Jerome's "Egyptian Mark"

If you start where most handbooks start, it looks grim for anyone who wants Mark in Egypt before the third century. Acts never sends an apostle to Alexandria. Our earliest detailed Alexandrian chronicle is Eusebius, who writes from Caesarea and leans heavily on his own local archives. Jerome, when he says that Mark came to Alexandria and founded the church there, is usually dismissed as simply rephrasing Eusebius. On that reconstruction there is no independent pre-Eusebian pipeline from Mark to Egypt. The evangelist’s “Alexandrian career” is a late, tidy story.

What happens if you refuse to start from Eusebius and ask instead what Irenaeus knows? Suddenly the picture is more awkward. In Adversus Haereses Irenaeus plainly does not like Mark’s gospel; he uses it sparingly, fumbles details when he quotes it, and never leans on it the way he does Matthew, Luke, or John. Yet in Book One he devotes an enormous amount of space to a Gnostic called Marcus, a visionary from the Valentinian fringe who fascinates wealthy women, plays games with letters and numbers, and dresses his teaching up as a mystery-gnosis. For Irenaeus, this Marcus is a parasite on the apostolic tradition, someone who has attached himself to the stream and poisoned it downstream. He is also, curiously, embedded in a geography that runs through the Rhône valley, into Gaul, and then, in later Latin reception, on to Spain.

By the time Jerome comments on this dossier, the figure has acquired a sharper contour. Jerome does not simply repeat “Marcus”; he twice calls him “Marcus Aegyptius,” the Egyptian Mark. In his Isaiah commentary he sketches a chain: Irenaeus, a man of apostolic times, reports that a certain Marcus, descended from the line of Basilides, first came to Gaul and corrupted the regions around the Rhône and the Garonne, seducing noble women with secret mysteries, mixing magic, bodily pleasure, and esoteric teaching. Then, Jerome says, Marcus crossed the Pyrenees and did the same thing in Spain. A later letter to a Spanish widow, Theodora, adds that this Marcus was from Memphis and that Irenaeus wrote about him three centuries earlier. When he talks about the women of Lusitania deluded by apocrypha like the Ascension of Isaiah and the Apocalypse of Elijah, he folds them into the same line: they have received the monstrosities of names like Basilides, Barbelon, Leusibora—and the man behind it, he insists, is Marcus the Egyptian.

Layered on top of this is the Priscillianist story. Sulpicius Severus, trying to make sense of the Spanish heresy, says that the superstition comes from the East and from Egypt, “but with what beginnings it took shape there is not easy to explain.” The first to bring it into Spain, he continues, was a Marcus from Memphis, whose hearers were Agape and the rhetorician Helpidius, and from them Priscillian was instructed. Isidore of Seville, summarizing Ithacius’s long-lost Apologia, calls Marcus a Manichaean magician from Memphis and Priscillian’s teacher. Later, when Jerome rails at Priscillianism, he reaches instinctively for the same template: this is Basilides and Marcus redux; the names repeat, the tricks repeat, the seduction of noble women repeats. The geographic marker is the same too: Egypt sending its poison westward.

On a purely chronological level all of this is a mess. Irenaeus is writing in the 180s about a Marcus who is his contemporary or near-contemporary, embedded in the Antonine world. Priscillian’s story unfolds in the late fourth century. You cannot simply stretch one Marcus across two hundred years and call him both a Valentinian showman and a Manichaean magician. The very passages Jerome invokes do not say what he says they say: Irenaeus describes Marcus deceiving many women “in the region of the Rhône,” but he never claims that he went on to Spain. Jerome is inaccurate about the dates, inaccurate about Irenaeus’s teacher (he makes Papias his master, not Polycarp), and casual about attaching Basilides’s name where Irenaeus attaches Valentinus. It is not surprising that critical readers have come to posit two Marcuses: an earlier second-century Marcus of Irenaeus’s polemic, and a later Manichaean Marcus tethered to Priscillian’s circle by Severus and Ithacius. On that reading Jerome has conflated dossiers, ironing out differences under the pressure of typology: whenever he sees Egyptian gnosis plus noble women plus magic, he writes “Marcus” over the top in thick black ink.

Even if one grants that, something remains stubborn in the way the tradition speaks. The instinct, across these Latin witnesses, is to mark the origin of this kind of gnosis as “the East and Egypt,” and to make its human face a Mark: Marcus Aegyptius, a man from Memphis, a figure whose teaching travels from Alexandria’s world to the far western provinces. Irenaeus himself, in the famous passage about “man” as the living element and the body as the embodiment of letters, sketches a fantasy that Priscillian’s critics will later recognize in his numerological speculations. The family resemblance is unmistakable; what changes is the time and the doctrinal coloration. If you strip away Jerome’s inaccuracies and the later Manichaean overlay, what he is trying to name is not just a random Egyptian charlatan, but an Egyptian line of “Markan” gnosis that his own imagination cannot help but shadow against the evangelist.

For contemporary scholarship, the safe conclusion is to be modest about what this gives us. Jerome cannot be marched into court as a reliable witness that the Mark of Irenaeus Book One is the same person as the evangelist or that the evangelist personally came from Memphis and took ship to Spain. The chronological objections to a single Marcus are real, and the slips in Jerome’s patristic memory are too many to ignore. At the same time, the very fact that late fourth- and fifth-century Latins feel the need to harmonize an “Egyptian Mark,” to see one Egyptian Marcus behind both Irenaean and Priscillianist patterns, tells us something about how Egypt, Mark, and heretical charisma were intertwined in Christian imagination. The stubborn absence of Egypt from Acts, the disappearance of a Pauline letter “to the Alexandrians,” and the thinness of early orthodox memory about an Alexandrian apostolic foundation are not simply accidents; they sit alongside a counter-memory in which Egypt is the source of dangerous gnosis, and “Mark” is not a canonical biographer safely ensconced in Rome’s success story but a figure whose name and home have been captured by the other side.

In that sense Jerome’s Egyptian Mark is less a clear window onto the second century than a distorted mirror, reflecting back a long-standing anxiety about an Alexandrian Markan stream that runs parallel to the Roman one. When he calls Marcus “Aegyptius” and pushes his influence from the Rhône to Lusitania, he is, clumsily, acknowledging that the kind of Markan gospel Irenaeus loathed did not die quickly, and that Christians in Gaul and Spain thought of its roots as Egyptian. Whether we want to read that back into a single historical person or into a broader tradition of “Mark as mystagogue” is another question. But it does mean that the glib claim, “there is no evidence for a Markan tradition in Egypt before the third century,” is no longer tenable. The evidence may be polemical, distorted, and late, but the pressure it exerts on the memory of Mark, Egypt, and gospel is real.