Markan Priority and Clement

The core idea is that one early stream of tradition saw the “gospels with genealogies” and Mark as belonging to different publication worlds, and John as a deliberately “spiritual” counter-move to those genealogical, publicly issued texts. In this memory, the gospels that include genealogies (naturally Matthew and Luke) are said to have been written “for the public,” whereas Mark is described as the product of a follower taking down preaching notes (hypomnēmata) from an apostle and then giving copies only “to those who asked for them.” When this is read against what we know about ancient literary practice—where lecture notes, aide-mémoires, and private copies circulated below the level of formal ekdosis or “release” to the public—it makes sense to treat Mark, in this strand of reception, as an unfinished, unordered dossier of powerful material rather than as a polished, officially issued gospel. Papias’ famous defense that Mark wrote “accurately, though not in order” then becomes a genre cue: notes first, later “arrangements” second, not a veiled criticism of Mark’s competence.

On this reconstruction, the well-known report about the order of the gospels preserved by Eusebius becomes programmatic rather than incidental: “Those of the gospels that contain the genealogies,” says the tradition he cites, “were written for the public, while Mark, who had followed Peter and remembered what was said, wrote it down and shared it with those who wanted it; and last of all, John, aware that the bodily matters had been set forth in the gospels, urged by friends and inspired by the Spirit, composed a spiritual gospel.” The differences in how apostolic approval is remembered—sometimes Peter merely tolerating Mark’s text, sometimes later writers claiming fuller endorsement—look less like a smooth story and more like a set of competing memories about how far a private notebook could be pushed into public, liturgical use once more “orderly” genealogical gospels and, finally, a Johannine “spiritual” rewriting existed. The resulting picture is an early, anti-synoptic posture that privileges a non-genealogical Mark-as-notes over later, openly “arranged” syntheses and treats John as a conscious correction of their order and emphases. In that world, any Alexandrian dossier that treats Mark as the base, distinguishes between public and private levels of circulation, and allows for later “more spiritual” expansions or refinements is not an anomaly but a natural extension of the same publication logic and of a long-running fight over which gospel form ought to be public, which reserved, and who has the right to edit the inherited notes.