Why Couldn't Clement Have ‘Forged’ an Alexandrian ‘Mystery’ Gospel of Mark?

If you start from Irenaeus rather than from Morton Smith, the idea of an Alexandrian “mystery” Mark suddenly looks a lot less exotic. In Adversus Haereses, Irenaeus spends real time on the “followers of Mark,” not because they are boringly orthodox, but because they are doing something recognizably dangerous with gospel text. They treat the narrative as material for οἰκονομία—“arrangement” or “disposition”—and he illustrates their vice with a Homer-cento parody: same words, different ordering, new meaning. That only works as a polemic if second-century readers already know what it means to recombine a revered text and present the result as a superior “economy.” The Marcosians are not an isolated freak; they are one documented instance of gospel recomposition practiced and defended under the banner of symbolic arrangement.

Set Stromateis down in that landscape and the Alexandrian angle sharpens. Clement openly writes a miscellany, a self-described patchwork that weaves Scripture, philosophy, and anecdote into new configurations. He plays with number symbolism; he uses allegory as second nature; he divides his audience into grades and insists that some teachings must be transmitted “economically” to the perfected. That is not an accidental resemblance to Marcosian technique. When you line up Irenaeus’s report of Marcosian habits—letter and number symbolism keyed to Alpha and Omega, the “acceptable year of the Lord” treated as a crafted chronology, invitations into grace that themselves function as performative thresholds—next to Clement’s own lexicon and rhetorical tics, the parallels are hard to miss. There are at least three ways to read this: Clement could be baptizing Marcosian material into a more respectable framework; both could be drawing from a shared Alexandrian repertoire of symbolic habits; or the overlaps could be dismissed as over-reading commonplaces. The first two, in different ways, both make it historically reasonable to imagine an Alexandrian teacher like Clement constructing a Markan “economy” for inner-circle use—a gospel-shaped text that is still recognizably Mark, but arranged and expanded for mystagogical ends.

What this line of reasoning really delivers is a strong capacity-and-milieu case. Irenaeus shows that cento-like recomposition of holy texts is on the table in the late second century, and he names one specific Mark-centered movement doing it. Clement shows, in his own pages, that he possesses all the requisite tools: collage without explicit citation, symbolic rearrangement, graded instruction, a comfort with treating narrative sequence as something that can be “managed” for the sake of the gnostic. Side-by-side comparisons of vocabulary and cadence—participation and ἀφθαρσία, ethical–noetic chains, gnomic rhythms—only reinforce the sense that if anyone was in a position to craft an Alexandrian “mystery” Mark, it is someone very much like Clement.

Where the argument has to slam on the brakes is at the point where plausibility becomes attribution. Showing that such a text could have existed, and that Clement’s toolkit and context make him a credible candidate for composing or reshaping it, is not the same as demonstrating that the specific excerpts embedded in the Letter to Theodore are his work. Claims of near-verbatim overlap and distinctive motif chains need rigorous documentation and control comparisons to rule out shared tradition or generic stock phrases. Above all, the manuscript situation sets a hard limit: what we actually have are photographs of an eighteenth-century hand copying something into a seventeenth-century printed book. That is a very late and fragile witness for what is supposed to be a second-century Alexandrian gospel supplement. However elegant the internal literary fit, it cannot substitute for the kind of external attestation historians are trained to want.

For the larger Secret Mark debate, this kind of argument does two things. It pushes the conversation toward coherence-within-context: once you factor in Irenaeus’s anti-cento polemic and Clement’s patchwork pedagogy, a Markan “mystery” gospel used for initiates stops being a bizarre anomaly and becomes a natural expression of known second-century habits. That helps defenders who want to say that To Theodore and its excerpt look and feel at home in their purported world. At the same time, the provenance objection doesn’t go away; it is strengthened by the very caution that separates what could have happened in Alexandria from what we can responsibly say about a late copy in a Mar Saba volume. In the end, the upshot is not “Clement forged Secret Mark” or “Clement could never have done such a thing,” but something more modest: Alexandrian pastiche gospels are historically intelligible; Clement’s own work fits that horizon; whether the specific pages Smith found belong to that horizon remains a question for palaeography and transmission history, not for literary plausibility alone.