Nathan Porter, 366 and To Theodore

If you start from the premise that “AI says no” is not an argument, the whole question of Clement’s authorship of marginal pieces like the Letter to Theodore and the so-called 366 letter looks very different. Computational tools are good at pressure-testing hypotheses; they are terrible at replacing them. The useful move is not to feed a suspicious text into a black box and take its thumbs-up/thumbs-down as gospel, but to ask very specific questions: does this prose behave, at the level of function words, connective tissue, and gnomic habits, like Clement’s undisputed work? Does it sit inside the Alexandrian epistolary and ascetic traditions that we can otherwise document?

Once you frame things that way, the 366 letter on ἐγκράτεια is immediately interesting because so much of its engine-room looks Clementine. A big chunk of its argument about Jesus as embodied ἐγκράτεια who carries no “weight” on land or sea and does not “give back” his food is paralleled almost word for word in Stromateis 3.7.59. Around that core, the letter breathes the same ethical and noetic air as Clement: ἐγκράτεια as the hinge virtue; μετουσία and μετέχειν Θεοῦ for participation in God; the stock opposition of φθορά and ἀφθαρσία; νοῦς as the organ that really sees; πάθη as νόσοι requiring θεραπεία in the form of virtue. Even the connective mesh—those little γάρ, δέ, οὖν steps, the oὔτε…οὔτε chains, the ἵνα and ὥστε clauses that turn maxims into trajectories—feels like someone thinking in Clement’s cadences.

The Clementine prose in To Theodore, when you strip away the “mystic Mark” excerpt and just look at the covering letter, shows a very similar infrastructure. There is the same gnomic fencing of truth into grades, the same pastoral worry about who gets to hear what, the same Alexandrian church-discipline voice that both flatters and warns the addressee. Light stylometric probes behave accordingly: if you treat undisputed Clement as a centroid and measure simple things like function-word frequencies and short character n-grams, the To Theodore prose falls close to that center. The 366 letter is slightly further out, which is not surprising given the genre difference—ascetic paraenesis versus polemical epistle—but it still sits comfortably in the same stylistic neighborhood rather than off in some foreign dialect.

The “problem” in 366 is not how it talks but what it dares to say. Those vivid lines about Christ as weightless, unburdened by digestion, have a docetic tang that makes some readers nervous: is this really Clement, or some later extremist hiding behind his vocabulary? But that worry only bites if you assume Clement never indulges in extreme ascetic hyperbole or never quotes views he then bends toward his own purposes. In the Stromateis and elsewhere, he is perfectly capable of pushing metaphors about purity and dispassion to the edge of plausibility, and he often incorporates others’ formulations before redirecting them. Treat the “weightless” Christ image as quoted or as rhetorical exaggeration rather than as a bare dogmatic statement, and the doctrinal spike flattens into something much more consistent with his usual strategy: shock the reader into seeing detachment as participation in the divine, then domesticate the image inside a larger ethical vision.

Against that, there is a recurrent modern move that says, in effect, “this is too Clementine to be Clement.” The letter sounds so much like him, uses so many of his favorite words, and follows so neatly his graded-truth pedagogy that it must be a later pastiche. But this only has teeth if it is coupled with a clear impostor profile and with specifics about which layers are allegedly over-fit and which are non-Clementine innovations. Simply saying “the style is suspiciously accurate, and also look at these oddities” is not enough, especially when genuine Clementine works themselves contain hapax-like phrases and unexpected turns. Real authors do surprising things; uniqueness is not, by itself, a fingerprint of forgery.

From the standpoint of the Secret Mark debate, the upshot is modest but important. Internal evidence now makes it hard to dismiss the Letter to Theodore’s frame voice as obviously non-Clementine. The way it moves between praise and warning, the connective lattice of its sentences, the whole secrecy-and-episcopal-discipline posture: all of this is exactly what you would expect from a late-second/early-third-century Alexandrian presbyter writing to a trusted subordinate. The 366 letter, while not as tight a fit, still looks like something emerging from the same orbit—a piece of ascetic exhortation that shares Clement’s lexicon and habits even if it pushes one Christological trope farther than we are used to seeing.

None of this proves that Clement personally wrote either document. Stylometry and close reading can rarely do more than shift probabilities. What they can do, and what this line of analysis does quite effectively, is weaken the argument that style alone exposes a modern pastiche. If both To Theodore and 366 inhabit a plausible Clementine envelope, then decisive judgments can’t come from “AI” pronouncements or gut reactions to a few unusual lines; they have to rest on harder questions of external provenance, manuscript history, and how we understand Alexandrian practices of attribution, quotation, and textual expansion. On that terrain, AI goes back where it belongs: from being a supposed judge of authenticity to serving as a glorified calculator, useful but not sovereign.