Maybe Clement's Alexandrian Community Didn't Refer to the Alexandrian Gospel as "the Secret Gospel of Mark" ...

The usual way of telling the story runs like this: there was one Gospel of Mark; Papias complained a bit about its “order”; Clement later remembered an extra, secret appendix; Morton Smith gave that appendix a catchy title, “The Secret Gospel of Mark,” and we have all been stuck with it ever since.

I want to argue for a very different picture.

First, Papias’ famous remark about Mark is not a throwaway comment on narrative awkwardness, but a programmatic description of a Markan tradition that is accurate in its component parts and deliberately open in its larger arrangement. That kind of “open file” Gospel is exactly the sort of thing that can be rewritten, recombined, and expanded in multiple places. Clement is not inventing a second Mark out of thin air; he is standing inside a Markan universe that Papias already describes, a universe where “Mark” is a body of remembered dominical material that can be configured more than once.

Second, when we come to the Letter to Theodore, we should stop talking as if Clement himself were coining the formal title “τοῦ Μάρκου τὸ μυστικὸν εὐαγγέλιον,” the “Secret Gospel of Mark.” The adjective μυστικός is deeply at home in Clement’s own theology, but his pedagogical habit is to call the Alexandrian Mark “more spiritual” and to talk about “mystic” and “epoptic” modes of discourse, not to multiply official book-titles. The exact “mystic gospel of Mark” phrasing fits much more comfortably as the Carpocratian sales-pitch that Clement is rebutting than as the solemn name of an Alexandrian lectionary codex.

Finally, the real “secret” that ties Papias and Clement together is not simply that a longer Mark existed somewhere in Palestine or Alexandria. The deeper secret is that the Law is “precise” while the Gospel is “mystic”: the Law is the realm of ἀκρίβεια, of articulated commands and preliminary, orderly knowledge of the Son; the Gospel is the realm of μυστήρια and ἐποπτεία, of an epoptic beholding that moves beyond the Son to the Father. Clement’s Mark is the evangelist who steps from the precise exegesis of Peter into this epoptic, mystic dimension. The Alexandrian “mystic” Mark is precisely the place where that step is scripted.

What follows will press those three points together: (a) Papias and Clement together imply a Mark who writes many gospels in many places; (b) the phrase “mystic/mystery gospel” belongs primarily to the Carpocratians’ branding of the Alexandrian Markan material; and (c) Clement refuses to stabilize that phrase as a formal title, because for him “mystic” describes a level of reading in a two-stage economy of Law and Gospel, precision and mystery.

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1. Papias, ἀκρίβεια, and a structurally open Mark

Papias’ testimony has usually been read with almost ostentatious minimalism. Mark, he says, having become Peter’s interpreter, “wrote accurately (ἀκριβῶς) as many things as he remembered, yet not in order (οὐ μέντοι τάξει).” Peter, for his part, “used to provide his teachings according to the needs of the moment, and not as someone making a σύνταξις of the dominical logia.” Mark therefore “did nothing wrong” in writing “some things as he remembered them,” since he took pains not to omit or falsify anything.

On the standard reading, all of this is flattened into a single verdict on a single book: Mark’s gospel is factually reliable but narratively a bit ragged; it lacks a tidy chronological order. Once the apologetic point is extracted—“it’s accurate even if the order is rough”—Papias can be dismissed.

But Papias is not writing in English, and τάξις in Greek is a thicker word than our thin “sequence.” τάξις is the term you use not just for the order of a story but for the order of a household. When you say a house is “in order,” you do not mean that the socks are currently placed after the shoes; you mean that there is a stable arrangement, a pattern, a pattern that can be counted on: coats here, shoes there, books on that shelf, and they will be there again tomorrow. Order in this richer sense implies repeatability and uniformity.

If we bring that fuller sense of τάξις back into Papias, his contrast between ἀκρίβεια and τάξις stops being a comment on Mark’s narrative polish and becomes a comment on the form of the Markan tradition. On the one hand, Mark’s material is absolutely reliable “in the small”: he is scrupulous not to omit or falsify what he has heard. On the other hand, Mark does not weld these accurate pieces into a once-for-all σύνταξις. Peter’s preaching provides χρεῖαι and episodes according to occasion, not as a finished architectural plan. Mark responds by writing down “as many things as he remembered” in the same episodic, ad hoc register.

The result is a body of accurate logia and episodes that have not yet been forced into a single, binding layout. The “objects in the room” are all genuine, but no one has yet committed to a definitive way of arranging the room. That is what it means, at a deeper level, for Mark to lack τάξις while possessing ἀκρίβεια.

Once we see that, Papias’ remark almost demands a plurality of Markan forms. A corpus that is accurate but structurally unconstrained is, by its nature, open to multiple orderings. If there is no canonical σύνταξις of the dominical logia, there is no obvious reason why “Mark” could not exist as more than one ordered whole: one configuration of episodes circulated in one community, another configuration in another; here a shorter dossier, there an expanded one, each drawing authentically on Mark’s memories, none yet enforced as the one correct “layout.”

Seen from that angle, Papias’ apology for Mark is not about excusing a slightly ragged book; it is the charter for a phase in which “Mark” is a living tradition rather than a frozen codex. That is important because later patristic evidence seems to know exactly such a phase, and Clement is one of our best witnesses to it.

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2. From Papias’ “open Mark” to local Marks: Caesarea and Alexandria

By the time we reach Eusebius, we start hearing about “accurate copies” of Mark in a very different tone. When he discusses the ending of Mark, he distinguishes manuscripts in which the text stops at 16:8 and others in which it continues to 16:9–20 and appeals to “the accurate copies” as the canonically correct line. A later Markan catena, preserving material from Victor of Antioch, explicitly cites “the Palestinian Gospel of Mark, as it has the truth,” in defense of the longer ending, and the language of “accurate copies” becomes associated with the Caesarean library. There, ἀκρίβεια is no longer the author’s virtue in remembering; it is a quality attributed to a specific textual form preserved in a specific place.

On the reading I am proposing, this is not a contradiction of Papias but the historical sequel. The corpus that Papias described—accurate but lacking a single binding τάξις—eventually undergoes an editorial “tidying of the room.” At Caesarea, perhaps drawing on a Palestinian line of transmission, someone takes the floating, episodic Markan material and pins it down into a unified sequence and extent. Those “accurate copies” that Eusebius trusts are the end result of that act of standardization.

The point to notice for our purposes is that this standardization is explicitly local: the “Palestinian Gospel of Mark” has the truth; the Caesarean copies are accurate. That way of speaking only makes sense against the backdrop of earlier plurality. If there was already one universally recognized, materially identical Mark, there would be no need to talk about the Palestinian Mark as opposed to anything else.

Clement’s Mark fits into that same landscape, but in a different city. When he recounts the origin of Mark’s gospel in the Hypotyposeis as quoted by Eusebius, he gives the story its now-familiar two-stage shape:

1. In Rome, Mark writes down Peter’s preaching at the request of the hearers, producing “the Gospel according to Mark” that is known in the wider church.

2. Afterwards, Mark comes to Alexandria, bringing both Peter’s notes and his Roman gospel with him, and there he composes “a more spiritual gospel (πνευματικώτερον εὐαγγέλιον) for the use of those being perfected.”

Placed against the Papian background, that two-stage narrative is not some bizarre Alexandrian fantasy. It is exactly what one would expect from a Markan tradition rich in accurate logia but not yet locked into a unique, universal τάξις. The same Mark who, in Papias, writes down “as many things as he remembered” from Peter without imposing a full σύνταξις can, in Clement, write more than once: first a publicly usable Roman arrangement of Peter’s logia, then a more spiritual, Alexandrian arrangement for initiates.

So when we say, in shorthand, that Clement thinks Mark wrote “two gospels,” we are not claiming he imagined two entirely different works with two unrelated titles. We are saying that for Clement Mark operates in more than one locale and more than one configuration. Mark’s Roman work and Mark’s Alexandrian work together embody exactly what Papias’ language allows: one evangelist, many gospels, each locally ordered out of the same accurate dominical material.

Clement, then, is not the outlier who invents multiplicity; he is the Alexandrian witness to a multiplicity that Papias’ description already structurally presupposes and that the later talk of a “Palestinian” Mark partially fossilizes.

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3. Clement’s grammar of precision and mystery: Law precise, Gospel mystic

All of this only starts to look like “Secret Mark” once we factor in Clement’s own way of classifying discourse. Clement loves the vocabulary of ἀκρίβεια, μυστικός, and ἐποπτικός, but he does not scatter these words randomly. They map onto a fairly consistent hierarchy.

In one direction, there is what we might call preliminary, precise discourse. That is the realm of the Law, of catechesis, of what the Paedagogus calls “didactic” or “pedagogic” phases. This is the level at which Peter, in Clement’s eyes, excels. Clement can say that Peter has “understood exactly” (συνειδὼς ἀκριβῶς) the words “In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth” and applies them to the first-begotten Son as the Wisdom through whom all things came to be. Peter’s God, here, is “the Son”: a perfectly sound and necessary insight, but still, for Clement, preliminary—the kind of thing one can “grasp exactly” because it is still, in a sense, on the surface of the scriptural words.

In another direction, there is mystic and epoptic discourse. Clement distinguishes a mode of speech that is διδασκαλικόν—didactic, “thin and spiritual, clinging to precision of language” (ἰσχνὸν καὶ πνευματικόν, ἀκριβολογίας ἐχόμενον)—from another mode that he calls τὸ ἐποπτικόν, the contemplative or visionary level, which he conspicuously “reserves for now” at the beginning of the Paedagogus and develops in the Stromateis. This upper level is what Plato would call the vision of the “truly great mysteries,” and Clement gladly adopts the mystery vocabulary: μυστήρια, μυστικός, ἐποπτεία.

He applies this dichotomy not only to his own works but to Scripture itself. The Old Testament, viewed as Law, speaks with commands, threats, examples, and “fear,” educating the people with what we might call architecturally precise instructions. The same Old Testament, viewed as “word,” as prophetic discourse, points into the depth of the Logos and contains “unfailing treasures of wisdom” and “hidden things” that belong to an inner, mystic level of instruction.

Origen, whom Clement anticipates here, will use almost the same language: what could be understood usefully on the spot was said plainly; “the more mystic and more epoptic things” (ὅσα δὲ μυστικώτερα ἦν καὶ ἐποπτικώτερα) were cast into riddles and dark sayings so that only the strenuous searcher could uncover them. Clement is already operating in that register. For him, there is a consistent coupling of ἀκρίβεια with preliminary instruction and of μυστικός / ἐποπτικός with advanced contemplation.

The critical point is that Clement is perfectly happy to say that the same scriptural text can be read at both levels. You can receive the Law as a precise array of commandments and as a shadow of the Gospel’s mysteries; you can hear the Gospel stories as straightforward history and as epoptic theophany. “Mystic,” in Clement’s usage, is not a different book so much as a different use of the book, a different discourse governed by the same Logos.

That is what makes it plausible for him to speak of John as the evangelist who, “last of all, composed a spiritual gospel (πνευματικὸν εὐαγγέλιον),” without thereby minting “The Spiritual Gospel according to John” as a new title. “Spiritual” here names the level at which John is read within the Alexandrian catechetical curriculum—a gospel whose function is epoptic.

With that grammar in view, we are already halfway to understanding what Clement means when he calls Mark’s Alexandrian work “more spiritual” and, in one place, “mystic.” He is not inventing a lurid thriller called The Secret Gospel of Mark. He is saying that Mark, like John, has a version or layer of his gospel that functions at the mystic, epoptic level.

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4. Reading To Theodore as a response to a Carpocratian “mystic gospel”

Turn now to the Letter to Theodore. Clement, responding to a correspondent worried by Carpocratian claims, carefully distinguishes several things:

He speaks first of “the divinely-inspired Gospel according to Mark” (τὸ θεόπνευστον κατὰ Μάρκον εὐαγγέλιον), the public, Roman Mark.

He then recounts that, when Mark came to Alexandria, he “brought both his former notes and those of Peter” and “composed yet another gospel” that he explicitly describes as “a more spiritual gospel” (πνευματικώτερον εὐαγγέλιον) for the use of those being perfected.

Later, when Carpocrates enters the story, Clement says that Carpocrates managed to obtain “a copy of the mystic gospel” (ἀπόγραφον τοῦ μυστικοῦ εὐαγγελίου), which he then interpreted according to his carnal doctrines and polluted with shameless additions.

Finally, Clement tells Theodore that when the Carpocratians bring forward their doctored text, one must not concede that it is “the mystic gospel of Mark” (τοῦ Μάρκου εἶναι τὸ μυστικὸν εὐαγγέλιον), but must even deny this on oath.

Morton Smith quite reasonably seized on μυστικὸν εὐαγγέλιον and, for the purposes of a book title, rendered it “Secret Gospel of Mark.” That phrase has now colonized our imagination. But if we step back and place Clement’s language in its own rhetorical environment, several things stand out.

First, Clement’s preferred, intra-Alexandrian descriptor for the longer Mark is “more spiritual gospel,” πνευματικώτερον εὐαγγέλιον. That is perfectly in line with his usage elsewhere (John as spiritual gospel, the epoptic stage as “more spiritual” than the pedagogic). It is the sort of phrase that marks a level of reading and a function within the catechetical cursus.

Second, the adjective μυστικός only surfaces at precisely the point where Carpocrates appears. It is in the sentence where Carpocrates “obtained a copy of the mystic gospel” that the term is first attached to the book, and it is in the sentence where Clement scripts Theodore’s reply to the Carpocratians—“do not concede that the mystic gospel is by Mark”—that the exact phrase “Mark’s mystic gospel” occurs.

That placement fits very naturally with the idea that μυστικὸν εὐαγγέλιον, at least in that sharp collocation, is not Clement’s internal label for the Alexandrian book but the slogan under which the Carpocratians are marketing their version. They are the ones saying, “We have Mark’s mystic gospel,” and Clement is teaching Theodore how to refuse that claim.

Notice the parallel with another of Clement’s favorite polemical moves: his treatment of “gnostic.” He can distinguish sharply between “knowledge falsely so-called,” the ψευδώνυμος γνῶσις of heretical sects, and the “true gnostic,” his own ideal Christian. Clement is perfectly willing to appropriate the same root word in different directions, but he also knows when a particular phrase belongs to the opponent’s self-branding. “Gnostic” for him is not a book-title; it is a contested badge. “Mystic gospel” in To Theodore behaves very similarly.

On this reading, the logic of the letter runs as follows. The Carpocratians in Alexandria have made much of a Markan book that they present to Theodore’s circle as “the mystic gospel.” They cite to him a shocking scene, “the naked man with naked man,” as proof that they alone have access to Jesus’ true mysteries. Theodore has been rattled. Clement writes to reframe the entire situation.

He tells Theodore: yes, there is a higher Mark. Mark did indeed compose a more spiritual gospel in Alexandria itself, written for the perfect and read only to those undergoing mystic instruction. That book belongs to the church, not to Carpocrates. Carpocrates, by bribing or deceiving a presbyter, obtained a copy and polluted the “spotless and holy” words with his own shameless fabrications. When, therefore, the Carpocratians shove their pastiche at you and say “this is Mark’s mystic gospel,” you must not merely demur; you must deny that equation on oath.

In other words, Clement is not saying, “There is no mystic gospel by Mark.” He is saying, “Whatever mystic gospel Mark wrote, this Carpocratian composite is not it, and you are not allowed to ratify their branding of their book as ‘Mark’s mystic gospel.’” The Greek can bear that elliptical reading easily: τοῦ Μάρκου εἶναι τὸ μυστικὸν εὐαγγέλιον can just as well be “that the mystic gospel [sc. this text before you] is by Mark” as a general, timeless statement “that any mystic gospel is by Mark.” Given the narrative context, the former is the more natural.

This also explains why Clement never uses the full, title-like formula “τὸ κατὰ Μάρκον μυστικὸν εὐαγγέλιον.” When he is naming a canonical title, he says “the Gospel according to Mark.” When he is talking about the longer Alexandrian version for insiders, he uses general adjectives—“more spiritual,” “mystic”—but keeps them grammatically detachable, as descriptions rather than nameplates. The phrase “Mark’s mystic gospel,” with Mark in the genitive and μυστικόν pressed tightly up against εὐαγγέλιον, belongs to the polemical moment, not to a library catalogue.

So point (b) of the thesis can be formulated this way: Clement’s letter presupposes that Carpocratians in Alexandria are claiming that their Markan text is “the mystic gospel of Mark,” and Clement is pushing back against that very branding.

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5. Clement’s Mark: many gospels, one evangelist, one secret

If we now pull these strands together, we can see what Clement is doing.

From Papias, we have a Mark whose great virtue is ἀκρίβεια at the level of memory and whose admitted “defect” is the absence of a single, fixed τάξις. That combination naturally generates a period in which Markan material can exist in multiple ordered forms without loss of authenticity.

In the broader patristic tradition, we then see two things: a move toward local standardizations (the “Palestinian” Mark, the Caesarean “accurate copies”) and, at Alexandria, a recognition that Mark’s material can be configured for more than one pedagogical level. Clement’s story of Mark writing first in Rome and then, later, a πνευματικώτερον εὐαγγέλιον in Alexandria is his way of mapping that flexibility. Mark writes “many gospels in many places” not in the sense of inventing wildly different narratives, but in the sense of deploying the same accurate dominical logia in multiple configurations suited to different audiences and locales.

At the same time, Clement’s entire theological apparatus is built on the contrast between precision and mystery, pedagogy and epopteia. The Law and the elementary gospel preaching operate with ἀκρίβεια, clear commands, tight exegesis of the Son. The higher gospel, the truly mystic instruction, moves into the epoptic contemplation of the Father, where ordinary “precision” gives way to a different kind of clarity, the clarity of vision rather than of syllogism.

The “secret,” then, is not merely that there is a longer Markan text. The “secret” is that the same Mark can function at both levels. Peter, as Clement presents him, is the exegete of the Law who reads Genesis “precisely,” seeing the Son in “In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth.” Mark, the interpreter of Peter, becomes the scribe of both levels. In Rome he inscribes Peter’s precise preaching in a form usable by the churches; in Alexandria he inscribes the mystic, epoptic dimensions of that same material for the τέλειοι, the perfect.

The Carpocratians latch onto the latter and give it a label: “mystic gospel.” They use the promise of μυστήρια to justify their antinomianism and their eroticized imaginings of Jesus. Clement, whose entire project is to rescue μυστήρια for an orthodox gnosis, refuses to let that branding stand. There is a mystic, more spiritual Mark, but it lives within the church’s own hierarchy of reading, aligned with his ethics–physics–epoptics scheme. The Carpocratian text is just a polluted derivative that needs to be denied.

That is why Clement’s letter oscillates the way it does. On the one hand, he asserts the existence of an Alexandrian, more spiritual Mark and quotes from it to show Theodore what the genuine material looks like. On the other hand, he tells Theodore not to concede, even under oath, that the Carpocratian book deserves to be called “Mark’s mystic gospel.” On the level of slogans, Clement is opposing their “mystic gospel of Mark” with his own vision of a Mark whose true mystic gospel is woven into the church’s secret teaching.

Clement does not, therefore, bequeath to us a neat, formal title “The Secret Gospel of Mark.” That is a modern convenience. What he does bequeath is something much more interesting: an Alexandrian remembrance of a Mark who writes more than once, whose material has more than one legitimate configuration, and whose higher, mystic configuration belongs inside a pedagogical structure in which Law is precise and Gospel is mystic, ἀκριβής below and μυστικός above.

Read that way, Clement is not an annoyance to be explained away or a gullible victim of a modern forgery. He is one of our richest witnesses to the way a second-century Christian intellectual, steeped in both Scripture and Platonism, thought about the fluidity of gospel tradition and the stratification of gospel interpretation. He lets us glimpse a time when “according to Mark” did not yet mean one fixed codex only, and when calling a gospel “mystic” was less about its secrecy from the public and more about the level at which it was read by those whose minds had moved beyond fear into wisdom.