Secret Mark and Alexandria

 Based on an idea by Andrew Criddle. One of the most persistent framing devices in discussion of Mark and Alexandria is the tidy story that runs: Mark served Peter in Rome, wrote his Gospel there under Peter’s eye, and only after Peter’s martyrdom did he sail east to found the church in Alexandria—perhaps bringing with him an expanded or “mystic” version of his text. It feels ancient because all the ingredients are old. But when you disentangle those ingredients, the synthesis itself starts to look like a later piece of harmonizing rather than a single continuous stream going back to the first or early second century.

On the Roman side, the earliest explicit link between Mark’s Gospel and Peter is Irenaeus. He knows Mark as Peter’s “interpreter” and, crucially, says Mark wrote “after their departure,” which in his idiom means after Peter and Paul’s death, not merely after they left Rome. What he does not do there is send Mark to Alexandria. Rome, Peter, a post-martyrdom Gospel: that is his constellation. Independently of this, we have another cluster of traditions, preserved most fully in Eusebius, which make Mark both Peter’s interpreter in Rome and the first evangelist of Egypt, founding churches in Alexandria. Eusebius reports Clement’s teaching that Mark wrote while Peter was preaching in Rome and that Peter did not explicitly authorize it but did not forbid it either. Then, with a characteristic φασίν (“they say”), he adds that Mark went on to proclaim in Egypt “the Gospel which he had written” and to be the first to establish churches in Alexandria. In his chronographic work, Eusebius folds this into a larger scheme that places Peter in Rome already under Claudius and Mark in Alexandria not long after, i.e. well before Nero’s persecution and Peter’s death.

A different dating logic emerges from Jerome and later Alexandrian chronicles. Jerome’s entry on Mark in On Illustrious Men assigns Mark’s death and burial in Alexandria to the eighth year of Nero, naming Annianus as his successor; the History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria preserves essentially the same handoff, with Annianus taking over in Nero’s seventh or eighth year. On the Roman side, late antique writers read Tacitus’ description of the post–Great Fire crackdown in 64 as the moment of Peter and Paul’s martyrdom. If you put those timelines together, you get a clean picture: Peter dies under Nero in Rome; around the same time Mark’s tenure in Alexandria ends and Annianus takes over. It is no surprise that medieval compilers and prologues move the pieces into a single line: after Peter’s death under Nero, Mark goes to Alexandria, founds the church, and dies there around the same period.

The tension is obvious. Eusebius’ own system wants Mark in Egypt early, under Claudius, while Peter is still alive in Rome. Irenaeus wants Mark’s writing after Peter’s death but does not mention Egypt. Jerome and the Alexandrian patriarchal tradition lock Mark’s end-point to Nero’s later years in a way that fits a post-Petrine transfer. Medieval prologues and chronicles then make explicit what is only implicit in that mesh of dates: Mark writes in Rome while Peter is alive, Peter dies under Nero, Mark then moves to Alexandria and becomes its founding bishop. At that stage, “Rome → Egypt after Peter” has become common sense.

There are at least two important consequences of this disentangling. First, the “Mark in Rome” and “Mark in Alexandria” motifs are both early but originally independent. You can combine them in more than one way. Eusebius chooses one combination (early Claudian Alexandria, before Peter’s martyrdom) and buttresses it with his highly tendentious reading of Philo’s Therapeutae as Christian proto-monks under Mark. Later traditions, keyed to Nero’s reign and the Annianus succession date, choose a different combination: Mark’s decisive turn to Egypt happens in the wake of Peter’s death. Neither configuration is simply “what has always been believed.” Both are reconstructions built from scattered chronological hints and local interests.

Second, this matters for how we read later texts that presuppose a specific itinerary. If a work quietly assumes that Mark wrote his Gospel in Rome while Peter was still preaching and only came to Alexandria after Peter’s death, it is not drawing directly on Eusebius’ chronology. It is echoing a synthesis that fits more comfortably with Jerome, the Alexandrian patriarchal lists, and the medieval harmonizers than with the earliest continuous narrative we have. That does not automatically make the text late or inauthentic; people can have access to lost local traditions or to chronographic schemes we no longer possess. But historically, the clearest attested form of the “after Peter died, Mark went to Alexandria” storyline is post-Nicene.

For the “Secret Mark” debate, this pushes in a very specific direction. The letter to Theodore sketches a background in which Mark is bound to Peter at Rome and then, after Peter’s departure, associated with Alexandria and a potentially fuller or “mystic” version of his Gospel. That picture aligns neatly with the later harmonized Mark legend. It is not the one Eusebius himself spells out when he is being most explicit about chronology. That does not answer the paleographic or linguistic questions about the letter. It does, however, warn us against treating “Mark after Peter, then Alexandria” as a rock-solid, primitive datum. The more we see that itinerary as a creative welding of originally separate motifs, the less weight it can bear as external corroboration for a special Alexandrian Markan text. The real work of evaluating “Secret Mark” still sits where it always should have: on the hand that wrote the pages, the ink and codex they were bound into, and the internal Markan profile of the fragments themselves, not on a later ecclesiastical story that tries to make Rome and Alexandria fit together in a single, elegant line.