Markan Stones, Johannine Story: Cento-Making Without a Smoking Gun

If you read the longer resurrection scene in To Theodore with Irenaeus’s description of heretical centos in mind, it looks uncannily like the kind of operation he attacks: a story built by re-deploying genuine gospel “stones” in a new architectural plan. The surface language is aggressively Markan, but the plot and staging are Johannine. That combination is the heart of the argument.

On the Markan side, the passage concentrates the evangelist’s favorite tics. The action runs in historic present, μετὰ ταῦτα is followed by εὐθύς, ἤρξατο + infinitive appears, a hand is grasped with κρατεῖν τῆς χειρός, and the central figure is a νεανίσκος in a σινδών. These are not generic “New Testament Greek” features; they are recognizably Mark’s fingerprints, piled up in a small compass. Even the emotional pivot comes from Mark 10:21, where Jesus “looking at him loved him.” In the Mar Saba scene that pattern is inverted so that the youth “looks at” Jesus and “loves” him. It is the same collocation of verbs, flipped to create a mirror image around a new protagonist.

Yet the dramatic scaffolding underneath is Johannine. The setting evokes Bethany and a garden; there is a tomb with a stone to be rolled away, a loud summons calling the youth out, and a grieving woman standing in roughly the “sister” role. The whole thing feels like a Mark-dialect retelling of the Lazarus story. Structurally, that is exactly what Irenaeus complains about in Adversus Haereses 1.8–9: people who take authentic gospel lines and rearrange them so that, while each component is true in itself, the composite creates a different Christ.

Once you see that centonic structure, two questions separate. First, is the diagnosis right? Second, if it is, who and when did the centonizing?

On the first point, the literary pattern is hard to miss. Markan diction is not just present, it is over-represented; Johannine motifs are not just vaguely echoed, they supply the narrative skeleton. A clever inversion of a Markan love-glance becomes the emotional center of gravity. It is difficult to explain that combination as a random by-product of “Markan style” or unconscious imitation. It looks more like an intentional exercise in recomposition: “Let us tell a Johannine-type story using Mark’s voice and favorite building blocks.”

That does not, however, answer the second question. Recognizing a cento tells you about method, not about authorship or date. Cento-making is already a second-century craft, both in pagan and Christian hands. Irenaeus’s parody of Homeric recomposition presupposes an audience familiar with the technique. So the mere fact that the longer Secret Mark scene is constructed does not force a modern conclusion. It is exactly the kind of thing an Alexandrian teacher steeped in harmonization and pastiche could have done for initiatory use, and it is also something a much later writer could fabricate.

At that point the non-textual facts start to matter. The copied hand in the Mar Saba volume is an eighteenth-century monastic script, not a twentieth-century scholar’s notebook hand, and more than one visitor reported seeing the pages after 1958. Those points do not prove that the underlying text is ancient, but they do make it less plausible that a single modern visitor both composed the cento and physically inserted it into the binding during one brief stay. If there was forgery, it has to be more layered: someone earlier created the text, someone later copied it, the volume eventually reached Mar Saba. That kind of scenario is harder to control, which cuts against the simplest “Smith wrote it on the spot” narrative.

A further wrinkle is the difference in technique between the embedded gospel scene and the Clementine prose that surrounds it. The letter’s body, insofar as it can be checked, does not scream “cento” in the same way; it reads like ordinary Alexandrian epistolary Clement, with his characteristic connective habits, reserve rhetoric, and pastoral tone. If one posits a single modern fabricator for both frame and excerpt, that person would have had to write convincing Clementine prose straight, then switch into high-density Markan centonization for the quoted pericope, then drop back to the prose voice without a seam showing. That is not impossible, but it is oddly elaborate given how many other, simpler ways a forger could have signaled “ancient gospel fragment” without that level of technical juggling.

There is also a methodological caution. Because Mark himself is internally repetitive—reusing his favorite constructions and adverbs at a high rate—statistics on small samples are treacherous. You can find short stretches of canonical Mark that look “centonic” by sheer concentration of his own habits. What does the real work here is the qualitative configuration: Markan surface laid over a Johannine plot, with a deliberate inversion of a key Markan collocation. It is that overall gestalt, not just a frequency table, that makes the cento diagnosis compelling.

Where this leaves the broader Secret Mark question is somewhere between clarity and suspension. The longer resurrection scene almost certainly is a constructed piece, built out of Mark for a story that feels Johannine. That lands it squarely in the family of practices Irenaeus attacks. But those practices live in the second century as well as any later period. A constructed pericope is exactly what Clement’s own rhetoric about “economies” and graded gospels might lead us to expect in an Alexandrian context. It is also exactly what a modern forger hoping to impress specialists might attempt.

So the centripetal insight here is limited but important. Calling the passage a cento undercuts any naive idea that we are looking at a raw, pristine shard of “lost Mark.” It also undercuts the assumption that centonization automatically signals modern fraud. Once you see that the text is a mosaic, the question “who laid these stones, and in which century?” cannot be settled by literary structure alone. That pushes the real work back onto provenance, palaeography, and a finer-grained comparison of the Clementine prose with undisputed Clement, instead of letting “constructed” function as a cheap proxy for “fake.”