Echoes of Mystic Mark (Secret Mark) in Gregory (Theodore)’s Letter in Praise of Origen

 One of the more revealing ways to approach the Letter to Theodore is to stop treating it as an orphan document and drop it back into the world it claims to come from: Alexandrian Christianity in the long shadow of Origen. Once you do that, a lot of things that are usually flagged as “suspicious” in the letter stop looking like glitches and start looking like house style.

The starting point is the simple fact that Alexandrian Christianity, from Clement onward, is built around a two-tier pedagogy. There is always milk and solid food, catechesis and gnosis, exoteric instruction and esoteric explanation. Clement can talk about τὰ μυστήρια, μύησις, τελείωσις with a straight face; Origen follows him with the same vocabulary of “mysteries,” “initiation,” and “the perfecting” of the advanced. The Letter to Theodore swims in this same lexicon. It takes for granted that there is a “mystic” Gospel of Mark, that this text is reserved “for those who are being perfected,” that there are things “unspeakable” which must not be shared with the uninitiated. This is not a modern occultist’s fantasy projected backwards. It is exactly how Alexandrian churchmen already talked about the relationship between basic Christian instruction and higher, more dangerous teaching.

Origen’s own letters and the testimonies about his school reinforce this. In the letter to Gregory, the student who will later be known as Gregory Thaumaturgus, Origen lays out a program that looks uncannily like what Clement presupposes in Theodore. Scripture is not just a flat text; it is a mystagogue, a guide into mysteries. The reader must move from the literal sense to the deeper, hidden meaning through a disciplined ascent (ἀναγωγή). Origen presents himself as mystagogue to Gregory; Gregory’s famous Address of Thanksgiving in return describes Origen as someone who led him through a graded initiation into Christian philosophy and doctrine. There is an entire ecosystem here: certain passages and books are reserved, certain teachings are delayed “until you are able to bear them,” there is an ethics of reserve built into the pedagogy.

Within that ecosystem, the “odd” features of the Letter to Theodore fall into place. The letter is worried about Carpocratians misusing a mystic version of Mark. It insists that Theodore must deny under oath the existence of certain passages or interpretations, not because they are false, but because they are not for public consumption. This is exactly what disciplina arcani looks like on the ground. Alexandrian writers do not just proclaim mysteries; they also lay down a secrecy ethic about how to guard them. Being required to deny knowledge, or to swear that one has not heard something, is not an embarrassment tacked onto Christianity from outside; it is part of the way the Christian “mysteries” were policed inside the community.

Even the narrative details in the Markan fragments Clement quotes plug into familiar Alexandrian patterns. The youth is raised, loved by Jesus, and then comes to him “at night” wearing a linen cloth over his naked body. Jesus teaches him the “mystery of the kingdom of God.” The setting is nocturnal. The vocabulary is initiatory. The linen and nakedness function as purity symbolism: stripping off the old man, putting on the new, leaving behind ordinary social identity to be reclothed in a different form of life. This is the same baptismal and ascetical imagery that Origen and his circle circle around constantly, and it is not accidental that later hagiography in Alexandria continues to trade on night-visions, white garments, and “holy mysteries” as its default idiom for serious initiation.

The “after six days” chronography that frames the longer Secret Mark scene also has a natural home here. Origen is notoriously fond of numerical symbolism; six days and the eighth day are stock markers for the old creation and the new, for the preparatory period before a decisive entry into something else. Gregory of Nyssa’s life of Gregory of Neocaesarea, which preserves memories of Origen’s teaching, offers a particularly striking parallel: a nocturnal theophany in which John the Beloved appears, mediates a divine vision, and effectively initiates Gregory into doctrine. It is the same pattern: night, a beloved disciple, a visionary encounter that confers more than ordinary information. The Letter to Theodore’s beloved youth at night, entering into the mystery of the kingdom, is not a bizarre intrusion into a sober gospel world; it is one iteration of a broader initiatory trope that crops up again in stories about Origen’s own circle.

This is where Nautin’s suggestion about Origen’s letter “to Gregory” originally being “to Theodore” becomes more than just a speculative footnote. Even if one does not buy the emendation, the fact that Origen could plausibly have written to a “Theodore” about how to handle Scripture, how to ascend from letter to spirit, how to guard what is revealed, gives a concrete social frame for Clement’s “Theodore.” It becomes entirely reasonable to imagine Alexandrian bishops sending “internal memos” to trusted pupils and clergy about how to manage a mystic gospel, what to deny, what to admit, and how to repair the damage done by heretical readers.

None of this proves that Clement actually wrote the Letter to Theodore, or that the “Secret Mark” excerpts are as old as they claim. What it does do is undercut a whole family of objections that lean on the letter’s tone, vocabulary, and secrecy ethic as though those things were obviously out of place in the late second or early third century. Once you put the letter back into the Alexandrian-Origenian ecosystem, the mystagogical profile stops being an argument against authenticity and becomes, at minimum, a point of contextual plausibility. A graded, guarded Markan tradition that was talked about in the language of μυστήρια and τελειούμενοι is exactly what one would expect to find in that milieu.

The implications for the Secret Mark debate are simple and annoying, because they push everyone back onto the hard questions. You cannot dismiss the letter by saying “real early Christians didn’t talk this way,” because in Alexandria they demonstrably did. You cannot treat oath-bound denial or night-time instruction as smoking guns of modern pastiche when they show up all over the Origenian and post-Origenian material. If you want to argue that the letter is a forgery or that the gospel excerpts are invented, you now have to do it on text-critical, historical, and transmission grounds within a setting where this sort of secrecy-and-initiation framing was normal. Conversely, if you are inclined to accept the letter, you cannot treat its mystery language as some special fingerprint of genuineness, because that language is a shared resource in the Alexandrian tradition.

In other words, once you recognize that the Letter to Theodore sounds like a perfectly ordinary piece of Alexandrian mystagogical housekeeping, the debate about Secret Mark becomes what it always should have been: not a quarrel about whether such a thing could exist, but a fight over who actually wrote this particular specimen, and when, and how it moved from the Alexandria of Clement and Origen to wherever Morton Smith found it.