Clement’s Scriptural Centos and the Plausibility of “Mystic Mark”

If you want to know whether Clement of Alexandria could stand behind the so-called “Secret Gospel of Mark,” you have to start with the way he actually uses Scripture. Not what later systems demand of him, and not what a modern theory would like him to have done, but the gritty, line-by-line reality of his surviving works: the catenae, the excerpts, the fragments where he is at his most unguarded and least literary.

Once you push past Protrepticus, Paedagogus, and Stromateis into Excerpta ex Theodoto, the Eclogae propheticae, and the stray fragments, you keep meeting the same Clement. He writes with Scripture as his native language. Verses from Paul, John, Matthew, the Pastorals, and the Catholic Epistles tumble out in short, stacked chains. He splices Old and New Testament in a way that rarely stops to tell you where one ends and the other begins. He is happiest when he can string together half-verses and phrases into a single argumentative rope: water and Spirit imagery blended with temple and veil motifs, virtue lists dovetailed with ascetic commonplaces, quick flashes of apocalyptic gloom or light pressed into service as moral exhortation. It is not neat “quotation plus comment.” It is a kind of continuous, unmarked cento.

That is precisely the habit the cataloguing work makes visible. When you lay out every biblical lemma in those minor writings, Johannine and Pauline cores emerge, but also something subtler: Clement’s willingness to recombine scriptural language into new patterns without any anxiety about “tampering.” He is not altering Scripture; he is working inside it, rearranging verses like tesserae to build a mosaic of the “perfect gnostic.” Allegorical reassignment is part of the same habit. A dominical saying can suddenly become about the soul’s inner combat, or a legal precept about ritual purity can be transposed into a statement about intellectual and moral cleanness. The surface remains scriptural; the referent shifts into the realm of spiritual anthropology.

When you bring the letter to Theodore into that world, its language looks far less exotic. The phrases that have drawn attention in the “mystic Mark” excerpts are all sitting on top of familiar biblical anchors. Wandering in darkness toward the “gloom” of punishment echoes well-trodden judgment imagery. The “narrow way” language is simply Matthew refracted through an ascetic lens. “Depths of Satan,” “sons of light,” and the maxim that “all things are pure to the pure” are not random inventions; they are recognizable scriptural motifs, exactly the kind Clement likes to weave into his exhortations. The letter’s voice lives in that biblical air.

There is also the more pointed case of Matthew 5:25. Clement allegorizes “agree with your adversary quickly” in a way that tracks remarkably closely with a Carpocratian reading known from Irenaeus: adversary, judge, and officer become spiritual forces and inner powers rather than courtroom roles. That convergence shows how easily Clement can take over a “heretical” interpretive move, domesticate it, and slot it into his own gnostic pedagogy. If someone is compiling a Markan passage whose texture feels Carpocratian and then framing it for a reader who needs to be protected from Carpocratian abuse, Clement is a very plausible candidate: he already thinks and writes along those lines.

The positive case, then, is not that Clement must have written the “mystic Mark” text, but that the techniques on display in the excerpts and in the letter—the seamless biblical diction, the comfort with allegorical reassignments, the ease of merging hostile exegesis into his own—look like things he in fact does elsewhere. The catalogue of citations gives that claim concrete footing. It is no longer a vague “Clement’s style sort of fits.” It is a dense map of how often and how freely he splices, rearranges, and spiritualizes.

The objections are real and should not be hand-waved away. The letter to Theodore never actually says that Clement himself authored the Markan excerpts it quotes. He speaks of a gospel “according to Mark” kept for those being perfected, but he does not explicitly identify himself as the composer or redactor of those passages. That leaves open the possibility that he is simply describing and quoting a text he inherited. It also leaves open the possibility that someone later, who admired Clement or wanted to channel his voice, imitated his scriptural mannerisms and produced a letter and excerpts that feel Clementine without being genuinely his. In a world where pseudonymous letters and attributions are everywhere, that is not a trivial possibility.

There is also the intriguing observation that the letter and the “mystic Mark” extract appear to be by the same hand, literarily speaking: the same turns of phrase, the same habit of embedding scriptural language without explicit citation, the same rhythm of moral exhortation. For some, that is a strike against Clement. It suggests an integrated composition by a later editor or compiler who is pastiching the gospel and the covering letter together. The rejoinder is simply that this is what Clement does anyway. He is, arguably, the only figure from that period for whom we possess a large, demonstrable corpus of gospel pastiche. We know he can speak in a scriptural register so thick that it is genuinely hard to tell where “quotation” ends and “commentary” begins. Asking a modern forger to reproduce that corpus-wide texture, without leaving obvious fingerprints of dependence on printed critical editions or modern scholarship, is not impossible, but it is a high bar.

Where does that leave the larger Secret Mark debate? The safest way to put it is that this kind of internal cataloguing work strengthens “Clement could have done this,” but does not by itself establish “Clement did.” It narrows the field of plausible ancient contexts and authors, and it makes the scenario of a late–second-century Alexandrian teacher working with a more spiritual Markan dossier much more historically concrete. At the same time, it does not remove the logical space for imitation, whether ancient or modern, and it does not answer the external questions of dating, provenance, and manuscript history.

What it does do—quietly but decisively—is erode one popular line of dismissal: the claim that the letter’s idiom and the excerpts’ cento-like texture are obviously non-Clementine. Once you have every citation from Ex Theodoto, the Eclogae, and the fragments in front of you, that claim becomes very hard to sustain. The voice in Theodore may not be provably Clement’s, but it speaks the same dense scriptural language and plays the same games with allegory and harmonization as the Clement we can see. Any future argument, whether for or against authenticity, has to reckon with that fact. The question is no longer whether Clement’s style could accommodate an initiatory Mark, but whether the internal fit, combined with whatever palaeographical and provenance evidence we can muster, tips the balance from compatibility to attribution.