The Argument for Clement's Authorship of "Secret Mark"

 One way into the Secret Mark problem is to stop asking “could Morton Smith have forged this?” and start asking “does this look like something a late–second-century Alexandrian like Clement would actually do?” Once you shift the frame that way, a lot of things that have been treated as bizarre outliers start to fall into place.

Take the basic shape of the claim: there exists, alongside the familiar gospel “according to Mark,” a more spiritual version, with additional episodes reserved for catechumens who have advanced beyond ordinary instruction. In most modern imaginations that sounds like a Dan Brown flourish. In Clement’s Alexandria it is almost banal. Clement distinguishes repeatedly between faith and gnosis, milk and solid food, the many and the few. He insists that Scripture has layers: a plain outer sense for beginners and a deeper, symbolic level for those who have been morally and intellectually trained. He treats the Christian life as an ascent through stages of purification toward likeness to God. Graded, initiatory teaching is not a side note in his thought; it is the organizing principle.

Now add to that his way of handling texts. Clement does not just quote one gospel at a time; he harmonizes, conflates, and stitches together sayings and episodes from different sources into composite “logoi of the Lord.” He is perfectly comfortable treating scriptural and parabiblical material as a single field of inspired discourse, provided it serves the work of forming the perfect human being. The distinction is not between “canonical” and “apocryphal” in our sense, but between material that bears a worthy, spiritual sense and material that does not. Within that world, a special Markan dossier shaped for mystagogical use is not an alien intrusion. It is exactly the sort of thing a teacher like Clement would have reason to preserve, adapt, and pass on.

The Rich Man story is a good test case. Clement’s famous treatise on “who is the rich man that shall be saved?” does not treat Jesus’ words as an across-the-board order to liquidate property. Instead he reads them as a demand for radical interior detachment, a stripping off of passions and attachments that binds the soul to the world. The point is not poverty for its own sake, but the soul’s freedom so that it can love rightly and know God. If you place the Secret Mark material next to that exegesis, it looks less like a random eroticized vignette and more like a dramatization of the passage from bondage to freedom: the neaniskos who leaves his linen cloth, spends the night with Jesus “learning the mystery of the kingdom,” and emerges to follow. It is the kind of symbolic narrative Clement habitually teases out of the insides of Scripture. A mystic Mark is simply that habit given narrative body.

The predictable objection is moral rather than historical: if Clement is endorsing or circulating a Mark-text that ordinary Christians do not know, and if he allows it to be described as “according to Mark,” isn’t this deceitful? Doesn’t this make him inconsistent with his own protests against heretical falsification? That is the one serious point of resistance in this line of argument. But it rests on a modern assumption about titles and authorship that the ancient evidence does not support. For Clement, “according to Mark” is not a copyright claim; it is a signal that the material belongs to the Markan line of transmission and interpretation. Alexandrian book-culture is full of expansions, epitomes, commentaries that live under a great name while being the work of later hands. There is nothing inherently dishonest about an Alexandrian teacher curating a more spiritual form of Mark under Mark’s name, any more than there is in an Alexandrian Platonist producing a “Platonic” dialogue that channels Plato’s doctrine.

If that is right, then the charge of inconsistency loses much of its force. Clement condemns falsification that mutilates the saving message or bends it toward immoral ends. A Markan expansion deployed in house, for those undergoing advanced formation, to lead them more deeply into detachment and likeness to Christ, lies on the other side of that line. The issue is not concealment as such—Clement is very frank about concealment—but what is being concealed and why. On that score, a reserved, mystagogical Mark fills out, rather than contradicts, the portrait of Clement we already have.

The implications for the wider Secret Mark debate are significant. If you take this Clementine profile seriously, the burden of proof shifts. The question is no longer “can we imagine a clever twentieth-century scholar inventing a mystic Mark?” but “given what we know about Clement’s theology, pedagogy, and textual practices, is a reserved Markan expansion plausible in his time and place?” The answer to that narrower, historically grounded question is yes. It fits. It looks like one more expression of a recognizable Alexandrian strategy: preserve deeper material, mark it as belonging to a trusted apostolic line, and use it for the perfection of the few.

That does not, by itself, prove the letter to Theodore authentic or Secret Mark ancient. Those judgments will always depend on a whole complex of palaeographical, codicological, and historiographical arguments. What it does is clear away one of the main conceptual obstacles. A “more spiritual” Mark used in initiation is not a wild anomaly that cries out for a modern forger. It is the kind of thing that a teacher like Clement could have handled and explained without strain, and that his students could have received as part of the normal Alexandrian economy of “hidden” and “manifest” teaching. Once that is granted, it becomes much harder to dismiss Secret Mark as sheer invention and much more reasonable to ask the quieter, older questions: how did such spiritual additions arise, how were they curated, and what do they tell us about the spectrum of “gospel according to Mark” in the second-century church?