Did Clement Write the Letter to Theodore?

The idea is that the question “did Clement write the Mar Saba letter?” turns on whether one starts from internal voice or from external provenance. On the internal side, the letter’s opening move—praising the suppression of Carpocratian teaching and leaning on Jude’s imagery of corrupt “dreamers” who defile the flesh—tracks very closely with Clement’s practice in the Stromateis, where Jude 8 (“Likewise also these filthy dreamers defile the flesh, despise dominion, and speak evil of dignities”) is deployed against libertine opponents and used to anchor a moralizing, “gnostic” exegesis. That sort of overlap in polemical target, scriptural touchstone, and theological tone is taken as raising the prior that the same Alexandrian teacher is speaking here too, at least until detailed tests of vocabulary, syntax, and stylistic habits say otherwise. On the external side, the most serious objection is that the text surfaced only in the twentieth century, in a now-lost printed book at Mar Saba, and survives only in photographs and a late hand; substantial scholarship has argued that its coloration reflects later patristic tradition and imitation of Clement rather than Clement himself. Those doubts keep the burden of proof firmly on the side of authenticity and mean that parallels in theme or style cannot, by themselves, overcome problems of provenance and possible dependence on post-Clementine sources. For the Secret Mark question, everything swings on this fork: if the letter’s voice is genuinely Clement’s, then an expanded Markan tradition embedded in his Alexandrian milieu becomes a live second-century datum; if the letter is better explained as later imitation, then “Secret Mark” loses any secure ancient anchoring and must be treated as, at best, an unprovenanced curiosity whose content cannot be straightforwardly fed back into the history of Mark’s Gospel.