Another Letter of Clement of Alexandria

Large parts of Stromateis, especially Book 3, are not Clement thinking aloud from scratch but a mosaic built on an earlier ascetic dossier, conventionally dubbed “Letter 366 / On Continence,” which itself seems to overlap with the same textual world as the Marcionite Antitheses. The argument starts from the cluster of self-control passages in Strom. 3.1, 3.7, 3.9, etc., and shows that they repeatedly match, almost line for line, an independent text that defines ἐγκράτεια as “denial of the body and confession toward God,” extends it beyond sexuality to speech, possessions, use, and thoughts, and treats it as a divine δύναμις and χάρις that heals the soul, makes it incorruptible, and unites it to God. Clement’s wording at Strom. 3.1.4 is so close to the reconstructed Letter 366 that it is better understood as a paraphrase or compressed citation, not as his own free formulation.

Around this core, Strom. 3 is full of “On X” titles—On Justice (Epiphanes), On Continence (Julius Cassianus), and so on—which look like chapter-headings in a larger, thematically organized Antitheses-like work. Clement repeatedly cites or alludes to material “On justice, on continence, on patience, on forbearance,” and ties these to hostile groups he calls Antitactae, whose name and rhetoric of opposition echo the Marcionite posture of setting the gospel against the creator and his Law. At the same time, he carefully avoids naming Marcion in the places where he quotes the sharpest antinomian material, preferring to ascribe it to figures like Epiphanes, Julius Cassianus, or Valentinus. The proposal is that all of these are, in different ways, “fronts” or partial rebrandings for a common, older ascetic-protreptic source, one that early Basilideans, Valentinians, and Marcionites could all appeal to.

Within this structure, the docetic-sounding block about Jesus as the embodiment of self-control is the most telling piece. The passage describes Jesus as “self-control made manifest,” so light upon earth and sea that neither ground nor waves bear his weight, eating and drinking “in his own way” such that the food is not corrupted in him because he himself “did not possess corruption.” This is then explicitly linked to a letter “of Valentinus to Agathopous.” Yet the surrounding discussion has already been borrowing from Letter 366, and later Clement only attributes two sentences of the larger unit to Valentinus by name. The suggestion is that Valentinus is not the originator of this Christological image but a secondary witness who himself quotes the same older ascetic source; Clement is using Valentinus as a kind of smoke screen while quietly drawing on a shared, more primitive document.

The docetic flavor of that Christology lines up much more naturally with apocryphal material like the Acts of John than with Clement’s usual ethical discourse. In Acts of John, Jesus is described as walking without leaving footprints and appearing almost intangible to the touch, a figure whose bodily presence is strangely weightless and incorruptible. One memorable line has John say, “Often I wished to see whether Jesus left a footprint, and I saw that he left no footprint upon the ground,” a motif that closely mirrors the image of a Christ who is “light on earth and sea” and does not process food in the ordinary, corruptible way. That parallel supports the idea that Clement, here, is transmitting inherited docetic tradition rather than inventing it.

The opening of Strom. 3 makes the polemical logic clear. Clement distinguishes between earlier, “rightly living” Basilideans and their lax successors, then immediately brings in this ascetic letter to show that the founders of their doctrines did not permit libertine behavior. He caps the reprimand with a Hegesippus-style warning against those who take on the name of Christ while living more licentiously than pagans, and with a Pauline proof-text from 2 Corinthians about “false apostles, deceitful workers.” Later in the same book he frames another deployment of Letter 366-like language with Romans 13:13–14, again using Paul as the canonical frame for a pre-existing ascetic voice. The repeated pattern is: cite or paraphrase the older dossier, then weld it to apostolic scripture to correct current heretical practice.

The upshot is a picture of Stromateis 3 as a densely layered construction: Clement is stitching together at least two books’ worth of an Antitheses-style ascetic treatise—organized under headings like On Justice and On Continence—alongside citations from Epiphanes, Julius Cassianus, and a Valentinian letter, all in the orbit of a Marcionite-like opposition to the Law. This does not “prove” any single identification (whether Letter 366 is by Clement, Valentinus, or someone else), but it makes it very plausible that Clement’s method is to excerpt and paraphrase earlier letters and tractates, sometimes naming their authors, sometimes veiling them, and to embed even startlingly docetic Christological lines inside his own argument. For any wider debate about Clement as a transmitter of esoteric or “secret” materials, that compositional habit is the central takeaway.