Order, Revelation, and the Fate of Secret Mark: Papias, Tertullian, and the Marcionite Gospel

At the heart of this line of argument is a simple but destabilizing question: what if the earliest catholic worries about “order” in the Gospels were not mainly about chronology, but about theology—about whether Jesus’ words and deeds sat in the right place within God’s prophetic plan? And what if those worries, first voiced by Papias and later weaponized by Tertullian, were aimed not just at Marcion’s editing of Luke but at a whole class of “unordered” gospels, including something like the so-called Secret Gospel of Mark?

Papias is the starting point. In the famous fragment preserved by Eusebius, he says that Mark, as Peter’s interpreter, “wrote accurately, though not in order” the things said or done by the Lord. That comment is usually treated as a mild remark about narrative sequence: Mark jumps around; Matthew is smoother. But the Greek word τάξις carries more weight than “chronology.” It can mean rank, proper placement, fitting arrangement—exactly the sort of term later used to describe the ordered relations of Father, Son, and Spirit, or the staged unfolding of revelation. Papias also insists he wants nothing to do with “strange commandments,” only with the dominical logia handed down by reliable elders. Taken together, those notes sound less like a neutral literary critic and more like a man who thinks that the way you arrange Jesus’ sayings is itself a doctrinal issue. A gospel that preserves true anecdotes but fails to set them within the right prophetic and theological frame is, in that sense, “not in order.”

Tertullian, more than a century later, lives in that same conceptual world. In Adversus Marcionem he hammers on ordo almost obsessively. Book 3 opens with iam hinc ordo de Christo: from here on, the dispute about Christ must proceed according to proper order. He says it “belonged to the order” that the Father should confess the Son first; he speaks of the order by which faith is shaped, of the gradus of his argument, the dispositio and structura of God’s dealings with Israel. Nothing from the Creator, he likes to say, is subitum—sudden; everything is staged, prepared, foreshadowed. Revelation is not a series of surprises; it is a carefully arranged unveiling of what was already hidden in the Law and the Prophets.

Once you see that, Book 4 looks different. On the surface, it is a commentary on the Marcionite gospel, treated as a mutilated Luke. But a large part of Tertullian’s irritation is not “this is the wrong gospel” but “this gospel is out of order.” Jesus appears without genealogy; John the Baptist bursts onto the scene without being firmly anchored in Isaiah; the beatitudes and hard sayings are treated as if they contrasted with, rather than completed, the Creator’s law. Again and again, Tertullian’s solution is not to deny the sayings, but to put them back into a sequence: to show how they grow out of Deuteronomy, Isaiah, the Psalms; how they are the latest step in a long chain rather than the first gesture of an alien god.

That is why chapter 25 is so important. Taking up Luke 10:21 (“You have hidden these things from the wise and prudent and revealed them to babes”), Tertullian asks: what things? whose things? hidden by whom? revealed by whom? The only coherent answer, he argues, is that the Creator veiled his own purposes in prophetic allegories, figures, and riddles, then revealed them through Christ to the simple who already believe. A god with no past, no prophets, no prior speech cannot have “hidden” anything; he can only start from scratch. For Tertullian, that disqualifies any system that advertises itself as a fresh revelation detached from the Jewish scriptures. Revelation has a genealogy. If you cannot show how a saying of Jesus springs from that hidden prophetic storehouse, you cannot claim it as legitimate dominical material.

Measured by that yardstick, something like Secret Mark is in trouble. Clement’s Letter to Theodore describes Mark composing a more spiritual gospel in Alexandria by adding “certain other stories” and sayings for those being initiated into great mysteries, including a strange resurrection of a young man and private nocturnal instruction. These episodes are precisely what Tertullian’s rule of faith cannot accommodate: new scenes, not grounded in prophecy, circulated in a quasi-esoteric way, outside the public apostolic preaching. They break Papias’s taxis and Tertullian’s ordo at the same time. From the perspective of that catholic instinct, the problem with a “secret gospel” is not that it is longer or shorter, but that it introduces unheralded material into a story that is supposed to be the consummation of an already-given scriptural drama.

Layered on top of this is the more radical suggestion that Marcion’s gospel may originally have stood somewhere in this Markan orbit. There are old hints—which later heresiology suppresses or recasts—that some Marcionites used a single gospel aligned more with Mark than with Luke, possibly a text that already had “mystical” expansions. The Refutation of All Heresies, for example, describes Marcionites with “the gospel and the apostle,” and in places seems to associate their gospel more naturally with Mark and Peter than with Luke. If one reconstructs a pre-Irenaean edition of Adversus Marcionem that was more Papian and Matthean in its orientation, the later insistence that Marcion corrupted Luke starts to look less like reporting and more like canonical spin. On that reconstruction, Irenaeus is the architect who forces Marcion onto Luke so that he can build his tidy four-gospel edifice in which each canonical gospel has its matching heresy, and Tertullian is the Latin voice of that system.

This is where the whole scheme meets its strongest resistance. The mainstream ancient testimony is blunt: Irenaeus says Marcion used an abbreviated Luke; Tertullian assumes the same; later heresiologists follow suit, and modern reconstructions of Marcion’s Evangelion are, for good reason, based on Luke. Critics of the Mark/Secret Mark hypothesis rightly point out that there is nothing in the explicit record about Marcion using Mark, let alone a “secret Mark,” and that importing Clement’s mysterious Alexandrian text into Marcion’s world multiplies uncertainties. They also emphasize that Tertullian clearly distinguishes between his church’s gospel and Marcion’s; his complaints about lack of introduction or prophetic anchoring are aimed at Marcion’s text, not at canonical Mark as he knew it. To say that his rhetoric against “sudden” Christ and “disordered” narrative is really a critique of Mark in disguise is to make him attack his own scripture—something his whole argument about church custody and public authority is designed to avoid.

There is also the more basic caution about Papias. All we have are fragments through Eusebius; reading later anxieties back into Papias’s few sentences is risky. Perhaps he did mean no more than, “Mark’s story jumps around.” Perhaps his preference for Matthew reflects local usage, not a grand theory of canonical order. And of course the standard picture in patristic and modern scholarship puts Marcion after the composition of our gospels, not before them. On that view, Marcion is not a tradition-bearer but a tradition-abbréviateur, trimming and rearranging Luke to suit his dualistic theology. The gaps, omissions, and awkwardness of his gospel are precisely what early critics expect from someone they consider to be “firstborn of Satan”: not a keeper of older forms, but a deliberate mutilator. If that is right, then the safest course is to take Irenaeus and Tertullian at roughly their word: their vehement defense of order and continuity aims at someone who has chopped up Luke, not at someone who is secretly preserving a Markan mystical edition.

Still, even if one brackets the bolder historical claims, the conceptual point stands. In the second and third centuries, catholic authors tied gospel legitimacy to taxis and ordo in a thick sense. A gospel had to be apostolic in origin, aligned with the Creator’s scriptural promises, and arranged so as to show that alignment. Any text that seemed to present Jesus as a sudden heavenly stranger, or that omitted the preparatory apparatus of prophecy, or that introduced fresh “mysteries” for an inner circle, looked theologically out of order. The fight with Marcion sharpened that instinct, because Marcion built his case precisely on contrast and antithesis: Christ over against the Law, grace over against justice, new god over against old. Irenaeus and Tertullian respond by insisting that Christ’s hardest sayings—“love your enemies,” “turn the other cheek,” “do not lust”—are not the slogans of a rival deity but the highest pitch of the same God’s voice, long heard in Torah and prophecy and now brought to fullness.

That perspective has consequences for any proposal about Secret Mark. If the letter to Theodore is genuine and if there really was an Alexandrian “more spiritual” Mark reserved for the perfect, then it sat from the start under a cloud of suspicion from writers like Tertullian, for whom the very idea of hidden gospel material was structurally wrong. If the letter is a modern forgery, then the whole edifice collapses into a brilliant pastiche of precisely those tensions—Papias’s remark about Mark, Clement’s taste for esoteric tradition, Tertullian’s horror of secret revelation—that preoccupied second-century debates. Either way, the lens of taxis clarifies what is actually at stake. The question is not only “did extra Markan pericopae once exist?” but “could such material be shown to belong inside the prophetic–apostolic order that figures like Papias and Tertullian regarded as non-negotiable?”

Under that lens, theories that make Marcion’s gospel a kind of Secret Mark do two things at once. They offer a daring alternative prehistory for both Marcionism and Mark, in which Alexandrian mysticism, Papian anxieties, and Roman canon politics all intersect. And they sharpen the catholic critique: if the true gospel is what emerges when the scattered logia are arranged according to divine taxis, then any gospel that deliberately traffics in secrecy, novelty, or dislocation will be judged, from that side, as a misordering of the dominical voice. Whether one finds the Secret Mark hypothesis persuasive or not, the old patristic fixation on order turns out to be a powerful diagnostic tool for understanding why some texts were embraced, others corrected, and still others pushed to the edge of heresy.