Hidden Reference to the Church of St Mark in the Stromateis?

Clement’s little sketch in the Stromateis of a world periodically purged by fire and water looks, at first glance, like bog-standard Middle Platonism: the Stoic ekpyrōsis, Plato’s story of cosmic floods, a few moralizing asides about impious cities going under and a remnant of “herdsmen and shepherds in the mountains” riding out the catastrophe. Read locally, though, it is hard not to hear Alexandrian overtones. Clement is writing in a city whose own outskirts bore the name Boukolia, “the cattle-pasture,” later remembered as the place where Mark was dragged, burned, and buried. When he lets Plato’s βουκόλοι and ποιμένες stand as the archetypal survivors while city-dwellers are swept away, he is not just ticking a philosophical box; he is giving his audience a picture of salvation that aligns uncannily with their own geography. The world ends, the polis perishes, but the ones in the pasture on the heights remain. For a community that met and buried its dead in a quarter literally called Boukolia, it would have been difficult not to feel the resonance.

That is especially true once you factor in Clement’s larger claim about where the Greeks get these images in the first place. He loves to accuse the philosophers of theft: whatever truth there is in their myths, he says, comes second-hand from the Hebrew prophets or from angelic revelation that was later garbled in transmission. Genuine doctrine therefore never presents itself naked; it arrives veiled in allegory, in riddling sayings, in symbolic narratives that only the initiated can decode. In that light, Plato’s “herdsmen and shepherds in the mountains” are not just rustic extras in a cosmic disaster film. They are, for Clement, types of the true gnostics, the ones who have withdrawn from the city’s false wisdom and stand in a liminal zone between earth and heaven, preserved precisely because they inhabit the margin. Once you are tuned to that frequency, the overlap between “herdsmen” and “Boukolia,” between philosophical myth and Alexandrian map, starts to look like the sort of double-coding Clement relishes.

Even so, Andrew Criddle’s caution is important. Noticing a lexical echo is one thing; turning it into hard historical data is another. The Stromateis passage does not name Mark, does not mention a church, and does not explicitly attach Boukolia to a cult of the evangelist. Clement is summarizing Greek cosmology, not giving a tour of Alexandrian shrines. Even if some hearers chuckled at the pun or felt a shiver of recognition at the thought that “the herdsmen in the heights” were, in some sense, “us,” that tells us more about the imaginative possibilities available to a Christian reader than about the factual state of a Mark martyrium in the late second century. At most, what the text can support is a sense that the cattle-pasture outside the walls was already a meaningful symbol in Christian ears, a place where survival, marginality, and divine favor could be pictured together.

Where this becomes interesting for the whole Secret Mark / Alexandrian mystagogy tangle is not in proving that a Church of St Mark already crowned Boukolia in Clement’s day, but in showing the sort of mental world in which an “evangelic mystery” could be mapped onto local terrain. Clement’s imagination is comfortable blending apocalyptic tropes, philosophical cycles, biblical precedent, and the lay of the land into a single figural field. The city stands for the doomed present order; the herdsmen on the heights, for the initiated few; the mountains, for the church’s hidden refuge. Later hagiography will pour Mark’s story into those same molds: the evangelist dragged from the heart of Alexandria to Boukolia, the martyr’s tomb anchoring a church on the outskirts, the “gospel of the Lord” preached from Egypt to Pentapolis and sealed in blood at the cattle-pasture. The Stromateis passage does not yet articulate that narrative, but it prepares the ground for it by giving Alexandrian Christians a way to read their own topography as prophecy.

For the debates over a “mystic gospel” of Mark, the pay-off is atmospheric rather than evidentiary. Clement’s rhetoric in the Stromateis confirms that he habitually thinks in terms of veiled truth, selective disclosure, and typological geography. He can take Plato’s flood and turn it into a parable of the gnostic remnant; he can let a generic “herdsman” become a cipher for those who stand apart from the city’s doom. In that setting, calling Mark’s narrative “more spiritual” or “mystic” need not signal a second book hidden in some Alexandrian chest. It is the same habit of speech: one text, two levels, one city, two fates—those inside the doomed structures and those out in the pasture, watching and waiting as the waters rise.