Clement of Alexandria References to "the Canon"

 One of the most striking things that falls out of a full concordance of Clement’s gospel citations is how little he behaves like someone flipping around four separate codices and how much he looks like a reader moving through a pre-arranged, harmonized sequence. When you track his proof-texts with GCS page and line, three big blocks emerge that run in the same order as the Diatessaron: he starts in the Infancy traditions, moves into John the Baptist and the Baptism of Jesus, then into the Sermon on the Mount; he then lives for a long time in the world of parables and mission sayings (Mark 4 ∥ Matthew 13, Luke 10–12); and finally he shifts into eschatological discourse and Passion material (Matthew 24–25, Luke 17–23). Within each of these macro-blocks his citations tend to follow the same local runs that Tatian stitched together. What he does not seem to do is leap backward across these blocks. His “string of pearls” exegesis is anchored in a narrative flow that looks very much like a harmonized gospel already exists in his mental and textual world.

The raw counts reinforce the impression. Clement clearly favors Matthew and Luke in both breadth and density: hundreds of loci from Matthew and Luke, a somewhat smaller but still substantial cluster from John, and a comparatively modest Mark footprint. Yet within that Markan footprint, Mark 10:17–31—the rich man pericope—is an outlier. It is not just used; it becomes a center of gravity in Quis dives and recurs across Stromateis and Paedagogus. Clement returns again and again to that scene when he wants to talk about perfection, detachment, graded teaching, and the danger of misreading Jesus’ demand. That combination—an overall harmonized, composite gospel environment and an intense focus on one Markan text with obvious “initiatory” overtones—matters for how we imagine his Alexandrian pedagogy. It shows he is entirely at home inside a stitched-together gospel tradition and that he treats at least some Markan material as a privileged site for deeper instruction. That makes the idea of an Alexandrian “more spiritual” Markan layer conceptually comfortable in his world; it does not, by itself, prove that he had or used such a layer. The concordance work normalizes the thought that Clement’s gospel reading already lives in the same ecosystem as Tatianic harmonies and expanded sequences, and it helps explain how a community could come to treasure and gate certain Markan episodes for the “perfected.” What it does not do is yield a smoking-gun quotation that can only be sourced from a longer Mark. In that sense, the data are best read as environmental: they increase the plausibility of an Alexandrian context where something like a “mystic Mark” could exist and matter, while leaving the existence and authenticity of any specific longer Markan text to be decided by other kinds of evidence.