How ‘A Certain Someone’ Became Nobody: The Limits of τις as a Christian Secret Code

One of the more linguistically curious byways in the larger debate is the suggestion that early Christians sometimes used the little Greek indefinite τις (“a certain [one]”) as a kind of coy spotlight, a way of gesturing toward paradigmatic figures—especially Jesus or Paul—without naming them outright. The question is whether this “certain someone” idiom is just Greek doing what Greek always does, or whether in some circles it became a slightly marked way of talking about central characters while maintaining a veil of reserve. The evidence canvassed ranges widely: Marcionite gospel reconstructions in which key scenes begin with εἶπέ τις or ἐπηρώτησέν τις; Clement’s own famous title Τίς ὁ σωζόμενος πλούσιος (“What rich person will be saved?”) that turns an anonymous “someone” into an ideal type; the “certain rich man” variants in Mark and Luke; and, above all, 2 Corinthians 12:2’s enigmatic οἶδα τινα ἄνθρωπον, where Paul speaks of “a certain man in Christ” caught up to the third heaven—only for later preachers like Chrysostom to insist that the “certain man” is Paul himself using modest anonymity as a rhetorical screen. Latin Christian writers play similar games with nescio quis, so the sense of “we all know who I mean, but I’m not saying” is not foreign to the tradition. Fold in the Testimonium Flavianum’s much-disputed “about this time there appeared Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man” and it is easy to see why some want to read a subtle code here: insiders learn to hear τις/τινα as a way of talking about the central figure while preserving a pose of distance or secrecy.

The pushback is that this all risks over-reading what is, in most cases, just the standard Greek way of introducing an anecdote. The Synoptics are full of “a certain man” with a field, a banquet, a sick child; so are countless other Greek narratives. The very fact that 2 Corinthians 12:2 has to be explained by later commentators is evidence that there is nothing self-evidently “technical” about τις there; the anonymity belongs to a familiar humility topos, not to an esoteric code. Once you remember that, the TF becomes even less useful as a control: its wording is contested to begin with, and treating its τις (if original) as a window into Christian insider usage risks circularity. On that reading, what the data really show is that early Christians, like other Greek writers, could exploit the flexibility of τις—sometimes for ordinary story-telling, sometimes as modesty or veiled self-reference, sometimes as a way of turning “some guy” into a type—but not that they evolved a distinct, recognizable “Jesus/Paul marker” in the pronoun itself.

For the Secret Mark controversy, the upshot is mostly about mood, not proof. A Clement who titles a treatise with a τίς-question and who plays constantly with graded disclosure, anonymized exemplars, and “those who know, know” rhetoric is precisely the kind of writer for whom strategically vague “someone” language feels native rather than odd. That makes the voice of a letter that talks about unnamed elders, unnamed Carpocratians, and a “more spiritual” gospel kept from the many a little easier to imagine in his orbit. But τις is far too common a particle to carry evidentiary weight by itself. It can illustrate how anonymity and type-figures function in early Christian prose; it cannot authenticate a late-attested Alexandrian letter or the Markan excerpt it transmits. The real work for or against authenticity still has to be done where it always had to be done: in the texture of the Greek, the relationship to canonical Mark and Clement’s undisputed writings, the paleography and codicology of the lost pages, and the reconstructable chain of custody from monastic shelf to modern edition.