Theodore a thousand years forward. Instead of picturing a monk at Mar Saba quietly copying an old Clementine letter into the back of a seventeenth-century volume, picture an early-modern Orthodox cleric in Amsterdam, marinated in patristic proof-texts, fighting Anglicans over apostolic tradition and rummaging through exactly the same authors Eusebius, Clement, Barnabas, heresiologists that cluster around the Voss book. Once you move the scene into that Dutch/Orthodox diaspora world, a different set of questions surfaces: not “could Clement have written this?” but “could someone around 1700 have stitched it together from books on their shelf?”

The key exhibit is Frangiskos Prossalendis’ 1706 Greek polemic, printed in Amsterdam, in which a pious “Orthodox pupil” trounces a “heretical teacher” and, in the process, unleashes a small avalanche of Clement citations. Prossalendis wields Clement as a weapon in defence of ζῶσα φωνή, ἄρρητα μυστήρια, unwritten apostolic doctrine passed on in a living voice and protected by disciplina arcani. The vocabulary will sound familiar to anyone who has spent time in the Letter to Theodore: μυστήριον and μυστικός as technical terms for inner teaching, the contrast between written texts and unwritten mysteries, the insistence that there are things the apostles did not entrust to parchment. Prossalendis does not just echo Clement thematically; he reproduces long chunks of Clement verbatim, in Greek, in Amsterdam, in the right chronological window for someone to have had both Clement and Voss’s 1646 volume in reach.

On top of that, Prossalendis reads Eusebius’s notice about Mark in a way that almost prefigures the Letter. Where Eusebius calls Mark’s work a ὑπόμνημα, Prossalendis construes this as an aide-mémoire for initiatory instruction: the written gospel as a kind of outline supporting a deeper, oral mystagogy. That is very close to the Letter’s picture of an ordinary Markan scroll that can be read “carnally” to catechumens or “spiritually” to the perfect, with certain episodes reserved for those being initiated into the great mysteries. Even if there is no line of direct dependence, the conceptual overlap is hard to miss. An early-modern Greek priest is already doing, in print, the thing the Letter dramatizes in epistolary form: using Clement and Eusebius to defend the idea of a more “mystic” gospel reading reserved for insiders.

Around this core you can assemble a wider constellation of early-modern Clementine mystagogy. Fénelon’s Le Gnostique de St Clément, though unpublished, treats Clement as a theorist of Christian gnosis and graded revelation; Schelstrate presses Clement into service to defend a Catholic disciplina arcani in the face of Protestant demands for transparency. Jesuit heresiology such as Praedestinatus plays games with Barnabas and Carpocratians, placing Carpocrates in a Barnabas-adjacent slot in its own weird chronology. All of that makes it much easier to imagine someone thinking, “Here is a nice Clement-Carpocrates vignette; where better to tuck it than in the blank leaves after Barnabas in Voss?” Even the printer’s detail Dirk Bruyn styling himself “Theodore” is not nothing; it shows how easily a Theodōros could be conjured out of the local Dutch air without any need to postulate a second-century Alexandrian catechumen.

Taken together, this Amsterdam/Orthodox matrix supplies something the debate has usually lacked: a historically thick, textually documented environment in which a Clementine letter about a mystic reading of Mark is both intelligible and useful. It becomes easy to see how a learned early-modern could have absorbed Clement’s language of μυστικός and πνευματικώτερος as stock disciplina-arcani idiom, could have read Eusebius’ Mark dossier as a tantalizing hint of a more “spiritual” Mark in Alexandria, and could have felt entirely justified in dramatising that combination in the voice of Clement himself. In that sense, the Amsterdam scenario does not prove anything about the Letter’s date, but it punctures the old assumption that its Clementine density is either impossible to fake or uniquely second-century.

At the same time, the evidentiary status of this reconstruction has to be kept clear. It is strong in texture rather than in proof. There really is a Prossalendis, really printed in Amsterdam in 1706, really quoting Clement and Eusebius in the right way. There really are Catholic and Orthodox polemicists trading on Clement’s authority to shore up unwritten mysteries. But there is, so far, no paleographic match for the Mar Saba hands in known Dutch or Greek scribes, no archival trace of the Voss volume passing through a particular workshop or monastery where such a pastiche might have been composed, no smoking-gun commonplace book that pairs Barnabas, Clement and Carpocrates in the exact sequence of the manuscript. The Barnabas–Carpocrates–Clement triangle rests partly on Praedestinatus’ odd chronology; the Theodore-printer link is amusing more than probative. You get a coherent milieu, not a signed confession.

If this early-modern Clement in Amsterdam pipeline were ever nailed down by handwriting and provenance, the consequences for the “Secret Mark” debate would be sharp. The center of gravity would shift decisively away from ancient Alexandria toward a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century exercise in Clementine mystagogy. The Letter would no longer be usable as straightforward second-century evidence for a longer Mark in the Alexandrian church. At the same time, the need to make Morton Smith into a solitary modern hoaxer would evaporate. A credible early-modern source-milieu would give you a perfectly good candidate horizon for composition or inscription, long before Smith ever set foot in Mar Saba, and dramatically lower the prior that he had to invent the text from scratch.

Even short of that kind of proof, the Amsterdam hypothesis has a disciplining effect on interpretation. It encourages reading Clement’s μυστικός and πνευματικώτερος as part of a long-lived idiom about inner teaching and unwritten mysteries, easy for any learned early-modern to imitate, rather than as fingerprints of a unique Alexandrian codex. It highlights how readily the Eusebian Mark passages can be turned into a narrative about a more spiritual gospel for initiates without requiring that such a gospel actually existed as a separate book. It suggests a very concrete research agenda: canvass Dutch and Greek archives for handwriting cousins to the Mar Saba script, reconstruct Orthodox diaspora reading-habits around Amsterdam and Leiden, and map out how often Barnabas, Ignatius, Clement and heresiologists turn up together in the margins of early-modern volumes.

Conceptually, this whole line of thought undercuts the reflex assumption that “Secret Mark” must point back to a lost second-century Alexandrian recension. It keeps on the table the possibility that what we have in the Letter is not a window into a hidden codex but an early-modern pastiche exploring Clement’s beloved theme of an evangelic mystery behind the text, staged in the blank leaves after Barnabas for readers trained to hear such resonances. Until the handwriting and provenance questions are answered, both timelines remain live. But the Amsterdam picture shows that one does not need to choose between “ancient Clement” and “modern Smith”; a third option, “early-modern Clementine bricolage,” is historically intelligible, textually grounded, and very much worth taking seriously.