The Evangelic Mystery: Clement’s Mystic Gospel, Gregory of Nyssa, and the Fate of the Marcionite Incipit

Most discussions of the Letter to Theodore get stuck on the binary: either Clement really wrote it and there was a “Secret Gospel of Mark” locked away in the Alexandrian archives, or Morton Smith forged the whole thing and “mystic gospel” is just a clever pastiche of patristic clichés. What happens if you stop asking “codex or hoax?” and instead follow the language? Once you do that, a rather different picture comes into focus.

The phrase μυστικὸν εὐαγγέλιον, together with Clement’s comparative πνευματικώτερον εὐαγγέλιον, never behaves like a book-title. It behaves like a signal. When Clement narrates Mark’s activity, he does not say, “Mark wrote a Mystic Gospel.” He says that after composing an initial selection of pericopae “most useful for catechumens,” Mark later, in Alexandria, composed “a more spiritual gospel” for the perfected, yet even then he “did not divulge the unutterable things.” The comparative already tells you what is going on: the same narrative is being graded. There is a more somatic layer and a more spiritual one, but still one scroll. Later in the letter, when Clement actually quotes the famous Bethany/Lazarus story, his citation formula is revealingly plain: “I copy out with the very words of the gospel.” No epithets, no hint that he is opening a different volume. If the actual title of the thing in the cupboard had been “Mystic Gospel,” that would be the natural moment to say so. Instead, μυστικός and πνευματικώτερον float as adjectives; they qualify a mode of reading, an inner stratum, rather than identifying a separate book.

That same logic governs the most notorious line, the one about Carpocrates securing an ἀπόγραφον of the “mystic gospel.” Here the philology is decisive. In Clement’s world, an ἀπόγραφον is not the normal word for a pristine duplicate. It is a registration, an outline, a set of notes. In Clement’s own Stromateis the verb ἀπογράφω never means “to copy a whole volume”; it means to sketch, to inscribe in a register. If he wanted to say “they stole our codex,” he had ἀντίγραφον or simply βίβλος ready to hand. Instead he carefully downgrades the Carpocratian trophy to a notebook—a partial, corrupted record of logia that Carpocrates then “re-expounded” and “polluted with shameless falsehoods.” On that reading, Clement’s point is not “they got hold of a parallel Mark that we also have, but we call it something different.” His point is, “they’ve pinched scraps of our liturgical Mark and claimed that their annotated excerpts are ‘the mystic gospel of Mark,’ when in fact the real mystery is not in any book at all.”

Set against the larger canon-politics of the second and third centuries, this fits rather neatly. Paul’s τὸ μυστήριον τοῦ εὐαγγελίου in Ephesians 6:19 is an obvious resource, but most orthodox writers appear nervous about repeating that exact genitive. They talk about “the mystery,” but leave “of the gospel” unspoken, precisely because sects like the Marcionites could point to a concrete evangelion and say, “There—that’s the mystery of the gospel Paul meant.” Origen inches closer to the Pauline wording when he anticipates a future moment when the church will proclaim τὸ μυστήριον τοῦ εὐαγγελίου with full parrhesia, but even he treats that as something not yet fully realized. Within that atmosphere, Clement’s circumlocutions make sense. You can hint at a μυστικὸν or πνευματικώτερον εὐαγγέλιον as long as you keep the mystery itself unwritten and stress that any text paraded as “mystic gospel” by libertines is, at best, a derivative ἀπόγραφον.

Seen this way, the Letter to Theodore is not floating in a vacuum; it stands at one end of a long Alexandrian conversation about how scripture works. Clement’s whole project rests on a two-tier pedagogy: exoteric narrative for the many, esoteric teaching for the few, delivered “not in writing but by living voice.” He loves Mark 4:34—“He did not speak to them without a parable”—as a charter for this reserve. The letter simply applies that rule intra-evangelically. There is one Markan scroll, but it has a public surface and a mystagogical depth, and it is that depth that some Alexandrians, perhaps loosely, could call “the mystic gospel.” The real scandal for Clement is that Carpocrates has taken phrases like γυμνοὶ τοῖς γυμνοῖς out of that context, detached them from their liturgical frame, and weaponized them as slogans for practices Clement finds abhorrent. His response is paradoxical but consistent: he quotes just enough of the enigmatic imagery to correct its misuse, but refuses to say what actually happened in the initiation, thereby preserving the secrecy he is defending.

Gregory of Nyssa’s phrase τὸ εὐαγγελικὸν μυστήριον shows what this looks like once the canon anxiety has cooled. By the late fourth century, with the fourfold gospel firmly established and Marcionite communities fading from view, he can bring “gospel” and “mystery” back together without anyone suspecting a fifth book. Even so, his wording is careful: he does not revive Paul’s “mystery of the gospel,” which might sound too much like a genitive of possession; he speaks instead of an “evangelic mystery,” where εὐαγγελικὸν is adjectival. The mystery is an interior depth; the gospel remains the canonical narrative. In his homily on Song of Songs 6, he lays out the two levels explicitly. There is the “somatic” or sensory gospel—Bethlehem, Nazareth, miracles, Passion, Resurrection—aimed at beginners. And there is the evangelic mystery, in which the same texts, and even the same place-names, are read as symbols of the Logos’ katabasis, his descent from unapproachable majesty to the lowliness of our nature.

That is where the Jericho road comes in. Jacob of Serug, reporting the Marcionite gospel, preserves the striking claim that Christ “appeared first between Jerusalem and Jericho.” In other words, the descent from Jerusalem to Jericho was not just a parable setting, but the initial scene of the Marcionite evangelion, a compressed prologue staging the Son’s descent into the world. Gregory’s homily appears to know the same motif, but in orthodox dress. Commenting on the Beloved’s “descent” in the Song, he explains that this reveals Christ “accompanying the man who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho,” descending with him from ineffable glory into Adamic clay. He leans on the same geography that Basil’s circle described—the precipitous, red-hued gorge of Adummim—and turns it into a mystagogical map: Adam formed from red earth, fallen along the Jericho road, rescued by the Logos who comes down to refashion humanity. If this cluster of themes once belonged to a textual incipit, everything we know points to the Marcionite gospel; but in Gregory it has been absorbed, allegorized, and wrapped safely in Song-of-Songs imagery. The “secret” is no longer a rival beginning; it is a way of reading the canonical gospels.

The Origenist connection ties the whole thing together. Eusebius tells us that before baptism Gregory Thaumaturgus was called Theodore, that he and his brother spent time in Alexandria and admired Clement, and that he later became Origen’s star pupil. In Gregory’s Panegyric on Origen, the vocabulary of the Letter to Theodore comes roaring back: God entrusts to Origen the λόγος μυστικός καὶ θεῖος; nothing is ἄρρητον for the inner circle; every kind of λόγος, “more mystical and more civic, divine and human,” can be learned in that classroom-paradise. It is not hard to imagine that a young Θεόδωρος, already being trained in Clement’s discipline of silence, is the same man who later looks back and says, “nothing remained unspeakable to us.” The shift is not from one gospel to another, but from one stage of initiation to the next.

Once you put all that in a line, the “mystic gospel” stops looking like a missing codex and starts looking like a tradition of reading. Mark writes a narrative that can be heard at two levels. Clement, in Alexandria, controls access to its inner tier and insists that no painted-up Carpocratian notebook has the right to call itself “the mystic gospel of Mark.” A Theodore who has proved himself discreet carries that habit of reserve into Origen’s school. Origen articulates the theory of graduated disclosure that undergirds both Clement’s letter and Gregory’s preaching. Gregory of Nyssa, at the far end of the chain, inherits the vocabulary, the descent imagery, and even the Jericho prologue, but now freely calls the inner tier “the evangelic mystery,” because the canon is secure and the Marcionite threat is largely rhetorical.

On that reconstruction, the live issue for us is not whether there was once a second Markan book that deserves a capital S in “Secret Mark.” The live issue is how far the Alexandrian church’s mystagogical reading of Mark overlapped, in narrative shape and theological emphasis, with the Marcionite evangelion—and how that overlap was tamed, reinterpreted, and finally hidden in plain sight inside the liturgy of the fourfold gospel. The “secret gospel,” in other words, was never primarily a book on a shelf. It was a way of hearing the one gospel, a depth of meaning that could be transmitted, lost, or domesticated—but not catalogued in a library list.