The Invention of Alexandrian Mark

Based on an idea by Andrew Criddle. Most of us grew up on the story that Mark sailed into Alexandria, founded the church, and took his place as first bishop; by the time you get to late antique hagiography, that picture has become lavishly detailed, tied to specific places and dates, and wrapped in martyrdom drama. The problem is that those stories disagree with each other on almost every factual seam. If you peel away the later paint, you are left not with a recoverable “Mark biography” but with a stubbornly thin early core: Alexandria believes, relatively early, that Mark is its founder, but the how, when, and what-he-did are unstable, and none of our surviving narratives look anything like an eyewitness recollection. That pushes the historian away from reconstruction (“what really happened when Mark came to Egypt?”) and toward function (“why did Alexandrians come to tell their story this way?”).

The most solid piece of scaffolding behind the legend is not a miracle story but a piece of church order. Our earliest Alexandrian notice says that Mark arrived in Nero’s seventh year, appointed twelve presbyters and seven deacons, and left behind a rule: when the bishop dies, those presbyters gather around his body and choose and ordain his successor from among themselves. That odd electoral practice pops up again in the martyrdom story of Peter of Alexandria and seems to have remained the Alexandrian norm down to about 300 CE. It looks like a presbyteral polity that patterned itself on Jerusalem’s mixed presbyter–bishop leadership. When the Jerusalem model collapsed after the Bar Kokhba war, Alexandria’s governance suddenly lacked a living template at the mother-church. The proposal in this thread is that the Mark founder story was crafted at that point—probably mid-second century—as a way of retrojecting apostolic authority onto the presbyteral system. “Mark came, Mark set this up, Mark’s own hand laid out our way of choosing bishops” is a powerful answer to the emerging Catholic claim that other sees, with different structures, had the more authentic lineage. On that reading, the founder narrative is not a garbled memory of a first-century mission, but an early institutional myth designed to underwrite an already existing polity.

Once you see it that way, a lot of the later embroidery around Alexandrian Mark falls into place as elaboration, not as source. Traditions that make Mark into a quasi-priestly figure, or stress physical quirks like stump fingers to explain why he never served at the altar, look less like biographical fragments and more like attempts to square an exalted founder-image with the mixed, non-sacrificial, philosophically tinged piety that diaspora Judaism and Alexandrian Christianity were already cultivating. So do speculations that present Mark as a “new Moses,” enthroned over a people who have a special, non-Temple access to God. They tell us a great deal about what later Alexandrians wanted from their origins—status vis-à-vis Jerusalem and Rome, a charter for their distinctive practices, a heroic first bishop—but very little about what any historical Mark actually did.

For the Secret Mark debate, this reframing does a quiet but important bit of work. If the Alexandrian Mark legend is primarily an early ecclesiological rationale for presbyteral governance, then it cannot, by itself, be used as external ballast for a separate Alexandrian recension of Mark’s gospel. “There was an ancient tradition that Mark founded Alexandria” no longer raises the prior that there must also have been an Alexandrian Markan codex lurking behind Clement’s “more spiritual” gospel; it simply shows that by the mid-second century the city’s Christians were bending Mark’s name to solve their own constitutional problems. At the same time, the dating suggested in the thread still leaves you with a lively Alexandrian environment by that period: presbyters with real clout, some remembered tie to Jerusalem, a culture comfortable with graded instruction and talk of mysteries. That atmosphere is exactly the sort of setting in which a Clement could later speak of “mystic” readings of Mark and a disciplina arcani without inventing those categories from whole cloth. The net effect is to strip away the comforting crutch of founder lore and force the discussion of Secret Mark back onto the hard evidence—handwriting, ink, codicology, Clement’s diction and redactional habits, dependence patterns—while acknowledging that an imaginative, self-legitimating Mark story was already in circulation long before Byzantine hagiography went wild.