Embracing the Letter to Theodore

Embracing the Letter to Theodore is less about romanticizing a single discovery and more about taking seriously how discoveries typically happen: through long, boring, obsessive work in exactly the sort of overlooked corners where this text turned up. Creativity is defined as repetition—doing the same hard, unglamorous thing again and again until something “unlikely” starts to look statistically inevitable. In that frame, a remarkable find in marginalia at a remote monastery is not a miracle but the predictable payoff of years spent learning languages, trudging through archives, and asking for access to places most scholars never bother to go. As Hesiod has it, “In front of excellence, the immortal gods have put sweat, and long and steep is the way to it,” a line that becomes almost a motto for this way of thinking about research. 

On this view, the usual “too good to be true” suspicion about the letter is turned inside out. The fact that the discoverer was unusually persistent, unusually willing to live in monasteries, and unusually focused on marginalia is not a red flag but precisely what you would expect in the biography of the person who finds something new. To say “no one else ever found anything like this there” is like saying the kid who trains more than everyone else must be cheating because he can juggle the ball longer: it treats extraordinary effort as evidence of fraud instead of the most obvious explanation for extraordinary results. A first access to unexplored library material is imagined as something like a wedding night for a textual scholar—an “enchanted” moment you do not pollute in advance by smuggling in your own prop text just to trick yourself.

At the same time, the argument insists that psychology cuts both ways. Suspicion of the letter is often tied, explicitly or implicitly, to anxieties about sexuality: worries that Secret Mark is “too gay,” that the discoverer was too interested in homoerotic readings, that the whole thing must therefore be a projection. Against this, it is argued that early Christian literature really does have odd, sexually charged or gender-bending elements; interpretations like the “fellowship of the male” in Acts of Thomas can be ascetic, symbolic, or ambiguous without being modern inventions, and the late, imaginative association of certain heretical groups with homosexuality (for example, the Carpocratians in Epiphanius) shows how polemical that charge can be rather than proving anything about first- or second-century practice. If homophobia can inflate suspicion, then appeals to sexuality are no safe guide in deciding authenticity in either direction.

Running underneath is a broader historical claim about Mark: that the canonical text we have may not be the only, or even the most original, form of the gospel known in antiquity. The argument points to hints that some Christians used a Mark in which Christ and Jesus could be separated at the passion, or a Mark that sat uneasily alongside Matthew, and asks why we should be so sure that later “orthodox” transmission preserved only the version they liked best. In that light, an expanded, more esoteric Alexandrian Mark is not an absurd fantasy but a plausible inhabitant of the second-century gospel landscape. The Letter to Theodore, in this frame, is not a solitary freak; it is one candidate witness to a Markan form others disliked and tried to suppress.

Set against this is the brute fact that the physical evidence is bad: ink on flyleaves of a post-1600 printed book, removed long ago from its monastery, never tested with modern methods, and now missing. Skeptical worries about modern provenance, missing chain of custody, and a discoverer with both the technical knowledge and the temperament to “write curse words on the altar” are acknowledged as real pressures that cannot be magicked away by romance about hard work. The reply, however, is that those suspicions remain conjectural until anchored in something concrete—anachronistic language, demonstrable dependence on modern editions, or palaeographic impossibilities—and that, in the absence of such particulars, global appeals to “motive, means, and opportunity” are just as psychological as the defenses they criticize.

So the idea is not “the letter must be authentic” and not “skepticism is wicked.” It is that if we are going to doubt, we ought to doubt consistently. We should be as ready to doubt the tidy story in which orthodox guardians transparently transmit the only real Mark as we are to doubt a strange text that appears in a modern binding; as ready to examine how homophobia shapes dismissal as how desire shapes belief; as ready to test the hand, language, and codicology as to spin probability stories about character. In that recalibrated field, the Letter to Theodore becomes neither a sacred relic nor an obvious fraud but a strenuous thought experiment in what we are willing to do with ambiguity: whether we will treat sweat, repetition, and an awkward fit with later orthodoxy as reasons to listen carefully, or as reasons to close the file.