St Mark as μυστολέκτης in the Acts of Mark

One of the recurring problems in arguments over “Secret Mark” is that the word μυστικός gets treated as if it were some exotic, one-off signal that Clement must be talking about a hidden codex. The material gathered here blows that assumption up from the Byzantine side. It starts from the line everyone knows in the Letter to Theodore—Clement telling his correspondent to deny on oath that the so-called “mystic gospel” belongs to Mark, and backing that advice with the maxim that “not everything true is to be spoken to all.” On its own, that can be read either as bibliographic (“there is a separate mystical Mark”) or hermeneutical (“there is a mystical way of expounding Mark”). What the Byzantine dossier shows is that later Greek Christians had an entire honorific vocabulary for people who dealt in “mystery speech” around the gospel, and they used it constantly without implying extra books.

The key noun is μυστολέκτης—literally a “mystery-speaker.” It surfaces first on an ivory diptych inscription: two men are praised as “true brothers, mystic speakers of the things above.” Koumanoudes glosses it in exactly the sense one would expect: someone who utters, expounds, or chants the mysteries of the faith. From there the word and its relatives are all over the place. John Geometres applies μυστολέκτης to holy men as a stock epithet. Analecta Sacra gives us compound phrases like “sacred worshiper and mystic speaker.” George Metochites can talk about “the divine mystic speaker” and “God-inspired mystic speakers.” A Paris manuscript describes an apostle as both μυστολέκτης and a beholder of ineffable things. Germanos is even able to weaponize the title, sneering at “mystic speakers of error” when he wants to brand opponents as heretical pretenders to this role. George Pisides incorporates the term into imperial panegyric. So this is not a quirky one-off; it is a standard way of saying “this person proclaims or comments on God’s mysteries.”

The vocabulary branches further. On Byzantine seals, μυστολέκτης appears as a court function, flanked by μυστογράφος, the “writer of mysteries.” Sophocles’ lexicon can still record the verb μυστολεκτέω, “to reveal a mystery.” Parallel honorifics for the evangelists show how comfortably this mystic register sits around the gospels. One hymn calls Luke “Christ’s most excellent mystic scribe” who “deliberately wrote the divine gospel.” Mark, in other verses, is praised as unveiling “the most hidden things of the God-man Word”—a poetic way of saying that his text discloses what lies beneath the surface of Christ’s life and teaching. Even if the Acts of Mark are not directly quoted calling him μυστολέκτης, the pattern is clear: evangelists and apostles occupy the role of mystic speaker or writer, and their gospels are routinely treated as vehicles for μυστήρια.

That has obvious consequences for how we hear Clement’s language. Once you see how normal it is in Greek Christian idiom to call someone a μυστολέκτης or μυστογράφος, and to speak of “mystic” preaching or writing without any suggestion of an extra canon, Clement’s μυστικὸν/πνευματικώτερον εὐαγγέλιον no longer looks like a weird technical label for a second book. It fits neatly into a much broader habit of distinguishing between the surface narrative and a deeper, initiatory sense disclosed to the worthy. When Clement tells Theodore to deny that “the mystic gospel” belongs to Mark, he can very naturally mean: don’t let the Carpocratians win the branding war by claiming the Alexandrian way of reading Mark as their property. The “mystic” quality attaches to the way Mark is expounded and heard, not to a different scroll hiding in a chest.

Of course, almost all of the μυστολέκτης material is medieval. It cannot be marched straight back into the second century as if nothing changed. A skeptic can fairly say that Byzantine hymnography and court titles do not prove how Clement used μυστικός. But what this dossier does knock out is the idea that reading Clement’s adjectives hermeneutically is special pleading invented to save the Letter to Theodore from birthing a fifth gospel. The burden of oddity shifts. It turns out that Christian Greek has a long, banal tradition of calling people “mystic speakers” and “mystic scribes,” and of treating the gospel as a locus of μυστήρια without multiplying books. Within that tradition, a “mystic gospel” is most straightforwardly heard as the mystagogical register of the one received narrative—exactly what later Byzantines thought evangelists like Mark and Luke were for.