Is Mark Pauline? How Your Answer Changes the ‘Secret Gospel’ Debate

One way into the Secret Mark controversy that rarely gets spelled out is to start with a prior question: what kind of text is canonical Mark in relation to Paul? If Mark is already deeply shaped by Pauline categories, then an initiatory expansion in which a young man is raised, spends the night with Jesus, and receives private instruction looks like a natural intensification of Mark’s world. If Mark is largely non-Pauline, the same passage feels like an overlay.

The “non-Pauline Mark” position tends to define itself negatively: Mark supposedly lacks robust pre-existence Christology, focuses on Jesus’ baptismal adoption and post-Easter exaltation, and is more interested in kingdom proclamation and failed discipleship than in anything like Pauline participationism. On this reading, Paul’s distinctive thought-world—union with Christ, “in Christ” mysticism, strong “mystery” language—is largely absent. Where Mark talks about suffering and cross-bearing, it is taken as an ethical summons rather than a participatory ontology; the secrecy motifs around parables and messianic identity are pedagogical tactics, not initiatory mysteries in a Pauline sense. If that portrait is right, then an added scene that looks like a ritualized “putting on Christ,” complete with night-time instruction and clothing imagery, is likely later, crafted by people who have already absorbed a more Pauline sacramental grammar.

The opposite impulse sees Mark and Paul as closer cousins. Here the focus is on patterns and keywords rather than proof-texts. Mark 1 can be read alongside Galatians 1 as a shared template: an anointing or pleasure of God, a withdrawal or wilderness, a proclamation of good news. Mark’s intensive use of εὐαγγέλιον, with its almost technical flavor, looks less like generic “good news” and more like the same “gospel” that Paul insists is his charter and identity, especially when later evangelists, who know Mark, conspicuously dial the term down. The secrecy program, where insiders receive explanations in private and the full sense of the cross is hidden until after the resurrection, can be interpreted as a narrative form of the same dynamic Paul describes when he speaks of hidden wisdom revealed to the mature. In that light the long Lazarus-like episode preserved in the Clementine letter feels less alien: an initiation scene in which a neaniskos is raised from the tomb, stripped and reclothed, instructed at night, and then later appears as the “young man” who flees naked or sits in the empty tomb would be a Markan dramatization of dying and rising with Christ, entirely at home in a Pauline-adjacent theology.

Once Mark is seen this way, the Alexandrian color around Clement complicates the picture even further. Clement’s own rhetoric of mystērion, graded teaching, and reserve about “the deeper things” makes it easy to imagine that certain Markan materials, especially those most resonant with initiation, were handled differently in catechesis. A longer Mark used for the perfected would then be an Alexandrian exploitation of themes already within the canonical gospel, not a foreign graft. The lack of independent manuscripts remains a serious problem, but the theological and literary fit becomes a point in favor of antiquity.

If, by contrast, one insists that Mark is structurally non-Pauline, the consequences are stark. Then the nocturnal initiation story attributed to “a more spiritual gospel of Mark” looks like a re-coded Mark, whether by a later Alexandrian circle infusing Pauline and perhaps Valentinian motifs into Mark’s skeleton, or by a modern reader who has learned to see baptism, clothing, and mystery everywhere in the New Testament and composes accordingly. On that construal the passage is doubly detached: it has no external textual witness and it pushes Mark in a direction that his own narrative, left to itself, does not naturally go.

The upshot is that the debate over Secret Mark’s plausibility is throttled by the prior decision about Mark and Paul. Decide that Mark lives in a largely non-Pauline register, and the longer fragment feels like a theological and ritual overreach. Decide that Mark is already a narrative “prequel” to Pauline theology, steeped in the same gospel vocabulary and mystery-logic, and the fragment becomes a conceivable deep cut: the kind of pericope that would be most at home in an Alexandrian setting of advanced instruction. In either case, what really moves the argument forward is not broad labels but tight tests: single best instances of possible Mark–Paul dependence, careful mapping of Mark’s mystery rhetoric, and micro-level comparison of the fragment’s Greek with Mark’s known narrative habits. Only there can one see whether the so-called Secret material hums at Mark’s frequency or introduces a new melody altogether.