The Naked One and His Nakeds: Clement, Carpocrates, and the Real Stakes of “Secret Mark”

Debate over the Letter to Theodore has been strangled for decades by a very narrow question: “Is this about sex?” The text enters modern scholarship through Morton Smith’s discovery at Mar Saba and his decision to read the famous phrase γυμνὸς γυμνῷ as “naked man with naked man,” and then to let that misreading drive an entire erotic imagination of Jesus initiating a youth in the night. Once you restore the plural—γυμνοὶ γυμνῷ, “nakeds with the Naked [One]”—the phrase no longer points so neatly toward a two-person liaison. It drops back into a much wider and older Christian idiom where nakedness is a badge of martyrdom, poverty, baptismal stripping, and contemplative immediacy before the Logos. In that register, Clement is not hinting at a scandal; he is policing a slogan. The Carpocratians, he says, boast of being “nakeds with the Naked,” but their actual rites corrupt a legitimate tradition of divine nakedness that stretches from the rich man of Mark 10 through Jerome’s nudum Christum nudus sequere and down into Byzantine liturgy, where the Twelve are praised as “the nakeds to the Naked One and the pure to the Most Pure.”

To make sense of this, you have to put Clement back into his real war, which is not with modern moralists but with the Carpocratians. In Stromateis 3 he spends an extraordinary amount of effort on their teaching: communal property, communal spouses, and a mythic appeal to “natural” justice where what the sun and rain do, the saints must imitate. At the center stands Epiphanes’ treatise On Righteousness, which raids Platonic myth—especially the Statesman’s golden age under Kronos—to imagine a return to proto-human innocence: no private possession, no clothing, no fixed marriages, just a community of the elect living as Adam and Eve should have lived. Clement’s strategy is subtle. He does not attack the Statesman head-on; instead he counter-weights it with the Republic, where the sharing of wives among the guardians is a tightly controlled, purely theoretical device inside an ideal politeia, not an instruction for real congregations to swap partners at the agapē. The point is not that Plato is wicked but that literal Carpocratian “return” to nakedness is a shallow, dangerous misreading of myth.

Seen from that angle, even the title Stromateis becomes part of the response. Carpocratian rhetoric idolizes the ἄστρωτος life of the Statesman—humans grazing “without bedding,” naked, unsheltered under Kronos. Clement pointedly calls his great work Στρωματεῖς, “Coverlets” or “Mats”: not a formless heap of scraps, but a deliberate spread of layers. Where the Eleatic Stranger’s humanity lies ἄστρωτος, “un-spread, un-covered,” Clement “spreads out” Scripture, Plato, and tradition as a pedagogical quilt that both veils and protects the truth. The same root verb στρώννυμι thus marks the difference between Alexandrian orthodoxy and Carpocratian parody: one strips bodies in the name of mythic justice; the other clothes minds, hiding the edible kernel of gnosis inside a hard shell of allusion and patchwork. It is no accident that Quis Dives Salvetur strikes the same target from another angle, resisting literal readings of “sell all you have” from Mark 10 and Matthew’s parallel. Clement’s opponents appear in both works: a “communist” Christianity that reads both Plato and the Gospel as flat injunctions to abolish property and modesty alike.

Behind the fight sits a broader Alexandrian ecosystem. Philo’s Therapeutae already offer a Jewish prototype of property-renouncing, quasi-monastic communities on the Egyptian fringe. Eusebius will later retroject Mark into that world, treating Philo’s ascetics as Christian proto-monks founded by the evangelist in Alexandria, and although that identification is historically fragile, it shows how easily Clement’s contemporaries could conflate Platonic, Jewish, and Christian ascetic streams into a single “naked with the Naked” ideal. In that milieu, Carpocratian groups are not inventing communism and mystical nakedness out of thin air; they are radicalizing an existing Alexandrian taste for shared property and symbolic stripping. Clement’s polemic, accordingly, does not try to erase the language of nakedness. It tries to reclaim it—insisting that the stripping must remain spiritual and epistemic, not be dragged down into beds and mattresses.

The same reorientation is visible if you follow the text of Secret Mark itself rather than the modern fantasies around it. Roy Kotansky’s recent reconstruction of the LGM 1 fragment, by simply switching two lines, turns a slightly incoherent resurrection vignette into a tightly framed miracle. The “loud cry” comes after Jesus has opened the tomb and entered, not before; the youth is raised in a way that looks much more like Lazarus than like an initiation into a mystery-bedroom. The command to return “six days later” wearing a linen cloth over his naked body then locks onto the strange young man of Mark 14:51–52, the one who flees Gethsemane naked after losing his σινδών. On this reading, the raised youth is a type and forerunner of Christ’s own Passion: wrapped in a shroud, stripped, and made to walk into the darkness. His nakedness is burial nakedness, martyrial nakedness, baptismal stripping—exactly the lexicon Clement knows. When Clement quotes the Carpocratian formula “nakeds with naked” at the point where he pivots away from further citation, his aim is not to titillate but to mark the limits: the scene has one naked youth and one Naked One, not a troupe of libertines. It does not supply the plurality that Carpocratian rites demand.

All of this rests on a deeper genealogy of “nakedness” language that runs from Plato through Philo into Origen and Clement. In Philo’s hands, the High Priest enters the Holy of Holies “naked before the truth”—not literally undressed, but stripped of doxa, of opinion and mixture, so as to confront akraiphnes aletheia, pure truth without alloy. Origen takes that over and speaks of becoming “naked of all ignorance” to approach the most pure truth, insisting that the sensible Gospel must be received into a spiritual Gospel or its inner radiance will remain veiled. Clement lives in the same symbolic universe. He is happy to talk about peeling off tunics of skin, about shedding passions and opinions, about the soul’s ascent through layers of meaning to the unveiled Logos. His quarrel with the Carpocratians is not that they love nakedness but that they have dragged a technical metaphor for epistemic purity down into bodies and beds.

Once that background is in place, the modern obsession with whether the Letter to Theodore encodes an erotic night-lesson looks increasingly parochial. The phrase γυμνοὶ γυμνῷ would have rung with Platonic, Philonic, and Origenian overtones for an Alexandrian ear: purified minds standing bare before the unadorned Logos, not partners sneaking off to a tryst. Clement’s polemical twist is to pluralize the “nakeds,” caricaturing Carpocratian group rites, and to set that corrupted usage against his own carefully layered coverings in the Stromateis. Later mystics in East and West—Eckhart, Ruysbroeck, John of the Cross—will quietly reclaim the older, contemplative sense of nakedness without Clement’s anxiety, speaking of the naked soul before the naked God as a way of naming the loss of all images in divine darkness. Read against that continuum, the “divine nakedness” in and around Secret Mark looks much less like a Freud case study and much more like a recognizably Alexandrian way of talking about baptism, martyrdom, and the soul’s exposure to truth.

None of this settles the forensic questions about the Mar Saba pages: ink, hand, provenance, dependence on Clement’s diction, the whole material dossier still has to be weighed. What it does do is clear some of the fog. If “nakeds with the Naked One” is a standard piece of ascetical and mystical vocabulary, then the Letter to Theodore no longer needs an erotic reading to make sense. Its real contest is not over sex but over who gets to claim the rhetoric of nakedness—Clement’s veiled pedagogy or Carpocratian literalism—and whether the Alexandrian tradition of stripping before the Logos is to be interpreted as a call to epistemic purity or as permission to abandon all coverings whatsoever.