Finding the Paper Which Justifies Excluding to Theodore as an Ancient Work

 How strong does the case really have to be before we’re entitled to throw “To Theodore” out of Clement’s oeuvre? Once you strip away the noise, that’s the core question behind this line of argument: not “do I like this text?” or “does it make me nervous?” but “where is the peer-reviewed demonstration that it cannot be Clement, or even ancient?” The tour through the usual objections is sobering. Yes, people say the longer Markan excerpt is a pastiche. Yes, people point to small-sample stylometry, to supposed liturgical anachronisms, to a late and messy provenance. But when you ask, case by case, whether any of these has been laid out in a formal, controlled, published way that actually compels exclusion, the answer keeps coming back as “not yet.”

Take the statistics. One camp doesn’t like how “Clementine” the vocabulary looks and thinks that very density smells of imitation. Another points out that when you run short-text authorship classifiers, the prose of the letter tends to land in the Clement cluster more often than not. Those two signals are in tension, not in harmony; and everyone admits the core prose sample is tiny once you subtract quotations. If short-sample methods are going to be used as a guillotine, they need to be validated on other known cases, not deployed for the first time on the single most contested fragment in the field. For now, stylometry is a spotlight, not a verdict: it can suggest directions and raise suspicions, but it does not, in its current published form, force us to say “this cannot be Clement.”

The same goes for script and orthography. The hand looks like what you’d expect from an 18th-century monastic copy; the spelling is mostly full rather than dominated by nomina sacra, but Greek copyists have always varied in that respect. These are precisely the kinds of details that should be assessed through systematic paleographical work, with explicit comparanda and criteria. That hasn’t happened at scale in print. One genuinely serious, peer-reviewed attempt to push the letter away from the second century compares its formal and conceptual features to Eusebius’s presentation of Serapion’s letter about the Gospel of Peter and argues that “To Theodore” is modeled on that later template. That’s the best kind of argument on offer: it clears the bar of publication and gives you testable literary parallels. But even that, when weighed, does not obviously overpower the contrary signs of Clementine style and Alexandrian epistolary habits. It’s a live possibility, not a checkmate.

Perhaps the sharpest conceptual objection comes from within Clement studies themselves: his talk of secrecy, it is said, is about oral handling of public scriptures, not about hiding extra gospels in monastery cupboards. On that reading, a written “more spiritual” Mark jars with his pedagogy. But this is a tension, not a falsification. The same Clement who insists on graded teaching also takes for granted a dense ecosystem of harmonies, testimonia, and rearranged logia. To say “Clement cannot have presupposed a reserved Markan text” is to turn a pattern into a prohibition. At the other end of the spectrum, modern forgery scenarios that lean on psychological portraits of the discoverer are rightly dismissed as speculative: they explain what someone thinks Morton Smith might have done, not what the text demonstrably is.

Where does that leave things? With a much more modest but important claim. If we’re going to exclude “To Theodore” from Clement, or from antiquity altogether, the burden of proof lies with those who want it out. That burden hasn’t yet been met by any single peer-reviewed study. Stylometry cuts both ways. Paleography has raised questions but not delivered a formal indictment. Literary-dependence arguments are suggestive but not decisive. A late antique pseudepigraphon remains a plausible middle option, yet it too is a hypothesis, not a documented fact. Until someone can show, in the same kind of controlled, published way we use for other disputed texts, that dependence or fabrication is more probable than Clementine authorship or ancient origin, the only honest conclusion is that the case against “To Theodore” is still underbuilt.